Pay transparency and pay equity are top of mind for organizations around the world. Career frameworks that integrate job architecture and job leveling are essential.
Career frameworks also are a requirement of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and EU Pay Transparency Directive to support the identification of employees who are doing work of equal value on a robust basis.
As a result, employers are increasingly expected to be better at rewards management, and that requires objective reasons for pay differences among “like” employee categories.
On a macro level, job leveling is a core element that shows how careers can progress within an organization. On a micro level, it’s the evaluation of jobs to understand their scope, complexity and impact relative to other jobs within an organization. Job leveling:
- Determines the relative value of jobs in your organization
- Serves as an input to compare jobs in the external market
- Helps you develop a consistent titling construct
- Assesses the jobs in your organization.
Lay your foundation by approaching job leveling in a fresh way. Analytical job evaluation is becoming a must-have, including a robust and defensible process to size jobs appropriately based on their scope and complexity including skills, effort and responsibilities.
WTW’s Global Grading System
For more than 30 years our Global Grading System (GGS) has been a market-leading approach to job leveling.
Made possible by our commitment to continuous improvements to our methodology that reflect the ongoing evolution of business, GGS provides the methodology and technology you need to determine the internal equity of jobs within your organization while also aligning with the external market. WTW’s GGS provides both the methodology and technology necessary to determine the internal relativity of jobs within an organization.
Through a rigorous and defensible process, GGS:
- Provides a structured, objective and globally consistent leveling framework that is easy to explain at all levels
- Recognizes multiple career paths to support compensation and talent management programs
- Uses factors that are universally applicable and gender neutral, and identify real differentiation in job size to clarify jobs of equal value with respect to skills, effort and responsibility
- Ensures a consistent and transparent assessment of jobs across lines of business, functions and geographies, all based on scope and complexity
- Aligns with compensation market data to create a strong foundation for compensation decisions that balance both internal and external pay equity
Automated job leveling
Within WTW’s GGS, we have a fully integrated automated job leveling (AJL) feature that uses machine learning and generative AI to suggest baseline evaluations that reflect decades of historical data evaluation and consultative experience.
Automated job leveling with WTW:
- Increases objectivity and consistency of the job-leveling process by reducing human error and bias by providing a baseline evaluation
- Provides AI-generated rationale for suggested evaluation scoring to inform the human-in-the-loop review process and enable users to interpret the AJL outcomes and determine where changes need to be made in the evaluation
- Reduces tactical activities, allowing compensation and HR professionals like you to focus on more strategic reviews and calibration decisions
- Significantly increases the number of roles that can be leveled within tight timelines and with limited resources
- Enables extensive use of our industry and market expertise to predict leveling outcomes
- Assists in validating the quality and relevance of job descriptions and job-profile content as a core input for leveling
Why you need to start today
As the nature of work and roles continues to change, setting a strong foundation for your people programs is critical. The right tools will help you with:
- Ensuring market alignment: The GGS leveling methodology aligns with WTW’s global compensation surveys, providing the groundwork for defensible, logical and unbiased compensation decisions
- Creating exceptional career experiences: Employees will easily understand the basis of their career and rewards opportunities, making conversations about compensation, learning and development and career opportunities clear and engaging
- Expanding career paths: GGS’s methodology describes and values both people managers’ and individual contributors’ careers, making career path options clear and attainable
- Embracing an agile approach: GGS and AJL can be customized to your organization, industry, business units, locations or functions, applying the right level of rigor while balancing communications at all levels and adjusting to company changes and different business situations
Leverage the power of technology, artificial intelligence, market-leading data and expert advisors to ensure your organization delivers fair and balanced rewards programs that your leaders will be proud to discuss. Getting compensation right is hard. We make it easy.
