What if you aren’t creating a job architecture from scratch? Instead, you inherited one as a newly hired compensation leader. Now you must figure out if it needs to change and how to go about that.
1st – Do a job architecture inventory. What is in place today for job families, career levels, pay grade structures, base pay ranges, target incentives, job titles, job descriptions, compensation philosophy, governance processes, comp guidelines, etc.?
2nd – How do each of these elements align to the business goals? Look at the short-term goals and long-term goals. Are you going to need employees doing different work in 3 years than they are doing today? Do you need more career levels to recognize the growth of employees and the needs of the business? Are the job descriptions for current roles updated? Do you need additional jobs to support succession planning and individual development plans? The outcome of this analysis is the future job architecture.
3rd – Once you have the current and future job architecture elements documented, you can see the gaps. Which gaps are the highest priority? Which will have the largest impact on the business goals and on employees? What is needed sooner? What can wait? Are there technology projects that will depend on your job architecture? The outcome of this is the gaps and the project plan to close them.
4th – Next, is the stakeholder work. This is where you share the current and future job architecture with the senior leaders who will care about the changes and are part of the approval process. This is where you ask for money, time, and people to ensure the project can be successful. And it is where you share the change management and communications plan.
5th – Once you have the approvals and resources, you get your project team together, set a project kickoff date, and get started.
It is often more difficult to update a job architecture that is in place versus building one from scratch.
You may have to have mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, technology projects, or other business imperatives that you can align the job architecture work to. Stand alone job architecture projects often aren’t approved and funded unless you can make a strong business case for them.
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