1.2 Determining the number of grades in a structure.
Whichever structure is chosen, single graded, career family, or job family, the number of grades in each 'spine' of the structure needs to be determined.
At one end of the scale, each individual job can constitute its own grade, and this is common in pure-job evaluated salary administration systems. The other, unlikely extreme is for all jobs top be in a single grade.
In a pure-job evaluated salary system, each individual position's job evaluation points determine its salary (and range). [This is the individual job ranges structure. See Section 1.4 following for a more detailed discussion.]
To answer the question 'how many grades are required in a structure', one first needs to address the question of how to differentiate between jobs so that one can determine whether they do indeed fall into different groups. The process of differentiating jobs requires that they be ranked.
Three methods for ranking jobs are:
- Simple Ranking
- Classification
- Point Method
Simple ranking is neither qualitative nor quantitative. Classification methods allow qualitative
differentiation and the Point method allows quantitative differentiation.
1.2.1 Ranking.
This method relies on job descriptions or job titles for the positions to be ranked. Each job is considered as a whole and placed in a 'felt fair' rank order to produce a league table. It is considered the simplest method since there is no attempt to break down or analyse the job in any way. It is therefore easy to understand and implement, particularly with a small number of jobs. Two basic types of ranking can be used: Simple or Paired Comparison.
1.2.1a Simple Ranking.
This method is one of the easiest to administer. Jobs are compared to each other based on the overall worth of the job to the organisation. The 'worth' of a job is usually based on judgements of such as aspects of the job as skill, effort (physical and mental), responsibility (supervisory and fiscal), working conditions, and any others that the assessors deem relevant.
Advantages
- Simple.
- Very effective when there are a relatively few jobs to be evaluated (less than 30).
Disadvantages
- Difficult to administer as the number of jobs increases.
- Rank judgements are subjective.
- Since there is no standard used for comparison, new jobs would have to be compared with the existing jobs to determine its appropriate rank. In essence, the ranking process would have to be repeated each time that a new job is added to the organisation.
Copyright 2004 National Remuneration Centre, Melbourne.