We need to talk about levels

What’s job levelling?

At its core, job levelling is the process of categorising roles within a given company based on a set of criteria. Common criteria includes responsibilities of the role, level of impact on the business, budget responsibility or skills. Job levelling contributes to building the overarching job architecture of a company alongside job titles, job descriptions, hierarchy.

Benefits of job levelling (and telltale signs that the current structure may not be working)

Here’s some of the key pieces that a robust job levelling framework helps with:

• Providing clarity of roles, responsibilities and accountability
• Outlining opportunities for growth and career progression (whether in-level or at higher levels)
• Serving as a building block upon which to design fair and equitable reward structures for existing employees and talent you’re looking to attract

Well communicated and implemented, job level frameworks can increase engagement, retention and perceptions of trust and fairness among the team. It can also support productive conversations during performance assessments, which will in turn help inform fairer and unbiased performance driven reward decisions.

On the other hand, a framework that’s not fit for purpose can create a range of complex challenges:

• Role conflicts due to lack of clarity, overlapping duties or inefficient team structures
• Lack of consistency in employee experience when job descriptions or expectations vary across teams or areas of the business
• High turnover driven by unclear or biased promotion, performance or career growth decisions and opportunities
• Challenges to attract talent and set competitive and fair offers, which can negatively impact internal pay equity
• Inconsistent, biased decision-making throughout reward programmes. Whether it’s for cash compensation, equity awards or level based benefit differentiation, a framework that’s not fit for purpose will exacerbate gaps and deeply damage trust in the fairness of the programmes

Best practice for reviewing and implementing job levels

Let’s look at what can be done to create a well rounded job level framework to fit your organisation:

1. Bring stakeholders on the journey. The earlier the better: work with employees and leaders in the business to identify what’s key for the design of a framework that works “on paper” but also “in practice”. Consider how different process are impacted by this framework; whether it’s hiring, performance management, role conflict resolution, succession planning, etc. Job levelling shouldn’t be the responsibility of “just one team” and it definitely isn’t “a people team thing”. This framing is important because designing a job levelling structure that works benefits (or negatively impacts) the entire company.
2. Leverage data and technology: job levelling and the overall job architecture can appear to be very daunting tasks. A number of benchmark survey providers have ready made frameworks that can be used as a starting point or to guide internal conversations. There’s also more and more companies that publish their level frameworks and companies that specialise in providing this type of support. The more data you can gather on market practice in your sector the better you’ll be able to piece together a baseline for your framework. Accessible AI tools can also help create framework outlines or descriptions upon which to build your own tailored levelling.
3. Be clear and transparent: to successfully embed any framework, clarity and transparency must be at the heart of any communications plan. Create a phased plan that targets all the different audiences you have and addresses key relevant moments (during hiring or performance review cycles for example) as well as on-going education (ensure your teams always have information accessible as they go through their own career journey).
4. Assess, review and iterate: create feedback loops from different users of the framework (employees, managers, people team members). This will help you assess your framework on an on-going basis and review and iterate as required. Note that job level structures are not static and will evolve over time as the company and its needs evolve.

Ready to use your robust levelling during hiring? Here’s how Dotti can help: you can access reporting easily to ensure consistency in your reward offering across levels and spot any outliers. Sign up to the waitlist below.