CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Welcome to our Turbocharging HR series, where we will be discussing job evaluation, talking about how it's evolved, and how an HR will be supporting to future-proof it. My name is Charlotte Wheeler, and I will be joined today by my colleague, Ruchi Arora.
RUCHI ARORA: Hi, Charlotte.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Hi, Ruchi. So a question to get us started. Job evaluation, job leveling has been around for a while now. There have been points where people have questioned whether it's still useful. What are your thoughts?
RUCHI ARORA: So the short answer is it's absolutely critical. So I do think that job evaluation is certainly here to stay. The big thing that is bringing it back into focus over the last couple of years is very much the EU Pay Transparency Directive and other pay equity regulations around the world.
So it's absolutely here to stay. I would say maybe six, seven years ago, there's a little bit of debate whether it's still relevant, and if it should still exist. But I think the regulations are driving it otherwise and absolutely foundational to HR frameworks.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: And can you give us a little bit of context on how it has evolved over the recent years, and maybe what it looks like in the next three to five years? What can we expect from job leveling?
RUCHI ARORA: Yeah, so I would answer that in two parts. One is the design of job leveling frameworks, and one is how job evaluation is done. So the first is very much the design of your job evaluation framework needs to be fit for purpose in the organization that you are in today and how your organization is evolving.
Many organizations are going through transformation. They're going through operating model changes. They're going through restructures. That's the internal elements. The external you've got, the economy hasn't been this uncertain for a long, long time over the last few years in terms of what we've seen. But also, as I mentioned, the regulations.
So the design of job evaluation needs to stay up to speed and up to date and relevant for how the external and internal environments are evolving for organizations. And what do I mean by that?
What I mean is we see many clients, even today, still come to us and say we've got a very granular framework, questionable whether that's fit for purpose today or if they need something a bit more broader.
Maybe there's a little bit of a hybrid. Some parts of your framework need to be a bit granular, some need to be a bit more broader. So there's lots of different ideas I think organizations are trying out, and I think that helps give certain messages to your employees around progression, development and opportunities in the organization.
The second is the "how" and how job evaluation is changing. I think the methodologies themselves are still very robust and objective in the factors that they use to measure roles, but how job evaluation is done through technology, using AI more in that space, and just trying to save time and bring efficiencies in the whole process of job evaluation is something that is evolving, and I think will continue to evolve even more in the future.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Let me dig a little bit deeper on that AI point that you just raised. So we hear a lot about that at the moment. Can you just give us a little bit more detail information on how AI can support something like job leveling? What does that look like?
RUCHI ARORA: So our job evaluation tool comes with AI now. And what used to take 30, 40 minutes to evaluate a role can now be done within seconds or minutes. And that is significantly improving the time that it is taking organizations to do job evaluation.
We know some organizations have had these factories of job evaluations where you've had people dedicated to that. So that's saving huge amounts of time. We see organizations also move job evaluation into things like reward operating centers, which again, is helping drive some of the efficiencies from job evaluation.
So the AI with job evaluation saves time, it's objective, and it provides a lot of robustness around the job evaluation outcomes. So that reward and HR teams can actually spend more time in discussing the actual role with the business, and making sure it's articulated in the right way' it's giving the right message, and they're able to attract and retain the talent and have the right people in those jobs, rather than focusing too much on what the number is or what the letter is.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: I mean, it sounds like there are so many positives there, but let me ask from another angle. Have you heard of, or do you see any limitations or challenges of using AIs, or how would you give organizations confidence that AI is the right way to go?
RUCHI ARORA: Yeah, we're all on a learning journey with AI in all aspects of life, and job evaluation is one of them. So the human in the loop remains really important with job evaluation. The AI with job evaluation will give you the outcome very quickly, but it is really a reward or HR professionals role to review that outcome, to put those outcomes in the context of the organization.
So I would say the human in the loop remains really important with job evaluation. This isn't about taking away humans doing job evaluation, it's about enabling them to do it better, quicker, faster, and have more impactful conversations with business leaders around it.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Yeah, so it kind of a different role in the process rather than removing them completely. Got so involved in that question. So job leveling, job evaluation, kind of whatever an organization calls it isn't new. As you said, it's been around for a long time. Organizations potentially been using the same methodologies for years.
How well do you think those existing methodologies can be applied to this kind of evolving context of agile roles, or emerging roles like data and data scientists and similar roles that are really changing very quickly? How can the two kind of coexist?
RUCHI ARORA: Yeah, so like I said, organizations are changing. So job evaluation has got to evolve with it. We have worked with a number of organizations who have truly moved to agile operating models, or may say they're moving to agile operating models, but they're on a bit of a journey. And the job evaluation methodologies are very much still fit for purpose.
Again, I come back to how that job evaluation methodology is applied in the context of the organization. The factors around how you measure and size a role still remain very relevant. You look at the knowledge that's required. You look at the impact the role is having, the complexity, and the contribution the role is making to the organization.
So those things, the things that we've always looked at, are still very much remain at the heart of job evaluation and are very relevant in organizations that are shifting to perhaps newer operating models.
And my final point I would say on this is that, whether you're in a more traditional setup or if you're in a more newer setup or dynamic setup, like an agile operating model, again, the pay transparency directive requires organizations to really think about things like categories workers. And again, even in an agile organization, you need to be able to do that. So job evaluation supports that.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Thank you. Potentially, quite a big question for my last one. For those organizations that are thinking about their job leveling approach, either implementing something or refreshing, are there any kind of themes or trends that you think should be feeding into some of that thought process, kind of any advice?
RUCHI ARORA: Yeah, so it's what I said earlier, really. It's thinking about whether the job evaluation framework that you have or have had for many years is fit for purpose. If you don't have one, you need one, because I don't think there's any getting away from that now with the pay regulations in place.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Definitely.
RUCHI ARORA: But the fit for purpose and whether it's still serving the organization in the way it needs to is very much around is the granularity. Is it giving the messages to the employees in the right way around promotion, progression, development in the organization?
And I would say that job evaluation in isolation won't address all your challenges that you have around attraction, retention, and engagement of your people. Actually, it's about linking your job evaluation to job architecture, to your skills architecture, having a really integrated kind of foundational framework that then helps you give the right messages to your employees and to the business around growth, development, movement, mobility across the business. So my one piece of advice would be job evaluation on its own isn't enough. It needs to be integrated with job architecture and skills architecture.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: I'd say a foundational piece, but not the only one.
RUCHI ARORA: Yes. Exactly.
CHARLOTTE WHEELER: Brilliant. Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about job leveling today. And please do join us for our other series on Turbocharging HR.
