An analysis of the most pressing concerns based on insights from 1,000 UK business leaders.
Author: Sarah Jefferys
Are your employees truly aware of how their roles contribute to the bigger picture? Can they envision their career path within your organisation, whether advancing in their current team or exploring opportunities across departments?
Is your reward offering transparent enough to build trust and motivation among your workforces?
Are you prepared to meet the demands of equal pay and pay transparency legislation, especially when it comes to defining "equal value" for pay comparisons?
These critical questions can be addressed with confidence when you implement a robust job levelling or job evaluation framework. Empower your organisation to thrive by ensuring clarity, transparency and compliance.
What is job levelling all about?
Job levelling (also referred to as job evaluation or job grading) measures the comparative value/ size of jobs and assigns them to a hierarchical job level (or job grade) within the organisation, using a robust system of evaluation.
It results in a defined organisation architecture/framework that sets out roles at each level through fairly evaluating the demands and contribution of each role.
Why should you bother with the investment it takes to put job levelling in place?
Some organisations may wish to put one harmonised/common structure in place following the acquisition of another business. Others may be at the point of getting their “brilliant basics” in place to enable them to grow and develop a broader HR framework. Or some might just have grown so quickly that they didn’t have the time or resource to think about it until now.
Job levelling can be used by an organisation to:
- Underpin reward frameworks (i.e. salary bands and/or benefits packages by job level, along with defined career pathways).
- Support robust discussion and consistent decision making in relation to pay, benefits, career development and succession planning.
- Enable greater transparency around pay, reward, and support effective communication—opening conversation with employees about opportunities for progression within the organisation.
So, what do best practices look like?
Organisations use job levelling frameworks in several ways—which one is right will depend on where they are in their development, how they want to use the framework and their readiness for transparency at a given point in time.
It may be that the framework is used by HR to support recruiting managers to position roles and associated pay. It may be the framework is used entirely without pay initially, or even for several years, to articulate career paths and opportunities within the organisation.
Whichever way it is used, it will bring value to the organisation by providing clarity to role requirements, rational and efficient job and organisation design, a basis for internal equity and support for the explanation of career paths and development opportunities.
How can Gallagher help with job levelling?
We have expertise in several areas that will support you in building a new or updating an existing job levelling framework:
- Using our in-house job levelling methodology to develop or refresh a transparent job hierarchy.
- Developing a link to any existing competency framework, or building a new one, so that there is one common language describing levels of work across the organisation.
- Pay benchmarking using robust, defendable market data sources to give clarity on rates of pay for individual roles that are free of bias and meaning that the data can then be linked to pay levels.
- Developing a market-based pay structure that align to your job level framework – creating a tool that will equip you to manage costs and provide managers and individuals with clarity around how people can move through the pay structures, including explaining the difference between a progression (within a job level) and promotion (into a new job level).
Let us help you create a job levelling framework that drives clarity, fairness, and growth—empowering your organisation for long-term success. Get your journey started with us today!
