There's a lot of head nodding when you mention the term "job architecture" but at the same time, when you look closely, most eyes are unfocused. Many compensation organizations don't think about job architecture, but I think it's the best way to organize your jobs. Here's a primer to pique your interest, with a definition and an outline of features and benefits.
When you build job architecture you specify the hierarchy of jobs for every job family in your organization. With it, you are able to immediately answer specific questions about what jobs mean to executives, recruiters, managers and employees because the hierarchy follows rules about job levels and job value.
Executives will find that they have a map of the company's job infrastructure, which they can use for planning and budgeting. Going beyond job descriptions, recruiters will be able to identify the value of the job in the organization and the trajectory candidates' careers can take for in-depth candidate discussions. Managers and employees won't have to go a couple of rounds anymore, because they will have detailed information about the level of skills, experience and decision-making ability that matches with their current and promotional jobs.
So, you see, job architecture moves you beyond a traditional salary structure by adding dimensions that address job families, job level descriptions and career ladders. All valuable in themselves, but there are communication advantages too. Job architecture also equips your organization with a shared vocabulary for talking about job value, career steps and compensation levels, plus tools that everyone uses for compensation-related discussions and decisions.
Certain commercial salary surveys are built on a job architecture methodology. These will have some of the above value for your organization, whether or not you have designed your own job architecture. But when your organization has its own job architecture, you save time and eliminate the need to generalize about pricing, career planning and talent planning -- especially handy if you are overwhelmed by new candidates or facing the prospect of high velocity growth in the future.
Investment in job architecture design, while initially time consuming, will ultimately bring efficiency and speed, as well as a healthy culture, to your door.
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
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