What are the Benefits of Job Transformation?

Many local authorities are looking to transform how jobs are created, structured and governed. We explore the impact it can have on an organisation.

Jobs sit at the heart of delivering the changes required to support improvements in customer experience. How they are designed is critical to harnessing talent and skills across organisations and systems, ensuring inclusion, accessing talent, developing people and planning for the future.

The way jobs are currently organised and managed across many local authorities is a blocker to change. So much so, that, according to EY, “governments won’t be able to provide a 21st century citizen experience and better citizen outcomes with 20th century skills and working practices”.

Across many local authorities, the current process for creating, organising and governing jobs is manual, inefficient, inaccurate, resource-intensive and poor quality, and why the need for job transformation is so critical for delivering a 21^st century service.

For all local authorities, embarking on a job transformation project of whatever size can bring many benefits.

HR Systems & Processes

HCM systems require accurate job structures and job titles in place before implementation. The mistake many organisations make is simply loading in what exists already, which is likely to be outdated, rigid, and not fit for purpose. If jobs are not organised and up to date, this will hinder the value organisations can get from their technology investment.

Recruitment

For most HCM platforms, the job structure powers the recruitment workflow. If there isn’t a clear structure in place for jobs, and a central repository for job descriptions, HR, Hiring Managers and Recruiters can waste a significant amount of time writing duplicate content or using out-of-date job descriptions that don’t accurately reflect the role.

Compensation & Benefits

One of the main uses of a job framework or job architecture is to provide a framework for managing pay and reward. A job levelling process can be used to assess the relative value of jobs in the organisation and to put in place compensation parameters for each job level. This helps ensure a consistent approach across job functions and helps with pay equity reporting and analysis.

Legal and Compliance Reporting

With increasing pay equity legislation being introduced, along with the requirement to report on equitable pay practices, an accurate job framework is fast becoming a critical tool for local authorities to implement, monitor and govern pay equity strategies. With a job structure in place, pay equity analysis is made significantly easier, removing the management discretion around jobs and pay.

Inclusion and Flexible Working

How jobs are described in a job description can have a significant impact on the diversity of talent we can attract, recruit, retain and progress. If job descriptions are thrown together and then reused repeatedly, they are likely to reduce the diversity of applicants. In contrast, a well-written job description, with a focus on inclusion and the essential skills needed for the role, can greatly increase the diversity of candidates who apply for that role.

In our guide, Six Steps to Inclusive Job Descriptions, we describe the impact this can have on diversity and inclusion.

Objectives & Performance Management

Having accurate up-to-date job content is critical to objective setting and performance management. When this is working well, job content flows seamlessly from the recruitment process to the performance management process. If job content isn’t accurate, and doesn’t reflect the realities of a role, this can lead to employee attrition.

Research has shown a direct link between accurate job descriptions and attrition; 43% of employees who leave within 90 days state the reason for leaving is that their day-to-day role wasn’t what they expected.

Learning & Development

Many organisations are moving to a skills-based approach and redesigning their operating models and strategies to have skills at their core. This enables them to become more agile, to have higher levels of employee engagement, to encourage innovation and to show faster rates of growth.

Career Paths & Succession Planning

A clear, streamlined job structure helps an organisation map out possible career paths and communicate these to employees, so they can be informed about any training and development opportunities and see possible routes up and around the organisation.

Employees will have clear visibility of roles across the organisation and can identify possible roles in different teams and departments rather than simply focusing on movement within their current team.

Workforce Planning & Analytics

Planning your workforce around the skills that are needed now and in the future is a critical task that all local authorities need to undertake. EY suggests seven steps for a public sector focussed workforce planning strategy, to identify the skills that an organisation requires and to plan a workforce around these:

• Define and articulate a purpose-driven vision of the future
• Define the organisational structure and transformation strategy
• Review the capacity and capability of the current workforce
• Evaluate short, medium and long-term workforce needs
• Model any projected workforce gaps.
• Fill any gaps by upskilling and re-skilling, bringing in external talent or allocating scarce resources across different departments and agencies
• Continue to assess the impact of emerging technologies, plot “technology disruption curves,” and continually recast existing roles and create new ones.

All of these steps are made easier by having a robust, future-focused job titling framework and job structure.

Organisational Change

Traditional ways of working have been replaced with digital transformation happening across the public and private sector. Those using public services have very different expectations about how they access services now, compared to five or ten years ago.

These changes can make it difficult for local authorities to keep their job content up to date and reflect the realities of the jobs that people are undertaking. Digitising and centralising job content makes this process much easier, as changes can be made quickly and easily to the job content or an update to multiple job roles is required.

Where to start

It can be difficult to know where to start with a job transformation. When faced with a chaotic picture of multiple job titles across various business areas and regions, the response can be to put this task into the “too hard” box and delay it for another year, in the hope it sorts itself out. However, this can create issues, open organisations vulnerable to compliance risk or slow down strategic people initiatives.

As a starting point for any organisation, technology can fast-track the harmonisation of your organisation’s job titles, reducing the process from years or months to just weeks, giving you the scope to start transforming jobs across your council or local authority.