Our HR professionals and employment law solicitors can help you to optimise your business’s pay and grading frameworks. We have extensive experience in evaluating existing management structures and helping clients to implement reward decisions. As specialists in both analytical and non-analytical job evaluation schemes, we can work with you to design a bespoke scheme that suits the needs of your company.
Whether you require support with terms and conditions, pay and salary structures, or bonus and incentive schemes, our comprehensive job evaluation offering covers as many areas as your business needs. We’ll not only help you to devise a new structure, but support with its implementation. This can involve training management where necessary and communicating changes to employees. Our services can be extended if the project becomes more complex than you initially anticipated or to fit in with any reorganisation your business might be experiencing.
What is job evaluation?
Job evaluation allows you to assess the value of various roles in your organisation, helping you to create a system for increased objectivity in the workplace. There are many methods that can be used to evaluate jobs, but ultimately all allow you to develop a ranking system to determine the importance of each and every employee role.
Having a solid framework in place can decrease the risk of discrimination claims, as it provides sound justification for any decisions made. Job evaluation can also be useful when formulating new pay structures, recruiting new members of staff, and reorganising your business. The system will not only protect your company from potential complaints, but will offer employees greater clarity and confidence in their roles, progression and incentives.
Why choose job evaluation services?
Using our own experience as well as the results of numerous surveys, data confirms that job evaluation:
- helps companies make reliable reward decisions, which is a vital element of effective pay management.
- helps reduce and slow the rate of growth in the pay bill, with typical savings ranging from 1% to 5%.
- mitigates legal and compliance risk. This is essential to achieving and demonstrating equal pay for work of equal value.
- is efficient and reduces the time required to respond to individual grading requests.
- is not expensive, with the ongoing unit cost of job evaluation work declining.
Our job evaluation services can not only improve the day-to-day operations of your company, but also help you to challenge equal pay claims successfully. When equal pay claims are not mitigated effectively, it is often because the company did not utilise an analytical job evaluation scheme to measure job size. While our employment law solicitors are equipped to help you handle any existing or ongoing claims, our job evaluation services can put preventative measures in place to lessen future risks.
Our services include:
- Expert analysis of job evaluation schemes.
- Our proprietary analytical system, which can be tailored to suit the culture of your organisation. The framework allows us to consider your existing grading or competency framework or can be used to underpin a new framework. It can also be used to model pay and grading structures.
- Project management and planning to ensure an effective partnership with you including:
- Union consultations.
- Communication and engagement.
- Developing job families.
- Designing a grading framework, pay progression mechanisms etc.
- Training in job evaluation.
Our job evaluation services offer end-to-end support should you require it. We will ensure every measure is taken to certify that your job evaluation scheme works in practice as well as theory. This means we can provide you with ongoing advice even after our framework has been fully implemented in your organisation. However, all of our structures are designed to be robust, transparent and consistently applied, which will ensure your compliance with the Equality Act 2010. You’ll be able to accurately measure the relative values of your roles, making your hiring process and rewards schemes much clearer for everyone involved.
Job Evaluation Process
Our approach to job evaluations is multifaceted and data-driven. There is no one method that suits all organisations, which is why we always tailor our framework accordingly. However, most job evaluations follow a similar pathway and have comparable goals.
The first step in any job evaluation process is to outline the job with a comprehensive description. You and your employees should be clear on what the main tasks of a certain role are and the skills and competencies required of the staff who will be carrying out the role. This information will be key going forward and is essential for any job evaluation methodology to succeed.
There are typically three ways you can approach job evaluations and, in some cases, a combination method will be preferable. We’ll determine which framework will work best for you after listening to your company goals and values.
If your organisation is smaller and doesn’t have a particularly complex structure, implementing a ranking system may seem like the most effective approach. This will involve ordering the roles undertaken by employees from most important to least important. Another option for smaller organisations is a classification method. This similarly involves ranking jobs from high to low importance, but allows you to add more classifications into your system. These may include levels such as junior or executive.
We’ve found that both of these methods can over-simplify the true complexity of roles within an organisation. Our team prefers to approach job evaluations in a way that accounts for all the factors within departments and teams. We’ll consider individuals’ skills and roles on a case-by-case basis and delve into subcategories. While a points-based system won’t work for all organisations, it can be used to accurately assess the true merit of a job within the wider organisational system of the workplace.
Whether you already have a job evaluation process in place or are considering one for the first time, our team can support and guide you. We’re experienced in identifying flaws in existing frameworks, helping you to rectify areas that are causing problems while recognising the elements of your system that provide value to your business. Our decisions will always be based around real data and evidence, meaning we’ll never disregard parts of your strategy for being different if they’re delivering results.
Pay, grading and salary structures
As part of our job evaluation services, our team can pay special attention to pay and salary structures, making sure they’re in line with company culture and conform to all equal pay audit standards.
We’re able to complete a wide range of tasks on a long- or short-term basis. All of our professionals are highly experienced and will be able to guide and advise your company leaders of the best course of action. We are able to offer the following:
- Analysing terms and conditions: we will not only assess your current policies, but advise you on where to focus your attention. We’ll explain how adjustments can help you mitigate risks and potential future claims, such as gender and BAME pay gap disputes.
- Designing new structures: our team can overhaul your entire pay and grading framework if needed. This is often necessary for organisations that have legacy structures, as these offer little room for flexibility. We can help you to design new structures that allow for increased control over pay and grade drift.
- Evaluating jobs: job evaluation services feed into pay and grading structures. We can offer a combined service to inspect and analyse terms and conditions as well as pay.
- Harmonising terms and conditions: whether you need a short, medium or long-term plan, our fully-costed harmonisation packages mean we can manage and support implementation from start to finish. We can engage or negotiate unions on your behalf with our deep expertise in changing employee contracts and TUPE changes to terms and conditions.
If your organisation undergoes significant restructuring after our evaluation, we can help you to draw up new documents and agreements for employees. Our employment law solicitors have all the skills necessary to ensure your business is fully compliant with legal regulations, while our HR professionals are adept at assisting with the increased strain this may put on your existing personnel.
Equal Pay Claims
Your business may be faced with an equal pay or discrimination claim if your salary structures aren’t strong enough. A lack of organisation or simply being unaware of discrepancies in pay within your business can lead to claims being taken to tribunal. Employees doing equal work must be paid the same amount of money regardless of their gender, race or other characteristics unrelated to their role and job performance.
If an employee suspects they are not receiving equal pay, they will select a comparator when filing their claim. They will use this employee who they believe is carrying out equal work to demonstrate how they may be underpaid. This is typically a co-worker on their team or in their department who does not have the characteristic they feel they are being discriminated for. By implementing a job evaluation scheme, you can make sure that the pay grading for all comparable roles is equal. While this won’t stop employees from filing claims, if your framework is consistently applied, you’ll be able to mitigate the claim by demonstrating the processes you have in place.
When equal pay claims are successful, your business may be required to provide the employee with back pay for up to six years of work. The court may also order an equal pay audit to be carried out company-wide, making job evaluation all the more important to implement at the earliest date possible.
Bonus and incentive schemes
If your business currently offers or plans to offer a bonus or incentive scheme in the near future, we can help you to devise a plan that best suits your needs. Our team has been designing bonus and incentive schemes for many years for a wide range of organisations across multiple sectors. We will always consider your company’s unique culture and objectives, ensuring that the final scheme helps you to achieve any goals you have in mind.
As part of the process, we will discuss with you at length the expected outcomes of your bonus scheme as well as all your aims and objectives. We’ll always listen to your thinking before challenging any ideas that could be improved with our own experiences. By questioning all aspects of your current practices, we’ll help you to find a framework that really works for you.
Our approach places particular emphasis on data, financial modelling and implementation. Affordability is a critical element of any scheme and we will work with you to model various scenarios to test affordability and control mechanisms. We offer support from design to implementation. We can also assist with training and communication plans, including managers, employees and trade unions.
What makes a successful bonus or incentive scheme?
Your bonus or incentive scheme should be easy to understand, straightforward to administer and genuinely effective in driving behaviour and results. These three elements are key, regardless of who the scheme is focused on or what your company culture is like. If your employees don’t have a clear understanding of how their actions can influence their reward outcome, then the scheme is unlikely to offer much incentive for them to change their behaviours.
Successful bonus schemes can focus on individuals, teams or the company as a whole, but before deciding this it’s important to understand what you want your plan to achieve. The basic objective of any incentive plan is to create an environment where employees want to contribute directly to the company’s success by demonstrating desired behaviours and achieving targets.
We can help you to develop a strategy that allows both your needs and the needs of your employees to be met as far as possible. Then our team can develop ways to communicate the terms of the scheme to your workforce effectively, ensuring all aspects are thoroughly understood.
Performance management
Job evaluation can be a helpful tool when it comes to performance management, as it can help you to identify the goals and expected achievements of individual employees. Not only will it make assessing performance an easier task, but it will tie into bonus scheme criteria. You’ll be able to effectively compare performance with employees in the same role, bettering your understanding of who should be rewarded.
By categorising various roles across your business, it’s easier to identify workers who are ready to progress or be promoted. Even if this is something that is already running smoothly, having a framework or points-based system can help you justify your decisions should they be questioned. If any employee suspects they may have been discriminated against, the job evaluation framework can prove management has acted in an appropriate manner.
Recruitment and retention
When job evaluations, pay gradings and bonus schemes are explained to prospective and current employees, companies typically experience improved retention rates and a smoother recruitment process. This is because organisation not only helps your HR to effectively manage your employees, but it offers staff a greater sense of security and confidence in the work they carry out.
At the recruitment stage, you’ll be able to provide candidates with a detailed and accurate job description, as this process of identifying key skills and tasks will already have been done internally. Not only will this attract the right candidates for the job, but it will increase the likelihood that they’ll stay with your company for longer as the role will meet their expectations.
Similarly, a bonus scheme that is attainable and clearly structured will allow employees to see their behaviours rewarded. While the mention of a bonus scheme can draw candidates into a workplace, if the incentives promised aren’t being delivered upon, it may mean they’ll look for employment elsewhere in time.
The key to retention is ensuring a high level of understanding at the recruitment stage and maintaining that agreed-upon framework for the duration of an employee’s career. Job evaluation will help you to implement solid systems that are proven to be long-lasting and realistically manageable. If you have any questions about how our services can improve employee satisfaction, recruitment or retention, our team is always on hand to provide further details.
Implement a job evaluation scheme today
Whether your organisation is concerned about discrimination, struggling to implement an incentive scheme, or has an unclear pay grading structure, job evaluation can help. Our services have been helpful to a wide range of companies in different sectors. No matter the problem you’re experiencing, our HR team and employment law solicitors can support you in restructuring and refining your internal processes.
Get in touch to book a consultation, get a quote, or discuss your needs. Our flexible packages can be adapted to suit your requirements, whether you need temporary fixed-fee support or an ongoing contract that’s billed by the hour. All of our fees are completely transparent and will be explained to you in detail when you begin working with us.
