Process is as Important as the Product in Developing a Robust Job Architecture

Defining a sustainable job architecture or catalog requires input from disparate stakeholders, sometimes with conflicting priorities within the organization. As explained in “Why Job Architecture Matters,” your compensation team is well-positioned to manage this effort. The compensation team understands the existing titles and salary structures that serve as the launch point. The team has relationships with executives and Human Resources (HR) that are essential to buy-in, and it can coordinate with IT departments, backend system managers and consultants you hire to help. With compensation firmly at the helm, what comes next? Process is as important as product in developing a robust job architecture, and we’ve organized our tips in that order.


1. Identify a Champion

Too often, efforts to develop a robust job architecture fail because they are created by well-intentioned people who want to do it from their own departments. As a result, the outputs they develop aren’t necessarily seen as a company-wide system to be adopted.

“Long-term success starts with leadership buy-in, early stakeholder involvement and ongoing support,” explains Hali Croner, President and CEO of The Croner Company. “Essential to that is an executive sponsor who really champions the effort.”

The executive sponsor ensures that the job architecture team has the resources it needs. The executive sponsor illustrates to the organization that top leaders buy into the effort and believe that its outcomes are business critical. The sponsor also motivates the team should efforts flag. The Chief People Officer along with one or two executive allies make ideal champions.


2. Consider a Third-Party Partner

Compensation teams often elect to work with a third-party partner to create and socialize the new job architecture. Why? The project requires a heavy lift on top of regular duties. Working with a knowledgeable consultant provides an external thought partner with experience in best practices needed to structure the job architecture and its levels — and later spearhead development of salary ranges. Experienced consulting firms can partner with internal project managers to keep schedules and deliverables on track.

A consultant also can help prepare communications materials, outline the training process and direct change management needed to secure adoption of the resulting job architecture.

 

3. Engage Business Managers

Next, involve your HR team in reaching out and partnering with managers and business leaders. Once business leaders see how the architecture supports their business decisions and communications, they can help hone the architecture and champion its adoption. Their “feet on the ground” experience helps structure the job catalog in the most effective way for the business.

“Bring line managers into the process early,” advises Lisa Dyakovski, Senior Consultant, The Croner Company. “Their input helps you avoid introducing unneeded jobs and mapping people to the wrong jobs.” Such mistakes invalidate the effort and compromise adoption of the final product.

4. Involve IT Personnel

Although compensation leads the effort, an early and close partnership with IT and HRIS helps ensure timely implementation of what you need, rather than just what the system is set up to do. Early IT and HRIS involvement can ensure agreement on a data structure (not the specific data). If your business operates in multiple countries, IT and HRIS can help identify data requirements. They can explain how much transparency the system is able to provide to employees and develop the required views and dashboards. Early involvement allows them to keep business systems running (such as payroll) while supporting the architecture team in releasing modifications needed for the new system.

“There is a lot of testing that needs to happen,” says Dyakovski, explaining that IT puts draft data and mock-ups through multiple rounds of testing until the final architecture is ready for launch. “IT needs time to create new fields and data sets to cut over to the new specs.”


“Buy-in — gained through participation, thoughtful infrastructure and strong underlying data systems — ensures that companies avoid an unwanted, but too common, outcome of ‘garbage in, garbage out,'” Dyakovski adds.

5. Agree on Organization Levels Early in the Process

At its core, job architecture organizes job families and organization levels into a job catalog. Even before determining the job families that will be in the architecture, it is critical to reach agreement on the levels that exist in the organization and are available to use. Examples of key decision points include whether there will be Associate Directors as well as Senior Managers, the number of levels that will be available in the individual contributor ladder, and whether there will be technician levels in addition to support levels. We advise that the levels selected match standard benchmarks in the external market to support the connection of levels with market data.

The final levels need to be clearly documented, and everyone in the organization needs to understand criteria that differentiate the levels. Early and regular training on levels, starting with HR business partners who advise company management, increases the probability of sustained success.

The levels in the architecture don’t have to correspond with current titling. In fact, if your organization has not been disciplined in titling versus levels, or you are faced with merging multiple disparate organizations into your architecture, you might consider a level structure with numbers, e.g., Level 7, Level 10, or letters and numbers that correspond with core external compensation surveys such as P2, P3, P4, M3, M4, M5.

6. Include All Families; and Build What You Might Need

Determine what positions your company has and codify them into job families. If you have accountants, create an Accounting family. Producers go into a Producing family; Program Officers into Program; Residential Technicians into a Residential Technician family. Iterate so as not to repeat families, and keep checking. When responsibilities blur, see if you can create an “80% rule” where the core accountabilities of selected roles are close enough to group into a shared family. Ideally, families match with external market benchmarks and serve as the sources of identifying employees conducting like work. Job families are a key element in reviewing pay equity. You don’t want too many, and you don’t want too few.

Just like organization levels, each job family should have a brief description so that everyone knows what the family does. Keep in mind that you must also be able to maintain the system that you develop.

 

Work with management to build sufficient levels by job family and describe those jobs. Tailor and trim levels based on family (for example, you may not have an SVP of Payroll). However, don’t try to simplify too much or scrimp on levels when there is a potential you may need one or two more levels in the family in the future. Managers can use these details to guide career development discussions and prepare job descriptions. New pay transparency and equity regulations require these details to distinguish pay between key families, levels and roles.

When building out job families, consider using titles found in salary surveys related to your industry, even if that means changing employee titles or applying revised titles to new hires while retiring older titles over time. Such consistency in titling helps reinforce the architecture and the leveling scheme at the organization.

 

7. Be Specific

“Many job architectures fail because they are so general they are meaningless.”

– Hali Croner, President and CEO, The Croner Company

Your job architecture must carefully balance specificity against broad classifications. Specificity has several benefits. It enables consistent, systematic mapping of employees to known roles and, when focusing on pay, compensation benchmarking that ties to published survey sources, resulting in meaningful salary ranges that are industry-specific and market-aligned.

“Many job architectures fail because they are so general they are meaningless,” notes Croner. “They are not broken into specialties, so managers feel they aren’t relevant.” As you codify organizational levels, job families and roles, be specific, Croner advises.

Your organization needs to review every family and associated roles. Some functions cross the whole enterprise and have consistent levels and families. However, all organizations have units that require their own architectures and career paths, such as editorial producers — web, newspaper, local, national and legal.

 

8. Map with Integrity

Sustainable architectures start with honest mapping of employees to roles based on accountabilities regardless of title, performance or current pay. When HR business partners objectively map individuals to the architecture, it places the architecture on strong footing, groups employees performing like work and flags titling and pay anomalies that can be addressed in time. Typically, the HR business partners lead the mapping exercise. Ensure they have tools to support the work, including family and level definitions, and that there is a transparent, regular calibration process to ensure work quality and build trust.

Strong mapping allows you to test the architecture. Is there a role in the architecture for every employee? Test the counts. If only a few employees are mapped to an organization level, determine if the organization level is needed. You may decide to remove it from across the enterprise. If only a few employees are mapped to a family, determine if the family might be collapsed into another one. Examine each level, family and role and evaluate them for use and relevance.

Once all these steps in creating the architecture are complete, stakeholders agree with the catalog of jobs outlined in the new architecture, and every employee is mapped to a role, it’s time to hand this information to your HRIS team. It inputs the new data structure into back-office systems and prepares for salary inputs.

9. Continually Maintain the Architecture

Put a process in place to maintain the job architecture and keep it current. Over time, allow some functions to leave the catalog and new ones to be introduced. Store definitions in a central place so everyone has a shared understanding.

“Watch how they are evolving,” explains Croner. This approach, combined with a regular review, allows for iteration over time and avoids the limits of a “one and done” solution.

 

10. Salary Benchmarking and Ranges Follow Architecture

The job architecture supports consistent salary survey benchmarking, reduces discretion and potential bias in matching and facilitates a systematic approach to obtaining and updating market rates each year.

“Having the architecture set with roles tied to jobs in a salary survey eliminates the ‘one-off’ approach for pricing a job and makes the process repeatable,” explains Dyakovski.

Create a benchmarking “key” that maps architecture levels to external survey levels, and automate consistent data pulls by family and level. Once that work is done, the bulk of the benchmarking effort focuses on reviewing survey data and grouping data to determine salary ranges. Remember, salary ranges should support the company’s compensation philosophy, including which markets are the basis of comparisons and targeted pay positioning (i.e., at what percentile the organization targets its range midpoints).

 

Next Up: Creating Salary Ranges

After benchmarking with market data, you can turn to creating salary ranges. Developing salary ranges for every job in your company is a heavy lift that may occur only once every 5 to 10 years. Here is another step in the process where you may consider a third-party partner. Having a partner who understands current benchmarking surveys and internal job relationships is helpful.

An experienced compensation consulting firm can perform the following tasks for your organization:

  • Determine market salary rates for most jobs in the architecture
  • Set salary ranges for every level
  • Identify and rationalize outliers to smooth salary range assignments and progression
  • Develop differentials for geographic and scope-adjusted pay
  • Articulate and adhere to the compensation philosophy

The architecture guides more than salary ranges. It also supports implementing the company’s philosophy regarding organization levels that are eligible for bonus, long-term incentives and even selected benefits and perquisites.

If you would like assistance developing a strong job architecture followed by market-based salary ranges, The Croner Company can help.

The Croner Company’s surveys and consulting services are relied upon by organizations at all stages of growth to establish and modify pay practices and align compensation with mission, values and market.

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