Understanding Your Organization’s Job Architecture in the Era of Pay Transparency

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 throughout the U.S. 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 some or all of your pay ranges to current and potential employees?

What does it take for an organization to be ready?

• A documented compensation philosophy and compensation administration practices
• Trusted salary surveys and data used 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 by getting your job architecture in order.

What is Job Architecture?

Job architecture is the organizational framework that lists all the jobs and responsibilities within an organization. It helps define clear career paths, hierarchy structures, and job responsibilities to ensure the compensation and benefits structure is fair and equitable.

Determining market competitiveness can be messy and inaccurate if you aren’t clear on what jobs are being performed by which employees. Over time, job descriptions aren’t maintained, and the integrity of job profiles naturally tends to erode due to lack of governance and ownership within the organization. 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.

When you don’t have an organized job architecture, presenting your pay data to the public can be cause for concern.

To be confident enough to reveal your pay ranges, you need to get your jobs in order first. Creating a job architecture that includes distinct definitions 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.

Steps to Building Job Architecture

Step 1: Define Job Families

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. Examples include Human Resources, Finance, and Information Technology. Some organizations may also have unique families such as Engineering or Supply Chain.

Step 2: Identify and Define Job Sub-Families

Sub-families are the distinct disciplines of work within a job family. For example, within the Human Resources job family, sub-families may include Talent Acquisition, Compensation, Benefits, and Training. Each sub-family has its own career progression within the organization.

Step 3: Designate Career Paths

Career paths define the different paths employees can take within the job architecture. This may include management vs. professional tracks, each characterized by unique responsibilities and expectations.

Step 4: Establish Career Levels

Career levels recognize incremental changes in job scope and responsibilities within a career path. Within an HR job family, for example, there may be professional individual contributors from entry to senior levels, as well as various levels of management up to the CHRO or Chief People Officer.

The number of career levels varies from three to seven, depending on the organization’s needs and opportunities for employee development.

Employee Mapping

The activity of placing employees into this new job architecture is known as employee mapping. This involves discussions with managers to either audit and revise employee placements using a crosswalk approach (mapping old job titles to new job structures) or starting from scratch and assigning employees based on job responsibilities.

During mapping, several discrepancies 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 employee leveling
• The need for improved governance over job structures and workflows

Where Do Job Descriptions Come In?

Job descriptions incorporate the outcomes of job architecture development. They define and differentiate career streams and levels using a set of consistent work dimensions. Sub-family alignment helps categorize skills and behaviors, which feed into detailed job descriptions.

The level of specificity in job descriptions varies depending on their purpose. For salary benchmarking, a general job family and level description may suffice. For recruiting and job postings, more detailed information is required to attract the right talent.

Connecting Job Architecture to Pay Transparency

With an accurate job architecture in place and employees correctly mapped, organizations can confidently determine market competitiveness and identify necessary pay adjustments. Proper job architecture facilitates job matching in salary surveys, improving the accuracy of compensation decisions.

Does this mean you are ready to reveal pay transparency to employees and job seekers? Maybe or maybe not. However, with a solid foundation, you are in a strong position to assess:

• Compensation philosophy and administration practices
• The alignment of skills and competencies to job architecture
• Consistent job titling

Need a Helping Hand?

Developing job architecture is a complex process that requires dedicated project management and company-wide commitment. The Comp Consultants specialize in job architecture development, compensation strategy, and pay transparency planning. Partnering with experts ensures a smoother process with better long-term outcomes.

Is it time to contact The Comp Consultants? You can reach us at [email protected].