Job architecture is a hot topic right now, and I have to admit that I am pleased. The outcomes of the design process can make compensation administration, career development and workforce planning so much more effective. Plus, there is an opportunity for each of us to learn so much about the organization's jobs and reward philosophy during the design process, and to improve employee pay satisfaction at the same time.
In the first part of this article, we looked at the types of organizations that use job architecture and why. If you haven't had a chance to participate in a design process, part two is an overview of the project components. You'll see that there can be different approaches to job architecture.
Here are the basic project design building blocks:
A. Job families. Familiar to all of us, this is where you start--by identifying the groupings of jobs that perform similar work. Traditional examples of job families are Finance, Legal, and Human Resources. You might think that complex companies have a long, complicated list of job families, but that may not always be true. Companies that have worked a lot on workforce planning may have simplified their organizational structure to support their work.
B. Job functions. Again, a familiar step--grouping jobs within a job family with similar responsibilities and skills. Healthcare organizations, for example, may have numerous job functions within a job family. Consider all of the types of nursing specialties there might be in a teaching hospital. Simpler examples, though, would be Accounting and Accounts Receivable/Payable under the Finance job family, or Compensation and Benefits under Human Resources.
C. Focus area/philosophy. This step is where you may see variability in an organization's approach to job architecture (and a difference in project schedule).
For some, the next step is to identify job levels. The projects that work in this way often produce a job architecture that emphasizes compensation administration. Their goal for organization-wide alignment is to create shared compensation levels, either as ranges or bands, that illustrate job levels. Those levels, in turn, are used for talking about career stages within a job function.
For others, the next step is to understand and organize career paths. This starts with sorting jobs within a function by categories like executive, manager, professional, support and so on. Then career levels are defined within each category that differentiate the levels of development over a career.
The descriptions for these levels of development can be immensely helpful for communicating career paths to employees. They can also be useful from an administration standpoint, to use as standardized guidelines for transferring employees among various functions within a job family or building consensus on a promotion, for example. (Standardization also helps build a level of employee trust in these transactions.) Salary alignment across the organization is a complex step in this type of design process as it executes and supports the career path framework.
If job architecture is not in your near future, but you'd like to learn more, almost all of the consulting firms are discussing their practices on a regular basis. (It's a hot topic!) Some of them share more than others, but many will help you learn what's current in our field.
If you have the budget, it's particularly important to partner with experienced firms for this work--the projects involve so much data that they can easily get bogged down. For example, you can get all the jobs slotted and then realize you don't know how to do the next step. I once work with a client who brought me all their job levels on little strips in a shopping bag. They had tried to build their architecture on a wall as a group exercise, and had given up after trying a couple of times to make it work. It's never turnkey, but your insights are going to come faster with firms who've done a lot of this work in your industry. And some firms have far better databases than others.
Margaret O'Hanlon brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm is re:Think Consulting. 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 everythingiscommunication.com. She is a member of U.S. Masters Swimming.
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