The importance of understanding your organization's jobs before pricing jobs
Pay transparency has been making headlines over the past three to four years, centered on new laws that are going into effect in many states and provinces throughout the US and Canada. Beyond that, employees and potential employees are seeking information on what a job pays, what their potential pay increase will be, how pay is determined, and even what their peers are paid. Many job seekers are not even interested in applying for jobs unless the pay information is included in the job posting.
Is your organization ready to reveal your pay ranges to job candidates or employees?
What does it take for an organization to be ready?
- A documented compensation philosophy and compensation administration practices
- Trusted salary surveys and data you use to price jobs
- An understanding of the responsibilities, skills, and qualifications for each job
- The assignment of employees to a job profile that accurately reflects what they do
- People managers’ with the ability to discuss pay decisions
If your confidence is low regarding the statements above, a logical place to start is to get your job architecture in order.
An impossible task
Imagine your boss tasks you with figuring out if the company is paying competitively and if you have any pay equity issues. Of course, you are happy to take on the assignment but something your boss says worries you:
"Our titles are a real mess, our job descriptions haven’t been updated in years, and I’m not sure if they even align with the type of work our teammates are doing today. But, we know our jobs...you’ll figure it out, right?"
You think to yourself, “How can we determine market competitiveness if we aren’t clear on the work being performed?”
Honestly, many companies are in that exact situation but are either not aware or not willing to admit it. Over time, the integrity of job profiles naturally tends to erode due to lack of governance and ownership within the organization. Job descriptions aren’t maintained and kept up to date. Until problems appear, often market benchmarking is simply updated from year to year by replacing last year's data with this year’s data, using the same connection between the organization’s jobs and the survey jobs. Managers are not consulted to discuss changes in the work and responsibilities or even to perform an audit to ensure that their employees are in the right jobs.
Defining the job architecture
To be confident enough to reveal your pay ranges, you need to get your jobs in order first. Creating a job architecture that includes the distinct definition of job families, sub-families, career streams, and levels will allow you to define your universe of unique jobs and assess the current employee placement within those jobs.
The process of reviewing and developing job architecture elements requires collaboration with HR team members and key stakeholders to define a distinct set of variables and definitions for each. For example, you’d start at the highest level and discuss which job families, or major categories of work, are present in the organization and need to be defined. Of course, you will have functions like Human Resources, Finance, and Information Technology. Whether or not you need a job family, such as Engineering or Supply Chain, will depend on your unique organization.
The next element to identify and define are job sub-families, or the distinct disciplines of work within a job family. For example, within the Human Resources job family, you may have sub-families that include Talent Acquisition, Compensation, Benefits, and Training and Development. These disciplines require different talent types with unique background, skills, and experience and will have their own career progression within the organization.
Career levels recognize incremental changes in job scope and responsibilities within a career stream and define the hierarchical position of a job within the organization. Within an HR job family, for example, there may be professional individual contributors from entry to senior levels, while at the same time there may be managers of people at various levels, including supervisors, managers, and, ultimately, the CHRO or Chief People Officer.
In the Mercer QuickPulse™ Survey: Job Architecture, conducted in early 2024, respondents indicated that most include Executive, Management/People Leader, Professional, Support, and Technical Career Streams. The number of career levels in each stream varies from three up to seven, typically in the Technical Stream. This is something that will also be unique to your organization and should be considered carefully, given its connection to development opportunities for your employees.
The combination of the job family, sub-family, career stream, and career level provides the foundation for a job catalog and your list of unique jobs within the organization.
Mapping employees
Now that you have the job architecture defined, it’s time to assign the employees to the resulting jobs. The activity of placing employees into this new job architecture is typically referred to as employee mapping. This involves discussions with managers to either audit and revise a rough cut of employee mapping using a crosswalk approach (i.e., previous job title to new job) or starting with a blank page, reviewing each employee, and assigning them to a new job in the architecture. When using the crosswalk approach, take care not to move groups of employees in the same current title to a new job without verifying that they are all doing the same job in the new architecture.
During mapping, several things typically come to light:
- Incorrect classifications —employees doing the same work but in different jobs or employees in the same job doing different work
- Discrepancies in the leveling of employees
- The need for process and workflow governance
These are just a few of the discoveries you will make while mapping employees into a new job architecture.
A key principle in building your architecture and mapping employees is to “do it once and do it right.” This is your chance to set yourself up for success when it comes to understanding your jobs, ensuring employees are mapped to the correct jobs, and build a solid foundation from which to assess pay competitiveness.
Where do job descriptions come in?
Great question. Typically, job descriptions incorporate the outcomes of the job architecture development discussions.
You’ll likely define and differentiate Career Streams and Levels utilizing a set of consistent work dimensions. You may also align skills and behaviors based on job Sub-Families. These elements can be the basis for the development of clear and consistent job descriptions.
This information, along with responsibility statements and specific qualifications for each job, will make up your job description.
The level of specificity and detail in your job descriptions will vary, depending on your culture as well as the intended use. For example, to match your job to a salary survey job, you can likely use the description of your job Family, Sub-Family, Career Stream, and Level. For recruiting and job posting, you’ll need more detail in order to fully describe the job to a potential applicant.
Connecting to pay
At this stage of the game, with a job architecture in place that reflects your business and employees assigned to jobs appropriately, you are much better positioned to determine if you are paying competitively overall and to identify whether there are employees in need of pay adjustments. Because you can be confident that employees’ responsibilities and qualifications are correct, you can now select the best matches in surveys to reflect the pay of your jobs. Added bonus — the job architecture components facilitate your job matching process across market surveys.
What was once impossible is now quite possible and leaves you with confidence that you are paying the employees in your organization appropriately.
Does this mean that you are now ready to pull back the curtain on pay to your employees and job seekers? Maybe or maybe not. However, you have a solid foundation to assess other key elements, including compensation philosophy and compensation administration practices, the alignment of skills and competencies to your job architecture, and consistent job titling.
From impossible task to probable success
With a sound job architecture in place and employees properly positioned within it, you are in a much better position to answer your boss’s question. You can determine whether you are paying competitively, confident that you are using jobs and data in salary surveys that reflect the work being done by the employees in the organization. Additionally, you’ll have the clarity and understanding of the jobs and their corresponding value to the organization to identify any existing pay equity complexities. You’re on your way to success!
Need a helping hand?
As you can tell, it’s not a simple task to develop a job architecture. It’s a significant project demanding project management resources as well as support and commitment company wide. Mercer is well-equipped to provide guidance, act as an additional team member, manage the project, or handle the whole project. Partnering with a consultant who eats, sleeps, and breathes job architecture will greatly lighten the load for you and your team.
Is it time to reach out to Mercer? You can reach us at surveys@mercer.com or 855-286-5302
About the Authors
Steve Guyer
Steve Guyer is a Partner in Mercer's Career business based in Atlanta, Georgia. He works with global organizations, assisting with a variety of compensation activities including strategic pay and reward program design, job architecture, competitive market assessment, job evaluation and global leveling, pay structure development and program governance.
Lia Santos
Lia Santos is a Partner with over 20 years of consulting experience. Lia specializes in the strategic design and implementation of compensation programs including executive compensation, management, and workforce rewards plans. She has extensive experience in advising clients across the spectrum of classification, compensation, and pay plan design/administration.