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.
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."
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.
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