Traditionally, organizations have used job leveling and job architecture to provide the infrastructure needed to organize work and rewards based on job types and seniority. However, as the nature of work has changed and as new jobs emerged, this foundational approach to job leveling and job architecture needs to adapt, too.
By effectively and efficiently defining work, the level of employee contribution and what a job means, the better your career experience becomes. Ultimately, getting the foundation of your organization right will enable you to think of work more broadly and be more flexible.
When considering your organization’s job architecture and job leveling, you can begin by imagining building a house. You start with the foundations and cornerstone — the job architecture, in this context — and design the floorplan of your job families.
Job leveling determines how high the walls are built and how tall you want your structure to be. That is, are you building a traditional career ladder, or will you take a more modern, skills-based approach to career progression that will open the door to accelerated career growth for your workforce?
In making these decisions, you begin to see the rooms of your house. Or, in this case, the job families and skills you need to accomplish the work that will help achieve your business goals. Now, take this analogy a step further and think about how you decorate your house. What you place in each room becomes the skills that can be changed, replaced or adapted as needed.
Your job architecture and job leveling now are at a place where your design can change as work and jobs change, but your structure and shape remain a constant foundation to build upon.
Your job architecture and job leveling foundation should not change often — if you have designed both broadly and follow the key principle that job architecture is agnostic to organization structure. However, ensuring your organizations’ jobs are fit for purpose is a valid reason to review your job architecture and job leveling more frequently to ensure your governance programs are working as intended. A periodic annual review gives you a chance to get back to the basics and ask yourself:
In short, your organization will benefit from understanding job architecture and leveling trends. A shelf life of five to 10 years is pretty good for a job architecture; however, some organizations don’t review, maintain and govern these frameworks. As such, job architecture and job leveling don’t grow and change at the same pace as market shifts. We only need to look at the past two to three years to see how much the market has changed:
No two organizations are alike, nor are their job architecture and leveling frameworks. However, in our work with forward-thinking organizations, we begin with two actions.
Job architecture and job leveling are critical when considering pay transparency and pay equity regulations being implemented around the world. The implications of these regulations go further than simply requiring organizations to report gender pay gaps; rather, they are driving companies to be more transparent about pay and providing more rights to employees to ask for pay information.
Again, this comes down to your architecture and leveling frameworks’ foundation. If your initial structure is misaligned or built incorrectly, the process of answering lawful questions becomes more complicated and costs time for teams to remediate.
Pay equity doesn’t mean every employee doing the same job needs to be paid the same, as pay can vary for many objective reasons. Yet, that doesn’t mean that organizations have to go back to granular grading structures and narrow job definitions. It’s quite the opposite.
Forward-thinking organizations are actually defining work and jobs more broadly to support business priorities around agility and flexibility as well as employee interests in expanding their career opportunities. You don’t need to default to traditional job architecture and job leveling structures. Instead, you need to ensure competitive reward practices that are underpinned by a robust level and job infrastructure. This is what will help the business explain its objective — and defensible — reasons for pay differences.
Job architecture and leveling are critical for communicating careers and rewards. When your architecture and leveling approach are designed and implemented well, it will be simpler for the business to explain to employees where they sit in the organization and what they can do to grow, develop and move.
To bring this all to life, managers and leaders must carefully plan and use a variety of communication tools and media. Remember:
Spending time and resources to build a strong job architecture and leveling process is wasted if you aren’t advertising and selling it to get the best return on your investment.
Ultimately, employees want a meaningful career experience that includes growth and purpose. This starts with your job architecture and job leveling, which need to be clearly defined in a simple way. Once that is in place, your organization’s employee experience will have room to grow and add value that your workforce seeks.
