Increasing pay equity and pay transparency legislation as well as changing requirements for reporting on equitable pay practices, prove that now, more than ever, job architecture is fast-becoming the most critical tool for organisations to implement, monitor and govern pay equity strategies.
A job architecture provides a framework for defining and aligning jobs within your organisation based on the type of work performed.
In its simplest form, it provides you with a mechanism to consolidate all your job titles into a consistent framework that provides clarity and transparency on career paths, career levels and pay.
Jobs (job titles) that have common features are consolidated into job groups, sometimes called job families, or where more sophisticated management of skills and careers is in place, they might be called guilds or professional groups.
As these groups are created, each will contain a number of job titles and levels reflecting different job outputs, skills, knowledge and experience. This structure then provides the foundation for job levelling and salary structures and other equitable compensation programmes based on job value.
Pay equity is the concept of compensating employees who have similar job functions with comparably equal pay, regardless of factors such as their gender, race, and ethnicity.
Pay equity is not only essential from a legal compliance perspective, but also helps manage budgets (ensuring no-one is overpaid), attract and retain employees and supports organisations in fulfilling their D, E, and I strategy. There is also increasing pressure from external stakeholders, such as investors and regulators, to make sure that pay equity is being analysed, along with plans in place to address any issues.
There has been some debate around how rigid your job architecture needs to be. Not having one can lead to significant challenges around pay inequities and compliance complexity
As Tom McMullen, Total Rewards Expert, Korn Ferry, stated in a recent Pay Equity panel; ‘a wobbly job foundation is the enemy of pay equity management’.
In many organisations, it is frequently the case that job titles are a mess, job levels are all over the place and there are inconsistencies in salary ranges across roles, business areas and regions. As a result, most organisations see a lot of management discretion around jobs and pay - decentralised governance, inconsistencies, grandfathering old structures – resulting in job title chaos and a very weak foundation.
Payscale found that over 40% of companies do not have an organised pay structure that is aligned to job ranges, but it is important to remember that your organisation is responsible for all existing pay disparities, even if they are unknown.
The absence of a solid job foundation or a clearly defined job and pay structure, combined with frequent management discretion in job creation and pay allocation, can make dealing with possible pay inequity much more difficult and can expose organisations to risk around non-compliance.
As organisations start to focus on pay equity, they are looking at their job architecture to support this. Many high-performing organisations are trying to get a better understanding of how jobs are placed within the organisation and mapping comparability of positions and titles.
A job architecture helps organisations consider and justify the relative importance and impact of job roles on the organisation. Roles are organised in the structure according to the nature of the work and skills required. This, in turn, influences the seniority and compensation level for the role.
With new business models requiring greater workplace flexibility, there has been some debate around how rigid your job architecture needs to be. However, not having one can lead to significant challenges around pay inequities and compliance complexity.
Leading employers are finding that, even if it’s just creating consistent titles or mapping levels to job titles, a basic job architecture sets the foundation for pay strategies, the pricing of jobs, salary decisions, and equitable pay practices.
With a job structure in place, pay equity analysis is made significantly easier - it is easier to look across the organisation and compare different roles to each other to see if there are any pay disparities. These can then be examined further, and actions taken to address any areas of concern.
With a job framework in place, organisations have a structure to share with leaders, managers, and employees that provides clarity on pay decisions and career levels. The job architecture gives more structure to decision-making around promotions and any associated salary rises. It removes the management discretion around jobs and pay and the resulting chaos that ensues.
Our key takeaways…
If you are getting pressure from your board to do something about pay equity, there are two questions to ask yourself:
How firm is your job architecture and job levelling foundation?
If it’s not in a good place then this is where you need to start. Focus on getting your jobs appropriately grouped, by titles and by level, then it becomes a lot easier to do your pay equity assessment after this initial work.
If your job architecture is in a good place, what mechanism do you have in place to govern this?
Proactive organisations are putting in place regular reviews to make sure their job framework and job families are still fit for purpose. This is particularly important with the unprecedented pace of change that organisations are now experiencing. McKinsey found that most organisations undertake a restructure on average every 3 years. Couple this with the day-to-day changes to how roles are executed, and the need for new jobs to be created in line with changing needs, job family structures will never and shouldn't ever remain static.
Utilise software to create a job architecture and help ensure pay equity
Many organisations are using technologies like RoleMapper to fast-track the process of job architecture creation and help analyse and maintain pay equity.
In December 2022, EU negotiators reached an agreement on a new directive, the EU pay transparency legislation to make salaries more transparent. The new rules will come into force twenty days after their publication in the EU Official Journal, and then member states will have three years to transpose these pay transparency requirements in their national law.
Following Brexit, the Directive will not apply in the UK. However, UK employers with European operations may want to ensure consistency of practice across their business.
The main aim of EU pay transparency legislation is to narrow the gender pay gap across the EU, where currently women earn on average 13% less than men per hour. There is, however, considerable variation between EU countries ranging from a gender pay gap of:
Less than 5%:
More than 18%:
In the UK, the gap among full-time employees increased to 8.3% in 2022, up from 7.7% in 2021. Although, this is still below the gap of 9% reported in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic.
When thinking about gender pay gaps, it is also important to consider the impact a salary pay gap can have on other aspects of overall compensation, such as pension provision. The EU currently has a gender pension gap of 30% between men and women.
The challenge for most organisations is not just how to keep up with the changes, but mechanisms and processes to ensure compliance globally
Pay transparency for job seekers
Employers will be required to provide information to job seekers about the initial pay level or the pay range of the role they are applying for. This could either be set out in the job advert, or provided in another way to jobseekers, before they reach the interview stage of the recruitment process.
Candidates cannot be asked about their pay history
Employers won’t be able to ask candidates what they are paid in their current role or what they have been paid for previous roles.
Employees will be able to request pay information
Employees will be able to request information from their employer, annually, regarding their individual pay level and the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value.
Pay setting and career progression
Employers must make easily accessible to workers a description of the gender-neutral criteria used to define pay levels and career progression.
It is also important to consider the impact a salary pay gap can have on other aspects of overall compensation. The EU currently has a gender pension gap of 30% between men and women.
Gender pay gap reporting
Employers with at least 100 employees will have to publish information on the pay gap between female and male workers. Employers with at least 250 employees will report every year, while employers with between 150 and 249 employees will report every three years.
As of five years after the transposition of the EU pay transparency legislation, employers with between 100 and 149 employees will also have to report every three years.
Pay assessment
Where pay reporting reveals a gender pay gap of at least 5%, and when the employer cannot justify the gap on basis of objective gender-neutral factors, employers will have to carry out a pay assessment, in co-operation with workers' representatives.
What is the evidence that pay transparency legislation has a positive impact on gender pay gaps?
In 2006, Denmark introduced pay transparency legislation for organisations over a certain size. Research showed that the impact of this legislation was a 7% reduction in the gender pay gap in the organisations included within the new rules. Further analysis showed that this reduction was primarily caused by a decrease in the wages of men rather than an increase in the wages of women.
Pay transparency legislation is being introduced all around the world. The challenge for most organisations is not just how to keep up with the changes, but how to put in mechanisms and processes to ensure compliance globally, managing increasing changes and the nuances of regional variations. For many companies, this now involves investing in technology to automate and integrate compliance and hiring specific DEI compliance experts to manage this process and protect the organisation against future issues.
Key actions for organisations:
Pay equity legislation requires employers to ensure “equal pay” for “equal work”
The UK Equality Act 2010 gives a woman the right to be paid the same as a man (and vice versa) when carrying out “equal work”
By law, 'equal work' counts as either:
Discrepancies in equal pay result in employers paying up to 6 years of back pay to every employee
Many grading and pay structures have evolved over time, which means it can be hard for managers to justify why one job is graded higher than another or paid more. If there is a difference in how jobs are paid, employers need to be able to demonstrate why. An inability to justify this delta can result in a pay equity claim.
If the employee succeeds in their equal pay discrimination claim, they are entitled to compensation consisting of back pay (if the claim is about pay) and/or damages (if the complaint is about some other contractual term).
Back pay can be awarded up to a maximum of six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland from the date that proceedings were filed with an employment tribunal.
In addition to back pay, employment tribunals may also award interest on the compensation and order that:
The most high-profile pay equity claims have been brought over the last 10 years against some of the UK’s largest supermarkets, including Asda, The Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Morrisons.
These claims assert that it is unfair that shop floor workers – who are mostly women – are paid less those employed in distribution centres – who are mainly men. If these claims are successful, they could result in up to £8 billion being paid out in back pay.
In the public sector, In 2019, Glasgow City Council agreed a package of payments worth more than £500 million to settle equal pay claims. These arose from a pay and conditions scheme introduced ten years earlier, which led to workers in female-dominated roles, such as catering or cleaning, receiving up to £3 an hour less than those in male-dominated areas such as refuse collection. Additional payments were also agreed in 2022 reaching a total of £770 million.
Pay equity audits and a structured job evaluation process can provide a defence against an equal value challenge, but….
As an initial step, many companies start with a pay equity audit (PEA) to ensure their organisation is paying employees fairly.
In simple terms, a pay equity audit involves comparing the pay of employees doing “like for like” work in an organisation and investigating the causes of any pay differences that cannot be justified. To determine the fair definition of “like for like” work, many organisations put in place a structured job evaluation process. Job evaluation is a method of determining on a systematic basis the relative importance of a number of different jobs, while avoiding prejudice or discrimination.
A well implemented and managed equal pay audit, and job evaluation process, can provide a ‘moment-in-time’ defence against an equal value challenge. But...Accurate, up-to-date job descriptions are critical to ensuring equal pay evaluations
Accurate, up-to-date job descriptions (or profiles) are critical to implementing and managing pay equity audits, job evaluation processes and ensuring you have unbiased effective pay and grading structures.
A job evaluation process appraises individual ‘factors’ of compensatory characteristics – such as skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Specific job descriptions (or profiles) are evaluated against these factors to determine a score and translate the role into a grading and compensation structure.
In a global organisation, job evaluation can be used to create globally consistent grades or bands which are immune from the influence of local currency fluctuations and also help ensure compliance with any local equal pay legislation.
…One of the biggest challenges is the state of an organisation’s job descriptions
The implementation and ongoing management of a job evaluation process, relies on an organisation having in place job descriptions (or profiles) that are accurate, up-to-date and an acceptable description to both the business and employees who sit in those roles.
As a quick aside, the naming convention (descriptions verses profiles) and the level of detail required in this document (high level versus local variations) is often a big topic of debate in organisations, we’ll share guidance on this in a later post. For the purpose of simplicity, we are using the term “job description” as a catch-all for all job documents, be they high level profiles or specific local variations.
Suffice to say, irrespective of the definition or level of detail of the content, this is one of the biggest challenges to the implementation and management of an effective pay equity audit and job evaluation process: the state of an organisation's job descriptions.
Here's what most organisations find when they lift the lid on their job descriptions:
The result of this “job description chaos” is an urgent need to review, update and cleanse the existing job structure and job catalogue. This is often an overwhelming task requiring stakeholders across multiple business areas and a considerable amount of time, effort and resources.
Keeping on top of your job data as your jobs and organisation changes is critical in keeping control of equal pay
Having invested the effort to define your job architecture and job catalog, you want to be able to govern how new roles are defined across the organisation to avoid recreating the chaos and risk that may have existed before.
McKinsey found that most organisations undertake re-structure on average every 3 years. Couple this with the day-to-day changes to how roles are executed and the need for new jobs to be created in line with changing needs, your job structure will never and should never remain static.
It is therefore essential to put a process in place to govern how new jobs are created and how existing jobs are updated on an on-going basis. However, this is where most organisations get stuck. Research shows that only 18 percent of organisations have proactive audit processes on maintaining their jobs
Without this governance, organisations risk recreating the chaos that may have existed before and exposing the organisation to risk of equal pay claims.
Job description software automates job governance and ongoing management, reducing future risk of equal pay claims
Innovative organisations are investing in technologies that help create, maintain, manage and govern their job architectures, catalogues and job description information to ensure that jobs and pay are fair, accurate and up-to-date.
de Novo Solutions, a leading provider of industry vertical solutions, digital transformation and business support services for both Oracle Cloud and ServiceNow applications, has today announced a further strategic partnership with RoleMapper, an award-winning AI-powered, job management and job description platform.
This move comes as more and more organisations are turning to skills-based hiring as their primary talent strategy in an effort to find more efficient ways to discover talent faster. Adopting a skills-based approach also has the potential to significantly impact an organisation’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
With debias and inclusion at its core, the RoleMapper platform allows organisations to fast track the creation, cleansing and ongoing management of job architectures, job catalogues and job descriptions. Powered by AI, RoleMapper transforms job data into a consistent, quality, future-focused, format, RoleMapper equips HR leaders with actionable intelligence, therefore enabling them to create, shape, and enrich their organisation’s culture and drive long-term business success.
This partnership will further strengthen de Novo's reputation for delivering on its promise to create value for its clients, allowing customers to benefit from the company's vast expertise, in-depth industry knowledge, and proven ability to hand-pick partners who provide the best for their customers.
Ian Carline, Chief Technology Officer at de Novo says,“RoleMapper is a clear market-leader in their field and exactly the type of organisation we look to partner with – organisations that do pioneering work by inventing new approaches to deliver extraordinary results. We look forward to working with the RoleMapper team moving forward and to bringing the benefits of its award-winning technology to our rapidly growing customer base.”
SaraHill, CEO, RoleMapper says: “In a world where organisations are facing significant skills challenges, increasing compliance requirements and continuous organisational transformation, de Novo has clearly identified that current approaches to managing jobs and job data are no longer fit for purpose. We are delighted to be partnering with de Novo to support how customers cleanse, update and manage job data and inclusive job descriptions -the fundamental building blocks of any workforce strategy.”
About de Novo
We are de Novo. The Experience Economy Consultancy. We create data-driven, personalised experiences over standardised business processes for the experience economy, providing organisations with valuable insights into their customers and employees.
It is our unique entrepreneurial background and diverse thinking that fundamentally differentiates ourselves from our competitors. We work across all industries, combining our experience as entrepreneurs, consultants and practitioners to deliver innovation and generate value for our clients through the power of Oracle SaaS Cloud and ServiceNow technologies.
We are a team of innovators, disruptors and straight-talkers, who are not afraid to challenge the status quo in order to support our clients in pioneering change in the fast-moving experience economy.
Excel in the digital world. Experience a different approach. Engage de Novo.
See how we're different: www.de-novo-solutions.com or email: contactdenovo@de-novo-solutions.com
#wearedenovo
About RoleMapper
RoleMapper is an award-winning, AI-powered platform that creates agile, inclusive and skills-based organisations by cleansing, updating and managing their job architecture and job data, as well as creating inclusive job descriptions - the fundamental building blocks of any workforce strategy.
Learn more about us at: www.rolemapper.tech
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.
About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle Partner Network(OPN) is Oracle’s partner program designed to help enable partners to accelerate the transition to cloud and help drive superior customer business outcomes. The OPN program allows partners to engage with Oracle through track(s) aligned to how they go to market: Cloud Build for partners that provide products or services built on or integrated with Oracle Cloud; CloudSell for partners that resell Oracle Cloud technology; Cloud Service for partners that implement, deploy and manage Oracle Cloud Services; and License & Hardware for partners that build, service or sell Oracle software licenses or hardware products. Customers may be able to expedite their business objectives with OPN partners who have achieved Expertise in a product family or cloud service. To learn more visit: https://www.oracle.com/partnernetwork.
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Contact Info
Michelle Clelland, Marketing Experience Lead, de Novo Solutions
michelle.clelland@de-novo-solutions.com
+44(0) 1633 492 042
Lisa Doherty, Marketing Manager, RoleMapper
lisa.doherty@rolemapper.tech
The practice of managing job architectures and job catalogs has, until recently, taken a bit of a back seat in the world of talent management, acting primarily as a tool for compensation teams to manage and govern pay and grading.
However, a combination of significant shifts in future of work strategies towards skills-based organizations, the move towards employee-centric self-serve models, the digitization of HR and increased equality legislation has catapulted the need for a simple, dynamic, skills-based job architecture and job catalog management into the epicentre of strategic workforce management.
A job architecture forms the building blocks of an organization, it sits at the heart of how you operationalize people strategies and powers your end-to-end talent management processes and systems.
Your job architecture and job catalog powers your talent management processes and systems.
Your job architecture provides a framework for mapping and cataloging the jobs into groups of job families that exist across your organization and how these are organized around levels of seniority and pay grades.
Underneath this job architecture sits your job catalog, a dynamic library of, what some organizations call job profiles, that describe the work outcomes and skills required to deliver the organizational, business area and team objectives.
In the past, organizations have put a lot of effort into creating and launching job architectures and job catalogs. But more often than not, this is a list of titles that sit in an HR system or on a spreadsheet with content describing roles that quickly go out-of-date.
Updating and governing the job catalog is a cumbersome, manual process, that slips to the bottom of the to-do list. The result is that job catalogs rarely reflect the actual work and skills that are required on the ground now or in the future. The result: organizations with traditional job architectures and job catalog content that is rigid and out-of-date and risk liability in today’s ever-changing, agile and increasingly compliance driven business environment.
Without good governance and dynamic management, old-fashioned job architectures can result in a chaotic proliferation of different job titles, many just slight variations of others. Josh Bersin uses BNY Mellon as an example. They found over 3,000 positions in their IT and Operations teams doing essentially the same roles, that, after a rigorous clean up, could be simply consolidated into 7-15 job families.
But why is this important?
Having an accurate, dynamic, job architecture and job catalog is more than just cleaning up an administrative headache, increasingly it’s become one of the most important strategic imperatives in the talent management ecosystem.
With the need to balance talent shortages with rapidly evolving skills requirements, identifying and building critical skills and competencies is at the top of the list of priorities for HR Leaders. There is an increasing focus on skills - re-skilling, upskilling, talent mobility and skills-based hiring.
Gartner predicts that over 30% of the skills that were present in an average job posting three years ago will soon be obsolete. There is also a wealth of research showing how the, conscious and unconscious, biases of Hiring Managers impact the accuracy of skills requirements included in job descriptions - we cover this subject in our guide Breaking Bias.
All these factors lead to a critical need for an accurate picture of your organization's skills landscape. A simple, dynamic job catalog will help you understand the current picture and will also help you dynamically plan for future skill requirements.
A job architecture and job catalog help you map out possible career paths and communicate these to employees, so they are clear about any training and development opportunities and possible routes around and up the organization.
A simple job architecture and job catalog enables employees to have clear visibility of roles and skills across the organization for possible roles in different teams and departments rather than simply focussing on movement within their current team. If you are investing in internal mobility or talent marketplace technologies, it's the job catalog content that feeds these technologies and powers the skills matching and career path mapping.
BNY Mellon found over 3,000 positions in their IT and Operations teams doing essentially the same roles, that, after a rigorous clean up, could be simply consolidated into 7-15 job families.
In most Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms, the job architecture powers the recruitment workflow. Job catalog content flows through to recruitment and provides the basis for shaping the external job posting. Without an accurate, up-to-date job catalog, HR, Hiring Managers and Recruiters can waste a significant amount of time updating job descriptions, or even worse post old, out-of-date job content that does not accurately reflect the role.
The ramifications of this are significant. In our guide, 6 steps to inclusive job descriptions, we describe the impact on diversity and inclusion. But the direct impact on the bottom line is also tangible. Research has shown a direct link between accurate job descriptions and attrition, with 43% of employees who leave within 90 days stating that their reason for leaving is that their day-to-day role wasn’t what they expected.
For organizations with an employee base of over 5000 and an attrition rate of 10%, the cost of inaccurate, out-of-date job descriptions can equate to an attrition cost of over $15m per year.
In summary, a simple, dynamic accurate job catalog will help you speed up recruitment, reduce attrition and increase diversity and inclusion in recruitment.
Pay transparency legislation is being introduced around the world, requiring organizations to be open about the compensation they provide for current and prospective employees. Chaotic and inconsistent job architectures can make complying with this legislation difficult. For example, would you be able to easily assess whether two Project Managers, who are essentially doing the same job, but in two different departments, are being compensated at the same level?
Out-of-date job architectures can also cause other compensation issues. Josh Bersin brings this pain to life in a Tech organization that had 65 different job levels. As a result, nobody would take a new position unless they got promoted to the next job level, causing enormous headaches.
The challenge for most organizations is not only how to keep up with these changes to the legislation, but how to put in mechanisms and processes to ensure compliance globally, as well as manage increasing changes and nuances of regional variations.
A simple, dynamic, future-proofed job architecture and job catalog enables you to have an up-to-date picture of the reality in your company to reach fair pay.
Cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) systems require that a job architecture and job catalog are in place before implementation. The mistake many companies make is simply loading in their existing job architecture and catalog which, as we've explained, are likely to be out-dated, rigid, and not fit for purpose.
The structure of your job architecture and the content of your job catalog powers various workflows from payroll to recruitment to skills matching.
Out-of-date or inaccurate job architecture and job catalog content will hinder the value you can get from your technology investment. Deloitte summarise the benefits of cleaning up your catalog prior to an HCM investment, citing: shorter overall implementation time, enhanced functionality, a higher level of system performance for processes such as workforce and succession planning and a stronger foundation.
In summary, updating your job architecture and job catalog is essential to get full value and maximum return on investment from your HCM system. Savvy organizations leverage the business change process with an HCM implementation to drive through job architecture and catalog updates, which will not only support the digitization of the organization, but will have all the wider benefits that we outline in this article.
A simple, dynamic accurate job catalog will help you speed up recruitment, reduce attrition and increase diversity and inclusion.
When two companies merge there is likely to be a mismatch in the way they describe jobs, how these jobs are organized in a hierarchy, the job levels and grades that they have in place and also their compensation and reward processes. What often happens is that everything is allowed to stay the same during the merger or acquisition process then this state of mismatch continues afterwards as no-one wants to take on the task of sorting it out.
Aligning two different job architectures through a manual process, involving multiple spreadsheets, can be laborious and time consuming, taking up to 18 months in some cases. However, if the old structures are kept, it can have many negative impacts, one being disgruntled employees. Why am I getting paid less than someone who has only recently been brought into the organization and is at a different job grade even though our job roles are essentially the same?
Having a simple, dynamic job architecture and job catalog in place enables you to rapidly map the roles in the acquired or merged organization to bring everything in line. It is even possible to do this during the deal process in order to map out the cost of transitioning employees over, as well as identify possible synergies and the potential benefits of the merger or acquisition.
What we often see in organizations is inconsistency between different parts of the organization – some with good job structures in place, others with nothing.This is particularly likely following high growth, lots of organizational change, multiple mergers or acquisitions. One consequence of this is that there is no governance over how new job share created – managers can create new roles with new job titles with no consequence or consistency.
An up-to-date, accurate and dynamic job architectures and job catalog content allows organizations to apply consistency and governance to their job creation process. Managers can use the job catalog to build their new roles within the agreed parameters of the process, helping to manage job scope creep and pay disparities. And ultimately ensuring you are not going back to the chaos and are dynamically building your jobs in a structured and consistent way.
About RoleMapper
RoleMapper is an AI-powered Job Management and Job Description Platform that enables you to:
Diversity and Inclusion has the ability to transform an organisation. Gender-diverse companies are 25% more likely to see above-average profitability, with ethnic-diverse organisations 36% more likely.
What matters is how an organization harnesses diversity, and whether it’s willing to reshape its power structure. Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas
But research has shown that progress is slow and this will only prove to get worse post-pandemic. Out of 1,000 large organisations surveyed, the representation of ethnic minorities on UK and US executive teams stood at only 13% in 2019, a growth of just 7% from 2014.
Using an example, just to put this in context; without change, companies in the US and UK won’t achieve gender parity in leadership for at least 24 – 29 years.
The business case for diversity and inclusion gets more compelling by the day, but global events and the pace of change means organisations need to be more agile, responsive and fleet of foot.
Building a case for diversity and inclusion
There are three core elements when it comes to building the business case for diversity.
There is strong evidence that increased diversity in organisations leads to greater innovation.
Scott Page, Professor of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, has looked at the link between team diversity and innovation and used mathematical modelling and case studies to demonstrate how diverse employees can produce organisational strength.
His key finding was that when teams comprise people with different perspectives and backgrounds, namely education, experience or identity, their collective intelligence is greater than that of homogeneous teams, even when these homogeneous teams are judged to be more capable.
“Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not”. Katherine Phillips, Columbia Business School
Where there are differences, each member of the team is more likely to anticipate, explore and evaluate different viewpoints. There is likely to be more discussion before reaching a consensus, which will take more time, but will ultimately be more beneficial in the long run, in terms of breadth of thinking, new ideas and organisational innovation.
Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average diversity on their management teams reported innovation revenue that was 19 percentage points higher than that of companies with below-average leadership diversity.
In their study they looked at the impact of six different diversity characteristics and found that some seemed more impactful than others. The most significant gains came from changing the makeup of the leadership team, such as the national origin of executives, the range of industry backgrounds, gender balance, and career paths.
Debiasing job descriptions, embedding flex and nurturing skills-based hiring are some critical ways to improve D&I.
An organisation with more diversity and inclusion can also result in more engaged, motivated and productive employees.
Research by Opportunity Now and Shapiro Consulting showed that when leaders are perceived by their teams as being inclusive, 84% of employees reported feeling more motivated, while 81% indicated it had a positive impact on their productivity. Organisations with high employee engagement levels report 3.9 times the earnings per share (EPS) growth rate compared to organisations with lower engagement in their same industry.
Hiring for diversity and inclusion is a real stumbling block for so many organisations that are currently restricting diversity through their recruitment processes.
According to a study by Harvard Business Review, there are around 27 million ‘hidden’ workers in the US alone. Untapped talent that wants to work but failing at the first part of the process. The reason why? Outdated algorithms that fail to be inclusive, as well as poor job descriptions.
It is estimated that there are more than 27 million ‘hidden’ workers in the United States alone. (HBR)
Summary
When building a case, it’s important to keep transformation front of mind, because in order to be a truly diverse organisation, change has to happen at the core.
Traditionally, diversity and inclusion often starts at the end of the hiring process with organisations looking for ‘quick fix’ with job ad copywriting tools, and, although these may attract diverse candidates it may not get them to interview.
To drive innovation, created a more productive environment and to tap into wider talent pools, it’s key organisations look at their job architecture and job descriptions. Are they doing what they should be doing? Are they fit for purpose? Are they agile and ready for future ways of working?
To learn more about driving inclusion at the core to help build a business case, book a demo or download our resources on creating inclusive cultures.
One impact of the global pandemic was an acceleration in the adoption of new technologies. HR tech was no exception, with many companies using the last two years to create process efficiencies, update old systems to boost productivity or implement new tools to help with their post-Covid recovery.
However, this rapid increase has also brought its own challenges. A survey by PwC found that 82% of organisations experienced problems with the adoption of new HR technologies. They concluded that most of these problems "can be linked back to planning phases that miss getting all the right people in the room to answer the right questions for change at scale".
It’s clear that, without solid foundations in place, integrating multiple HR technologies and building a tech stack can bring about more problems than it solves. Something we see time and again, is that if jobs aren’t fixed at the core or foundation, then it creates bigger and more complex challenges further down the integration process. Essentially, a sequence of chain reactions.
One key area to start is with your job architecture, which refers to the infrastructure or hierarchy of jobs within an organisation. It is an evolution of what used to be called job classification, which has now evolved beyond simply classifying jobs and encompasses job levels, job titles, job grades, how employees progress through careers and how they are rewarded.
Having a well-designed, comprehensive, job architecture framework gives organisations the agility to respond quickly to changes happening in the global economy.
Workplaces are evolving at a rapid pace. Technology is causing many skills to become obsolete, whilst simultaneously creating huge demands for others. Employees are seeking out flexibility and career progression – and are willing to move jobs regularly to achieve these. So much so, Grant Thornton found that 21% of Americans accepted a new job during the last 12 months and of these, 40% are already looking for another job.
Without solid foundations in place, integrating multiple HR technologies and building a tech stack can bring about more problems than it solves
A job architecture creates agility, consistency and transparency. It underpins all of the key HR processes that top priorities for organisations right now so you can:
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. Maintenance and governance of a manual process creates additional challenges.
RoleMapper provides you with the tools to manage the complexity of cleansing, transforming and governing your jobs and job architecture. Powered by the most recent advances in AI and language technology, we give you the agility to create a structured, up-to-date catalogues of all roles across your organisation.
Most of us would like to think that we’re not biased most of the time. We consider ourselves to be objective, fair-minded individuals.
However, the truth is that all of us are influenced by our biases; conscious biases that we are aware of and also unconscious, hidden biases that we have operating at an unconscious level in our brains, influencing the decisions we make about individuals.
Recruitment biases can impact many aspects of the recruitment process, such as:
In his book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia noted that the brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously. The unconscious brain handles the rest.
Without our unconscious processes, we wouldn’t be able to do everyday things successfully. To process all of this information, our unconscious brain makes shortcuts. However, these unconscious shortcuts our brain takes can lead us to make subjective judgements about people if we’re not careful – this is known as unconscious bias.
A popular definition of unconscious bias provided by Cornish and Jones (2013) defines unconscious bias as ‘a bias that we are unaware of, which happens outside our control’. It is a bias that happens automatically and is triggered by our brain making quick judgements and assessments of people and situations, and is influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences.
Unconscious bias happens automatically and is triggered by our brain making quick judgements and assessments of people and situations, influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences.
These biases are important because, even though we may be unaware of them, they can have a significant impact on the decisions we make. In particular, the people decisions that are made within organisations (e.g. who is recruited into organisations, who gets promoted in organisations and also who leaves organisations). In recruitment there are different kinds of bias that can affect our decision-making.
This is when we create a hypothesis in our minds and look for ways to prove it. It is the innate tendency to seek-out confirmation of our preconceived beliefs. For example, when interviewing you may form a distinct opinion about a candidate based on a small piece of information such as the school or university they attended.
At an unconscious level, you may be looking for information that confirms your original hypothesis. You may also ignore information that contradicts your initial hypothesis.
The Halo or Horns effect are terms often used to describe specifically how confirmatory bias can manifest itself in interviews. The "halo" effect occurs when an interviewer allows one strong point about the candidate to overshadow or have an effect on everything else.
For instance, knowing they used to work at a particular company might be viewed more favourably. Everything the applicant says during the interview is seen in this light. ("Well, she left out an important part of the answer to that question, but, she must know it, she used to work at X company).
The "horns" effect is just the opposite, allowing one weak point to influence everything else.
There are many ways that we can be primed about other people. We will receive second hand, third hand information from others, and this can lead us to make certain judgements about people based on this information rather than making a decision based on the objective information available.
Often we put too much weight on information from others without really thinking about the circumstances under which that information was received. Could it be that the impression someone made on an individual based on one interaction 5 years ago?
In social psychology, a stereotype is a thought that can be adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things. These thoughts or beliefs may or may not accurately reflect reality.
We use our stereotypes to make quick assumptions about people when we meet someone for the first time from a particular social group.
For example, at an unconscious level we might think: “women with children will miss a lot of work”; “a male candidate will make a better leader than a female candidate.”
This refers to our unconscious tendency to favour those who remind us of ourselves. This can result in hiring managers or recruiters favouring an employee because they are similar to themselves, rather than because they are the best person for the job.
The contrast effect is where we are influenced by the context or by the contrast with other individuals. For example, you interview a number of candidates in a day, but then you interview three weak candidates in a row.
As a result, you may think that the fourth candidate is better than they actually are due to the comparison with the three weaker candidates. This is why it is important to assess candidates against competencies rather than compare with each other.
We tend to be quick to form first impressions of people, and we tend to hold on to these first impressions and give them a lot of weight even when we receive subsequent information that contradicts our first impression.
We can therefore be biased by the first impression that a candidate makes, rather than looking at all the information that we have about the candidate.
This is one of the most common forms of bias in the recruitment process, as it affects how we assess other people. When we do something well, we tend to think it’s down to our own merit and personality.
When we do something badly, we tend to believe that our failing is down to external factors, like other people who adversely affected us and prevented us from doing our best.
However, when it comes to other people, we tend to think the opposite. If someone else has done something well we consider them lucky, and if they’ve done something badly we tend to think it’s due to their personality or bad behaviour.
We will downplay situational factors when explaining behaviour and over-emphasise personal characteristics, for example “I know it’s been a bad sales environment, but I think his poor performance was solely down to lack of effort.”
In-group bias, refers to a preference for one's in-group - a social group with which you associate yourself - over the out-group, or social group with which you don’t identify. Simply put, it refers to favouritism toward one's own group.
The concept is also known as in-group out-group bias. According to the in-group bias theory, such behaviour can be attributed to competition, wherein two groups vie for limited resources, or to circumstances wherein groups feel the need to prove their superiority.
In recruitment, this bias can mean that, at an unconscious level, you may make decisions which favour people from your in-group over those in your out-group, This could include viewing their CV more positively, or glossing over negative parts of an interview.
This bias may also impact how you behave towards people. We have a tendency to use micro-affirmations (small positive behaviours towards people such as nodding in agreement, maintaining eye contact) towards people in our in-group, and micro-aggressions (e.g. interrupting, not acknowledging the point someone’s made) towards people in our out-group.
If debiasing recruitment is key to your D&I strategies, RoleMapper can help. Why not get in touch for a demo and see how we can help drive inclusion at its core.
Identifying what flex works for your organisation can be fraught with complexities.
A solution that, on the surface, looks to be a win-win solution for your people and your business may not be quite as it seems when you start to look more closely. How teams define flex and hybrid may differ across the organisation. Not only that, but ensuring a fair and level playing field for all, without creating two-tier flex, is crucial for increasing diverse hires.
Taking all this into consideration, what is the most effective way to implement flex or hybrid working strategies across the enterprise? How do you create fair flex that is inclusive to all?
Our Future of Work series has been designed to help you navigate and better understand this way of working, ensuring your organisation adopts the right ways of working for your business and gets you future fit for the new world of work.
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Support for a four-day working week was gaining momentum before the pandemic.
Various companies were trialling versions of this working pattern and noticing impressive benefits in terms of productivity and wellbeing. However, recent events have put flexible working front and centre of every major company’s thinking. Organisations are now looking at a variety of different ways to increase flexibility, both in terms of time(when employees work) and location(where employees work).
The impact of covid and associated lockdowns has led many companies to focus on employee wellbeing and productivity, which, more often than not, includes the serious consideration of switching to working four days each week instead of the usual five. But what do we mean by the term four-day week?
We’ve found that if you read between the headlines, a four-day working week often means different things to different people. There are also many challenges related to making this change, which includes:
In order to achieve this, organisations need to focus on a sequence of key steps to making the four-day week a success:
STEP 1: Define the Case for Change
Make sure that you define the business case and your drivers for making this change (as these may be different).
STEP 2: Clarify your Definitions
Define what your organisation means by a four-day week.
STEP 3: Track and Measure Impact
Consider how you are going to measure the impact of a change to a four-day week.
STEP 4: Decide on an Implementation Approach
STEP 5: Take a long term view
Ensure that your approach to introducing this new way of working is led by systematic role design.
RoleMapper’s Future of Work modules allow you to design, integrate and implement sustainable, consistent and fair hybrid and flexible working practices, at scale.
We give your organisation the tools to:
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