With legislation on the rise across many countries, now is the time for organisations to get on the front foot when it comes to pay transparency, but when faced with the challenge of dealing with complex organisational structures, it can be a daunting task.
There are a lot of moving parts for any large organisation when it comes to compliance. It's not just about keeping up with legislative changes but also putting in place robust and agile job data structures, mechanisms and processes to enable effective global compliance, whilst managing the nuances of regional variations.
“The pay transparency movement will continue to spread through regulation, but also through changing workforce expectations. We’re in an environment where employees are rightly demanding fairness, clarity and transparency in how they are paid.” Aon
There are now 10 US states with pay transparency legislation in place, with a further thirteen in the process of making it law.
Using the state of California as an example, all employers, with 15 or more employees, must include the pay scale for a position in any job posting. They must also maintain records of a job title and wage rate history for each employee for the duration of employment plus three years.
26% of the US labour force is covered by pay transparency laws, that's over 44 million people
In addition, there are requirements for pay gap reporting, a ban on asking job applicants about their salary histories and relying on an applicant's salary history to determine compensation levels.
In 2023, the EU Parliament voted to adopt a Directive. This is in a drive to close the gender pay gap of around 13%. EU Member States have until June 2026 to transpose the Directive into national law.
The Directive also makes pay gap reporting mandatory for organisations over a certain size; it also goes one step further, requiring organisations to look at deeper analysis and establish a corrective action plan where there is a pay gap of more than 5%.
Job applicants will have the right to receive information on the initial pay level/range for any advertised position and employers cannot ask about previous or current pay.
The EU Directive won’t directly apply in the UK. However, if a company is registered in the UK, or anywhere else non-EU, but has more than 100 employees based in EU member states, they will need to comply with the legislation and reporting requirements for that location.
The UK also has its own gender pay gap reporting process for organisations with more than 250 employees.
At the very core of pay transparency, and pay fairness, is job data. Having the job data for your whole organisation mapped within a well-structured job architecture, with a consistent levelling framework across job families, will give you the ability to look across your landscape of jobs, pay and reward, in order to make comparisons between similar roles and ensure equal pay for equal work.
However, for some companies job data can be chaotic, inconsistent and unstructured. It can exist as a long list of job titles and associated job codes that have developed organically as the organisation has grown, changed, merged or acquired. Where an organisation does have a job structure in place, it can easily become difficult to govern and manage and therefore out-of-date.
In both scenarios, there can be a state of chaos – hundreds of job titles, many just slight variations of others; job levels all over the place; and inconsistencies in salary ranges across roles, business areas and regions. A disordered job structure creates a shaky foundation, which makes compliance with pay transparency legislation difficult.
From a Job data perspective, it’s never been more important to get your house in order. Regaining control through a dynamic Job Architecture, and structured frameworks through Job Families, will give greater transparency and control over pay and grading.
Although legislative requirements may differ in each location, fundamentally, they have one overall aim in common; achieving equal pay for equal work for employees from under-represented groups.
Chaotic job structures can act as a barrier to pay and reward, making it difficult to establish clear criteria for compensation, which, in turn, leads to inconsistencies, inequities, and confusion among employees.
This is a time when pay transparency is increasingly becoming a legislative or mandatory requirement, both in Europe and the US: 10 states and counting have now made it law. In the UK, we’re seeing the public sector being hit by pay equity fines, which are largely due to a lack of visibility of job structures.
The challenge is that for many organisations job data and job content is chaotic, inconsistent and unstructured with little to no governance or overall management. Many organisations are simply managing a long list of job titles that have been added to organically as the organisation has grown, changed, merged, or gone through acquisition.
It is therefore unsurprising that so many organisations, both public and private are struggling to get their house in order and make job and pay structures more transparent and visible across the enterprise.
One way to reduce this chaos is to organise your jobs into a job family framework. This is where jobs in an organisation, sharing similar skillsets, nature of work and career paths, are grouped in job families.
The essential nature of the activities and the basic skills used will be similar for all roles within a job family. However, the level of responsibility, the skills required to do the work and the scope of the role may be different.
Job families help simplify pay structures by creating a more organised and streamlined approach to pay and reward. A job family framework will reduce the number of distinct reward structures, making it easier to manage and communicate pay information.
Job families also simplify the process of determining appropriate pay ranges for different roles, as organisations can use market data and industry benchmarks specific to each job family.
With job families, high-level roles within each category are evaluated, which minimises the need to evaluate individual jobs across locations or teams. Categorising tasks broadens flexibility; as roles evolve, new tasks typically align within existing categories, avoiding frequent job evaluations.
Standardising job titles within job families also aids market benchmarking. Salary comparisons occur at the job family level, rather than assessing each unique role individually. This approach enables organisations to maintain competitive pay while simplifying structures and adhering to governance standards.
2. Pay Transparency
A job family structure enhances communication and transparency around pay and reward and aligns with global movements towards pay transparency.
Increasingly favoured by employees and job seekers - 60% of US and 57% of UK employees would be more willing to switch to organisations with greater pay transparency - job families provide individuals with a clearer understanding of how their role fits within the organisational framework.
Well-defined job families also enable data-driven compensation decisions, including setting salary ranges and adapting to market trends. Moreover, such structures promote accountability in pay decisions, facilitating explanations and justifications to candidates and employees.
3. Pay Equity
Finally, simplifying pay structures through job families can help with evaluations of pay equity. A job family structure makes it easier to look across job families, particularly if these are linked by a common grading / levelling structure, to understand any pay equity issues between different roles.
Where roles are grouped into job families based on skills and responsibilities, overlaps and inefficiencies are avoided and therefore it is much easier to see if employees are being paid differently, even though their experience and skills are the same.
We go into greater depth around job family frameworks and outline all potential benefits in our Guide to Job Families.
RoleMapper, the AI-powered job management platform, has secured £2.1million funding that will support job creation and overall growth of the business. The funding round includes £1million equity investment from the British Business Bank’s South West Investment Fund (SWIF), via appointed fund manager, The FSE Group. Mercia Ventures, South West-based venture capital firm QantX, and existing private investors.
The £200m South West Investment Fund covers the entire South West region and provides loans from £25k to £2m and equity investment up to £5m to help a range of small and medium sized businesses to start up, scale up or stay ahead. The RoleMapper deal is the fund’s largest investment to date since its launch in July last year.
RoleMapper’s technology is disrupting how organisations manage jobs, skills, inclusivity and compliance. It can automate and transform how to plan and manage job designs and descriptions, with access to millions of jobs and skills across multiple industries, all integrated within existing human resources (HR) systems.
Sara Hill, RoleMapper Founder and CEO said: “We are thrilled to have the South West Investment Fund and FSE on board as new partners, enabling us to further strengthen our product, unique AI models and build capacity for further roll-out. We look forward to working with all our investors as we continue our growth journey and build on the progress we’ve made helping organisations create better jobs and build inclusive workplaces.”
The Exeter based business is already working with a number of large organisations including well-known global brands, local authorities and NHS trusts.
Ralph Singleton, Head of Equity, South West at The FSE Group added: “RoleMapper has a strong leadership team with experience building and scaling businesses in the B2B and HR space. They have recently pivoted their offering to address an identified market need and their AI powered tech is helping major corporates and public sector organisations manage their responsibilities as equal opportunity employers. We look forward to working with them as they expand.”
Jody Tableporter, Director, Nations and Regions Investment Funds said: “Rolemapper has gone from start-up to scale-up in just a few years, harnessing AI technology to transform how businesses and organisations manage their workforce strategy. We’re delighted the South West Investment Fund is supporting their further growth, with what is the fund’s largest deal to date.”
Mercia Ventures first backed RoleMapper in 2022. Rafael Joseph of Mercia added: “We’re pleased to continue to back the team at RoleMapper. They have shown great tenacity against a tough economic backdrop and successfully reshaped their strategy to solve the immediate issues facing clients. As a consequence, they’ve continued to win impressive blue-chip customers, proving the need for their solutions in the market. We expect them to have another strong year in 2024.”
The purpose of the South West Investment Fund is to drive sustainable economic growth by supporting innovation and creating local opportunity for new and growing businesses across the South West. The South West Investment Fund is increasing the supply and diversity of early-stage finance for South West smaller businesses, providing funds to firms that might otherwise not receive investment and helping to break down barriers in access to finance.
Job families and job functions can help organisations establish a robust framework, ensuring transparent career paths or a more effective shift to a skills-based approach. They can be particularly useful when there is a lot of variation in job titles between different functions.
Essentially, a job family is a group of related jobs within an organisation that share similar skill sets and nature of work. Although the level of responsibility, the skills required to do the work and the scope of the role may differ, the essential nature of the activities and the basic skills used will be similar for all roles within a job family.
They are not to be confused with ‘Job family groups’ or ‘job functions’ which are higher-level categories that include multiple job families; Finance or General Administration are good examples of a job function.
We talk to a lot of organisations that are really struggling with their job data and job content that is chaotic, inconsistent and unstructured with no governance or overall management.
As a result of this lack of structure, many organisations exist as a long list of job titles that have been added organically as the organisation has grown, changed, merged or acquired. If an organisation does have a job structure in place, it is often the case that a streamlined structure was implemented but, over time, has been difficult to govern and manage.
In both scenarios, there is often a resulting state of chaos:
Introducing a job family structure can help consolidate, review, cleanse and streamline your job data and job content
Once a job family framework is in place, it provides a solid foundation for many key organisational processes, such as:
There are a range of ways an organisation can create a job family, which includes:
To get a better idea of the job families and structures, we've created a range of examples around key functions.
Our latest guide goes into more detail on creating job families, as well as outlining why it’s a critical element when making that shift to becoming a skills-based organisation.
For many organisations, job data and job content is chaotic, inconsistent and unstructured with no governance or overall management.
Many organisations exist as a long list of job titles that have been added to organically as the organisation has grown, changed, merged or acquired. If an organisation does have a job structure in place, it is often the case that a streamlined structure was implemented but, over time, this has been difficult to govern and manage.
Introducing a job family structure can help consolidate, review, cleanse and streamline your job data and job content. Once a job family framework is in place, it provides a solid foundation for many key organisational processes.
Josh Bersin refers to job families as “Guilds” or “Professional Groups” as roles are grouped on similar skills requirements. He recommends that each job family is owned by a capability leader, who is then responsible for keeping track of the skills and technologies that people in the group need, as well as making sure they are also aware of wider career options that utilise their skills.
RoleMapper's Guide to Job Families focuses on the importance of implementing a Job Family framework and its key benefits, which includes:
We've also created a bank of Job Family examples to help bring a Job Family framework to life.
Organisations are evolving at an unprecedented pace. The typical enterprise organisation has undertaken five major changes in the past three years — and nearly 75% expect to multiply the types of major change initiatives they will undertake in the next three years
“A job architecture provides the foundation for implementing a skills-based approach within an organisation”
When the pace of change was relatively slow, jobs could be described using traditional job descriptions. These would define the exact nature of the work that an individual needed to do, usually in a long list of tasks and remained static over time.
However, an increasing number of organisations are now recognising that defining work in these ways has downsides, the key one being that it can put the brakes on organisational agility.
Transitioning to a skills-based approach can provide organisations with the flexibility required to adapt during periods of significant change. However, reaping the advantages of this approach hinges on the initial investment of time and effort to establish a robust foundation through a well-designed and effectively managed job architecture.
A skills-based approach is where organisations define work by deconstructing jobs into critical tasks and outcomes and identifying the current and emerging skills required.
A skills-based approach to defining work and jobs involves focusing on the skills and abilities needed to perform tasks and contribute to an organisation’s goals. There is less focus on where jobs and people sit within a business and more focus on understanding the jobs, works and skills required across the whole organisation. The work that needs to be done is broken down into discrete segments of work and the requirements are mapped into identifiable skills clusters.
Instead of relying solely on traditional job descriptions, organisations adopting this approach are developing skills-based job profiles that focus on the skills necessary for the role. This enables a clearer understanding of what is expected and helps in recruiting, evaluating, and developing talent. It also makes it easier to spot skills gaps then make plans to fix these either by redeploying people with the relevant skills internally or hiring externally.
One of the key impacts of this rapid evolution is the need for a radical, new approach to how we define and describe jobs and work.
Recent research by Deloitte found clear benefits of a skills-based approach both in terms of better business results and also an improved employee experience. Organisations who had embedded a skills-based approach were:
In the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 93% of respondents said moving away from a focus on jobs – and towards skills – was important or very important to their organisation’s success. Yet only 20% believed that their organisation was very ready to tackle the challenge.
From our experience of working with clients moving to a skills-based approach, the main barrier is a chaotic job architecture.
A job architecture forms the building blocks of an organisation. It provides the framework upon which you can extract, align and manage how skills are distributed and required across the organisation.
If an organisation’s job architecture is chaotic, inconsistent and without governance, moving to a skills-based approach will be an uphill battle.
A well-designed job architecture can play a crucial role in facilitating the transition to a skills-based approach by:
Reviewing your organisation's job architecture framework can feel like a daunting prospect. We've worked with organisations that have spent more than 18 months carrying out this task manually. If it takes this long, then by the time you've completed it, it's likely out-of-date, not to mention maintenance and governance of a manual process creating additional challenges.
Our proprietary AI and advanced Natural Language Processing allow our customers to transform and digitise their job data into best-in-class, inclusive job descriptions and a robust, future-focused job architecture and job titling skills framework. The availability of good job data will enable organisations to easily shift towards a skills-based approach.
The process of inclusive job design sits at the heart of your ability to attract, retain, reward and progress talent across your organisation.
There have been significant shifts in the world of work that have driven creating inclusive jobs to the top of the priority list for leading organisations.
We are operating in ever-changing, volatile markets with increased legislation, particularly around pay equity and transparency. Combine this with a new generation who are expecting a more employee-centric, self-service model to help them navigate career paths up and around an organisation, and you have a clear business imperative to drive change - a key driver being inclusive job descriptions.
Creating inclusive job descriptions is more than just re-working the language and copy on a page. It is a sequence of key steps in a job design process that will enable you to create job descriptions that reflect, in an inclusive way, the work that your organisation needs done now and in the future . The outputs of this process will be debiased job descriptions that will truly make an impact at each stage of the employee lifecycle.
Inclusive job design is the process of designing a job in a way that is unbiased and reflects the actual job that needs to be done - rather than making assumptions about the job and/or job holder.
Complexity is a real barrier to inclusion. If a job description is simply a long list of tasks, people find it hard to see how their experience and skills can transfer to fulfil a manager’s long wish-list of deliverables. If there are too many responsibilities, or if they are overly complex, research has shown that it will very likely put people off applying for the role.
There are three key areas to focus on to ensure your requirements are inclusive. First, which of the requirements are truly essential? Our own research found that, on average, 60% of the requirements listed on a job description aren’t actually essential to be successful in the role. Furthermore, research shows that women will not put themselves forward for a role if they don’t meet 80-100% of the criteria.
Make it a mandatory step in your job design process to assess which flexible and hybrid working options will work for a role, and challenge yourself to consider options that have not been tried before. Make sure the flexible working options available for the role are fully explained in the job description. If it is decided that a role is not suitable for some options, document the reasons why to ensure that they can be justified.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that the average user reads at most 20% of what’s on a page. People tend to scan information that they see online, rather than read it. It’s therefore crucial that you convey the key information about the role in a way that is easy to understand. Long drawn-out job descriptions will put a lot of people off.
The final step is something most organisations find the hardest to do, and that is to systematically embed the principles of inclusive job design into the way that jobs are designed and the way in which job descriptions are written.
Create a process and guidance for anyone to use in your organisation who is involved in job design and writing job descriptions. Put governance in place to make sure that inclusive job design principles are being followed.
Our new public sector guide, "The Strategic Importance of Jobs" explores why jobs are more than just tasks; they are critical components of strategic planning and organisational success.
We focus in on the following key points:
This job architecture guide offers practical insights and recommendations for HR professionals to design and maintain an effective organisational architecture.
You will learn:
RoleMapper eliminates the cost and time burden on Reward and HR teams. Our proprietary AI and advanced Natural Language Processing can transform your existing job titles and/or job data into a robust, future-focused job architecture and job titling framework.
Our team of experts work with you to design an AI-enabled solution or service that best suits your business requirements, giving you an accurate and fit-for-purpose representation of your organisation for strategic business and people initiatives.
For many organisations, getting their job architecture and job catalogue ‘house’ in order is a manual, slow and expensive process. The same applies to creating inclusive, compliant and de-biased job descriptions.
However, the speed at which hiring strategies are changing, and with legislation increasing around pay transparency and pay equity, organisations are at risk of falling behind, not to mention non-compliance, due to outdated job structures and job descriptions.
Using proprietary AI, with input from our team of experts, RoleMapper’s new services aim to rapidly reduce the cost and time it takes to consolidate and update your job architecture and job catalogue, as well as create best-in-class job postings that are fully inclusive, compliant and fit-for-purpose.
RoleMapper Founder and CEO, Sara Hill says: "Our Harmonisation, Transformation and Optimisation Services are simple and straightforward. You give us your job data as it is and we’ll give you a simplified, centralised, job architecture and job catalogue. Or, if you’re focused purely on job descriptions, fully compliant and de-biased job postings."
Continues Hill: "We’ve had repeated requests from customers to use RoleMapper to help fast track their job architecture and job catalogue clean-up and harmonisation projects. We’ve listened to the market and we’ve responded with the launch of our job Harmonisation, Transformation and Optimisation services.
We’ve seen so many strategic business or people initiatives fall at the first hurdle, mainly due to a lack of accuracy of data or the poor health of their job architecture and job descriptions. Why? Because typical manual processes are time-consuming and prone to error. Our service aims to completely remove those hurdles."
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