Job Evaluation: Definition, Process and Benefits

Job evaluation and related processes are designed to help organizations communicate their strategic and operational objectives at a detailed, job-specific level. The exercise ensures job compensation appropriately reflects each role’s relative contribution to those organizational goals. Results generate actionable steps by HR staff, and functional benefits to the organization that can positively impact workforce understanding of expectations and deliverables, productivity and engagement. How can your organization achieve these beneficial results?

What is Job Evaluation?

Job evaluation is a systematic way of determining the value, or worth, of a specific job relative to other jobs within an organization, and establishing pay equity.

Understanding pay equity requires effectively gathering, analyzing and scoring a selected job for Skill, Effort, Responsibility and Working Conditions. These criteria, once collected, will determine the qualifications for a particular job that subsequently defines equity benchmarks within the organization. Each evaluation requires fundamental job analysis to provide accurate and factual information about the job.

Job Evaluation and Pay Equity: Definition, Process and BenefitsWhat is the Process?

The most effective approaches will efficiently gather detailed job information about every job within an organization. A comprehensive questionnaire (i.e., with NO fill-in-the-blank fields) will ensure every compensable factor and selected response can be consistently verified as correct. It will also enable direct response comparisons with other jobs as organizational context is established. This process will ensure comparable worth standards are in place for an organization's unionized and exempt jobs.

To maintain an accountable, accurate and reliable operation, quality pay equity software should electronically date stamp all processes.

An important part of the process is that input and maintenance of job accountabilities should be combined. This step ensures job duties, responsibilities and evaluated pay levels provided to job incumbents consistently and accurately reflect the work being done. At the same time, it makes clear the organization holds itself accountable to evaluate every job across the organization in a comprehensive, consistent, objective and transparent manner.

The integrity of the pay equity process must be protected to be effective. Good job evaluation software should generate results that can prove the accuracy, consistency, and objectivity of each job evaluation result in several different ways. There should be referential integrity that can ensure the organization’s job evaluation process consistently demonstrates accountability, objectivity, and respect for each stakeholder.

A professional software system needs to ensure consistency is maintained over time, and one way to do this is through cloud-based storage of job evaluation rationale. That way, job evaluation committee decisions of an organization made years from now will be developed from a complete understanding of the perspectives, value interpretations and job comparators of the decisions made today - even if the job evaluation committee changes.

Selecting the Best Pay Equity Software for Your Organization

There are a variety of pay equity methodologies and technologies available in the marketplace today. The best approaches will always focus on open communication with employees, an integral part of the trust process that encourages engagement from the workforce. Good software will enable job content experts to provide specific perspectives on what the work requires. As process feedback to employees, the job evaluation system should generate job descriptions and additional evaluation rationale that support the suggested job evaluation result in language that does not require job evaluation expertise to interpret, communicate or understand.

A professional, inclusive software solution will provide numerous benefits for the organization and its workforce. It should enable an organization to customize job evaluation terminologies, factor weights, competency definitions, module features, and system access security to a very detailed and strategy-driven perspective. It should also effectively identify and recognize, on a relative basis, those jobs required to demonstrate the most valued and challenging operational, technical, and behavioral competencies.

System training and communications with management and staff should always be considered essential at every stage of the project to:

  • Facilitate understanding and communication of accountabilities and expectations by minimizing subjective interpretations.
  • Increase operational efficiencies and enable objective, more informed decision-making concerning job classification.
  • Provide an opportunity to involve staff, management, and other stakeholders in defining and resolving differences between understandings and expectations of job responsibilities and accountabilities.
  • Generate job evaluation results that recognize the critically important skills and behaviors most directly associated with the organizational achievement of its strategic and operational objectives.

Practical Benefits of Job Evaluation

Done right, a significant return on investment (ROI) will be realized by an organization in the following ways:

  • Efficiencies and cost savings related to management and employee time required to prepare and update job descriptions;
  • Committee time required to effectively review and evaluate jobs for fair, defensible and appropriate job classification/compensation results;
  • The positive impact on employee engagement is when job accountabilities are clear, the compensation setting process is transparent, and pay fairness can be easily communicated.

 

Our Encompassing Visions™ team of pay equity and compensation experts will provide guidance and training to help you thoroughly analyze and understand what your organization is paying for, and why. Please call us toll-free at 1-866-913-3628 or fill in the short form here to request your guided demo.

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