Work Levels
Providing the Foundations for Career Structures
Work Levels Providing the Foundations for Career Structures Overview There is mutual benefit to be derived from the individual managing their personal development and career in partnership with the organisation. Whilst partnership and employee engagement are the fashionable buzz-phrases, many organisations lack the means to develop coherent career frameworks that are fundamental to gaining employee commitment. The purpose of this article is to introduce a set of ideas and concepts that can be summarised as Work Levels which provide the means to develop the necessary career infrastructure. Introduction One of the major themes of our times is ‘personal responsibility’. Increasingly so, responsibility for all types of action is being placed on the shoulders of the individual. This is true for personal development and careers as it for making sufficient pension arrangements. Whilst taking personal responsibility for one’s career is a healthy mindset, if an employer passes the total responsibility for careers and personal development over to the individual, there is often not much to stop that individual developing themselves elsewhere. There is mutual benefit to be derived from the individual managing their personal development and career in partnership with the organisation. As such, careers and career development are very much part of the employee engagement agenda and an organisation’s approach has a profound impact on the ‘psychological-contract’ that exists between the individual and that organisation. Whilst many organisations have the best of intentions regarding the creation of coher-
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ent career frameworks, very often the tools and methods that they turn to have adverse and unintended consequences. The Pernicious Effects of Grading Systems Designing career structures can be difficult because often they are driven by grading systems. Many organisations grade their employees’ jobs using some kind of ranking or rating system based on job evaluation. The assigned grades are intended to generate fair pay for people doing the same work and these grades are usually made known within the organisation. Whilst these systems are designed to compare different sorts of jobs and assign a grade that equates to a pay level or band they become ‘proxies’ for career structures. In practice, this has a terrible side effect. Intended for one, use these grading systems end-up adding to the costs of bureaucracy, frustrating employees and undermining leadership development.
Work Levels
Providing the Foundations for Career Structures
Most companies that use job evaluation base their job grades on a points system. Points are allocated to a variety of weighted factors that often include size of budget and number of subordinates. Without proper controls there is an in-built incentive to ‘empire build’ in order to obtain the necessary points to get to the next grade. Job grading has an equally pernicious effect on leadership development. This is because bosses assign promotions based on grades rather than on contribution and set up the system so that they can continue to promote people who are at risk of leaving. By adding more steps to the management escalator they try to keep everyone moving up and end up designing the whole organization to make room for the people who have to be promoted.
ment methodology that provides structure but does not bring along with it the typical management bureaucracy that job evaluation systems often entail. Work Levels is a management methodology used by some of the world’s leading organisations. The essence of Work Levels is that all work can be allocated to one of a specified number of levels of work - each with its own theme, purpose and core contribution. Core contribution describes the outputs of the job and the value of these to the organisation is in direct proportion to the complexity of the environment in which decisions have to be made. Based on the integrated framework, a direct 'mirror-image' connection is made between the outputs of work and the inputs- the personal capabilities, competencies and skills/knowledge/experience required to achieve these. At each successive level the capability to get one's head around the scale of the challenge needs to change profoundly. Making this connection provides a dynamic link between people and jobs and this enables organisations to link career structures and the development agenda.
Due to continual competitive pressure, the number of organisation that have the luxury of creating extra rungs on the career ladder are now few. However, even in the ones that have created all these extra tiers, career management can be a nightmare and take up considerable management time and attention. Work Levels The good news is that there is a manage-
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Broad Bands Work Levels can be introduced into companies with job evaluation systems so long as they limit the use of the evaluated rankings and ratings to identify fair compensation in comparison with others at the same level in the same job. Any more than that, and there is job evaluation ‘mission-creep’. For all other managerial and organisational purposes Work Levels can be used to create a system of clear accountabilities and broad-banded career structures where movement between levels represents genuine and significant promotion. In July 2001, Tesco PLC began replacing
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Work Levels
Providing the Foundations for Career Structures
its management job grades with Work Levels. CEO, Sir Terry Leahy was concerned that his managers spent too much time arguing over their job evaluation points. Leahy said to Brian Dive, the external consultant that implemented Work Levels in Tesco, ‘I want a system that is simple, clear, and transparent, which managers understand, trust, and then forget about and get on and serve our customers’. ‘Although initially introduced to solve a compensation issue (fair pay for accountable work), Work Levels has subsequently been applied in Tesco to drive more effective organisation design, reduce costbases and help control costs in a time of great organic growth. They also now underpin the company’s leadership development programme with key differentiating competences identified at each level of work.’ (Dive 2008). Job-Families When there is a system that recognise when a job genuinely grows in size and scope (rather than simply increasing in score), it is possible to identify Job Families.
and scope. Within each Job-Family it is possible to clearly define benchmark jobs that can form the basis of a career ladder. A Job Family, as a cluster of related jobs, does not have to match the current organisation structure. As such, it is possible that a family encompases jobs that are in different functions, for instance, Sales and Marketing. Job Family identification does require a detailed analysis of the necessary skills/knowledge and experience. If not, job clusters can be limited to very specific technologies or expertise and career silos easily form. On the other hand if you are too inclusive as to what a Job Family is then people can become unsure as to how to move around in the organisation. The Job Families chosen need to reflect one or more of the following characteristics: The mission and vision of the organisation. For instance an organisation that sets out to deliver world-class projects on time is likely to want a Job Family that addresses project management. The core processes or work-flows of the organisation. The Job Families can cover the same areas as the broad business processes. For instance in a retail organisation these could include such as Customer Propositions, Supply/Logistics and Customer Service. The deep technical know-how upon which the organisation is built. An analysis of skills/knowledge and experience identifies the broad connections between specialist areas.
A Job Family can be defined as a group of jobs where the skills, knowledge and aptitude for the work are similar but develop progressively as the jobs increase in size
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Work Levels
Providing the Foundations for Career Structures
Benefits Using Work Levels it is possible to support the construction of an over-arching training and development architecture. This is because the fundamental power of the system comes from the dynamic link that is made between the work undertaken and the personal capability required to carry this out. Therefore the question becomes training and development for what? One of the major benefits of identifying career and personal development structures is that career success can be achieved by means other than gaining promotion to a higher grade. In broadbands there are greater opportunities for job enrichment and progression together with clear criteria as to what is required to move to another career ladder.
Conclusion Under continued pressure on overhead costs, it is time to dismantle expensive and over-engineered career structures that do not deliver either engagement or efficiency. Work Levels can be used to develop a broad-banded career framework together with an integrated training and development architecture. The end-result is that organisations minimse costs and, by ensuring that real adding value work is done at every level, job-holders are naturally more engaged and retained.
Well developed career structures that specificy job and personal requirements provide the basis for: Good recruitment decisions Timely training and development Self-development. A career framework can help individuals identify development needs for themselves. However, we all have blind-spots and there are some areas where feedback and coaching from a range of sources is required. Work Levels provides the basis for consistent coaching across an organisation and together with the provision of self assessment tools, individuals can be helped to: Take on more senior roles in compressed timescales, Develop self confidence and self awareness, Make difficult transitions, for example, from functional specialist to general manager, Establish realistic and cost effective development plans.
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