Clover Consultancy

This successful environmental consultancy with a specialism around rivers and wetland management had been growing steadily for 25 years, but now potential permanent employee numbers would soon be approaching three figures and with that growth, it was becoming clear that certain HR approaches were no longer sustainable.

One big area where it was necessary to be less ad-hoc was around salary decisions.  When a vacancy needed to be advertised, or a job offer made, it was starting from first principles each time, with no structure to rely on.  Ultimately, this could lead to offers being set at what was necessary to convince someone to join the business.  Out of this approach, the following concerns were identified:

• A fear that some new starters had been overpaid, especially with no evidence on hiring of their actual performance level. 
•  Alternatively, potentially advertised salary levels had not been set high enough for some vacancies to attract good candidates.
• New starters with a pay advantage over longstanding employees could be leading to demotivation and attrition.

In addition, at the senior management level, there was a concern around a lack of clear career ladders and the ability to demonstrate to employees routeways for career development away from the obvious move into their boss’s shoes.  There was also a recognition that any inconsistencies in salary might need to be defended in an equal value claim situation and this would be difficult with current practices.

This organisation was using Clover HR for general HR support of its existing very small HR team and they came for advice as to options on how to handle this situation.

Within the resources available to Clover was an Associate who amongst a breadth of experience had a number of years with a reward/compensation specialism, who had gained prior experience of job evaluation, had introduced job grades into businesses in a similar position and had been trained in the use of one of the most common and validated job evaluation systems(Hay).

Clover mapped out a project plan that covered different options around developing gradable role descriptions looking at: how much could be handled in house, how much  external resources were required, the impact on timelines and budgeted cost and how much knowledge transfer would occur to the existing HR team.

This ultimately led to an agreed maximum budget of 20 days of consultancy support.

This Associate was able to coach the HR Manager in the environmental consultancy on how to develop gradable role descriptions for the positions in the business. This required a new template.

Job descriptions had been developed previously in the business, but as with many organisations, they were often a list of tasks that reflected either the doer’s view or their manager’s, but not necessarily a jointly agreed view of actual reality.

Often there would be vagueness around areas of responsibility such that three layers in the organisation might all be stated as doing the same thing, in the same words.  It was not clear who actually did what and who actually took decisions and had real responsibility.  It was also necessary to know what knowledge (”Know-How”) was necessary to do the job and what was just “nice”.  The reality of the problems that needed to be solved within each job role could not be seen in the existing role descriptions.

Having established a template to hold the necessary information, the Clover Associate and the local HR Manager worked together to get them populated and importantly recognised by the job holders and their managers that they were a true reflection of the role.  This would ensure that in turn, they accepted the points generated after scoring also as a true reflection.

The Clover Associate, then reviewed each role description, asking questions as necessary to achieve clarity and consistent quality.  They were then point scored under the Hay System.

This in turn then allowed for the development of a proposal for which roles could be grouped together into fairly wide cross-functional grade bands.  At this point it was necessary to review outliers/anomalies – those roles where their Hay Points suggested they should be in one grade band but their current salary suggested a different one. Obviously, this could then go either way, it could suggest a misunderstanding in the grading based around the write up of the role, or it could show roles that had been underpaid/overpaid in the past and would need action to be taken quickly.

The final stage in terms of what had been agreed upfront was then to access competitive/market data and develop suggested salary bands and how the results of the work could be communicated.  Clearly, employees in the organisation would not just want to hear about what points their job had gained, they would need to know their relativities to others and how this related to their salary now and potential for the future.

This foundational work on proposed salary bands was put into a presentation to be sold to the senior management level of the business so that following sign off, it, in turn, could then be communicated out to all employees.  It was put to immediate use ahead of this to set pay levels for advertising some immediate vacancies and handling some individual employee pay concerns.

As a supplementary request, options were also provided for how annual salary progression could be handled within those ranges.  The environmental consultancy itself was also able to use the information provided to link to some in-house work surrounding competencies.  The project concluded at that point, within predicted budget and having provided a much stronger foundation for the business to make its salary decisions.