The world of work is changing, but the existing HR infrastructures are often lagging behind. Many urgently need to be revised. The basics for work, career and remuneration can be reorganized and linked in six steps.
The world of work is changing, but the existing HR infrastructures are often lagging behind. Many urgently need to be revised. The basics for work, career and remuneration can be reorganized and linked in six steps.
Even before the pandemic, we were confronted with a diverse, continuously changing work reality. The challenges of the past few months have now proven to accelerate developments that had previously been announced. Nevertheless, in most companies the infrastructure with which work, career and remuneration are structured, organized and linked has remained at a somewhat outdated status. Even if the infrastructure is invisible, this will be painfully perceptible when it no longer functions properly in the face of a changed working environment and employees, executives, works councils and top managers stumble over it.
Why grading systems have to be rethought
The need to rethink the existing infrastructure results from two developments in particular:
Flexibility of work organization and personnel deployment: The pandemic has shown the importance of rapid adaptability and resilience to the survival and success of companies. Accelerated digitization, agile, customer-centered forms of work, flexible use of employees across functions, company areas and company boundaries, as well as continuous reskilling and upskilling of employees are inevitable here. Existing skills must be identified and assigned to the work to be done. Traditionally, this is done via permanent positions, but increasingly also via temporary activities, expanded areas of responsibility, projects or agile roles. To do this, we need an infrastructure that systematically takes into account the ongoing digitalization of work, structures work and positions in a meaningful way and links them with the required skills and abilities. In addition, it should make it possible to think and reward added value no longer just about the value or the evaluation of a position.
Remote working, self-determined forms of work and internal career mobility: In the past few months, employees and companies have gained experience working in the home office to a previously unthinkable extent, pragmatically and with a lot of goodwill. The experiences were often positive, which is why many companies want to stick to remote working. This will not only change the office landscape in the long term, it will also shift the roles of employees and managers towards greater autonomy and self-control among employees. This also applies to agile forms of work or new work. For successful self-management of their development and internal career mobility, employees need transparency and orientation as well as access to relevant information. What is needed is an intuitive one-stop career infrastructure in which employees, managers, self-organized teams, mentors, career coaches, etc., i.e. everyone who deals with the topic of “development”, can navigate independently, decentrally and on demand.
Six steps to modernizing work, career and compensation infrastructure
Usually, the three building blocks job evaluation, job architecture and (scaled or unscaled) competence model still exist independently of one another for different personnel applications, which is not very efficient, effective and user-friendly. But what do you do?
The linchpin for the review and further development of the infrastructure is the employee experience, the sum of the points of contact between employees and their company. The infrastructure should enable an optimal employee experience, which in turn benefits the company, as studies by Willis Towers Watson on the “High Performance Employee Experience” have impressively shown
(see also Personalmagazin 03/2020, “Hard facts instead of hot air”, page 76f).
You can further develop the infrastructure in your company in six steps:
Step one: analysis
Collect and analyze the existing infrastructure elements with a view to how well they fulfill their purpose: What is there already? What works? For which HR processes? Where is the problem? What is missing from the user’s point of view? What about the “user experience”?
Step two: roadmap
Define your infrastructure roadmap: What are the urgent requirements for employees and companies? What are the relevant applications (“use cases”) of the infrastructure? Which segments are particularly important (e.g. for digital jobs, the project career and for agile roles)? Which infrastructure elements need to be further developed (e.g. role profiles, assignment of skills and experiences, transparency about development focuses on positions or in roles, less granular career levels, contribution to the meaning or common good of the position, etc.)? Which networking (e.g. remuneration, career, workforce planning, organizational and job design) is critical to success?
Step three: prototype
Develop a prototype for the infrastructure as a common denominator for all employee groups – consisting of career bands and career levels (such as subject, leadership, project, process), job families, positions, roles, competencies, skills, etc. Let the “Employee Experience.” “Guide and consider user feedback in the various applications.
Step four: segment specific elaboration, testing and refinement
Specify the prototype for one (or two) success-critical segment (s) (e.g. digital roles, R&D) and develop career matrices for this segment together with the department. A career matrix makes it transparent how positions or tasks develop across different career stages (grades, levels) with a view to activities, requirements, scope of responsibility, contribution, competencies, skills, experiences, learning opportunities, career paths, meaningful next steps, etc.
Step five: bring it to life
Visualize, communicate and implement the career infrastructure and career matrices, ideally with the help of an interactive app or career platform.
Step six: roll out to other segments
Continue with other segments by repeating steps four and five for that segment, continuously taking into account user feedback.
If you make the infrastructure in your company for work, career and remuneration fit for the new world of work, you benefit indirectly from a high-performing, development-oriented and committed workforce. And that’s not only important in economically critical times.
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