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DO JOBS REALLY MATTER IN SALARY SURVEYS?

Written by Bianca Valencia on December 10, 2020. Posted in Resources.

Compensation professionals all use salary surveys as inputs into the management of salaries in their respective organizations. As we all know, surveys capture market data for benchmark jobs – representative positions that are commonly found across many employers – and this data is then used to inform about other (non-benchmark) roles.

As a survey provider for high-growth and developing markets, Birches Group is focused on countries with smaller markets, fewer employers, and a myriad of different jobs, often defined differently from employer to employer. In our surveys, we capture occupationally-specific data as a reference, because our clients demand it. But are these references really valid or meaningful? Below is an example from Côte d’Ivoire:

You can see that the range of pay provided by job family (green columns) closely matches the overall data at the 50^th percentile of the market (grey rectangle). The incumbent average data also varies a bit by job family, but clusters within the market range.

We would argue that fewer jobs might serve clients better. Here’s why.

Let’s suppose you hire three new staff this week – one in finance, one in marketing and one in engineering. All three are placed in the same salary band in your company, say band C. The starting salary for each is determined in accordance with your policy, and takes into account several factors, such as experience, education, past salary history and scarcity in the market. You might also consider internal equity and compression issues. In the end, all three individuals are successfully recruited and placed at three different salaries in band C, all within the lower half of the range.

Fast forward to the first pay review for the same three individuals. What factors are used to determine their pay movement? Performance? Budgets? Compa-ratio? Relationships with the boss and peers? Internal equity? Yes to all of these. Now how does their specific job role or occupation factor into the calculation? Not at all! You treat all the band C employees the same when applying your merit pay policy, don’t you?

Companies typically have generic pay bands. Jobs with comparable value to the organization are placed in the same band, regardless of occupation or role. Pay movement for individuals within the band is based on many factors, but it is company parameters and individual characteristics, not job or occupation, that determine pay progression.

If you agree with this conclusion, then what follows is even more important. The occupational differences reported by most surveys, while certainly interesting, do not actually mean that the reason for the difference is related to the occupation or the role. Rather, it illustrates that for any job, there is a range of compensation that varies according to individual circumstances.

Companies build their generic pay ranges by carefully selecting representative benchmark jobs across each job family. They look for multiple sources of data for each benchmark job and often create elaborate calculations, with weightings of various sorts, and using different percentiles of the market data, to establish the final going rate. This is then used to build a structure for all of the jobs at that grade in the company. By blending data into a single going rate, you are in effect, using generic data for your structure.

So, why not simplify your life, and use generic data to start with? Our grade averages report (other providers refer to them as level reports or roll-ups) provides all of the information you need to build a structure. Because all job data we collect is included, even those positions with insufficient data to be separately reported, the sample size is the largest and most reflective of the market practice.

Best of all, you no longer have to wring your hands about what to do if you cannot match enough specific jobs to the survey. As long as you know how the survey provider levels map to your internal grades, you’re good to go.

It’s time to rethink how surveys are conducted and used, and admit that false precision and complex processes are misleading and wasteful. De-emphasizing jobs is the first step. We will share more ideas in future articles.

Warren joined Birches Group in New York as a partner in 2007, following a long career in Compensation and Benefits at Colgate-Palmolive. He held the position of Director, International Compensation for 10 years immediately prior to joining Birches Group. Warren has broad experience working across the globe with clients on local national and expatriate compensation projects. He leads our Business Development and Client Services teams and manages our strategic partnerships around the world. Warren previously held leadership positions for the Expatriate Management Committee of the National Foreign Trade Council and was president of the Latin America Compensation and Benefits Forum.

BENCHMARKING REGIONAL ROLES: WHAT WORKS?

Written by Bianca Valencia on December 10, 2020. Posted in Resources.

More and more companies are consolidating operations into regional centers, using a base in one country to manage businesses in multiple markets. This makes good sense for several reasons:

Efficiency – regional offices eliminate duplicate resources and allow organizations to focus on customer-facing positions in smaller markets.
Expansion – a regional approach allows for gradual expansion into new markets, permitting “testing of the waters” before entering a market.
Local knowledge and expertise – staff in a regional center are usually familiar with more than one of the markets in the region, so can often help bridge market, language and cultural differences.

Regional offices sound like a great model for many companies. But how does a regional role impact compensation? This is a subject of considerable debate amongst compensation professionals.

Here’s my take:

Regional roles should be benchmarked against the market where they are physically located. So, a regional role based in Kenya, focused on East Africa, should be compared to the Kenyan market. Now, I know some of you would suggest I’ve got this wrong — you think a blended approach using data from multiple countries would be better. Why?

A blended approach could result in a lower number since lower-paying, less developed markets come into the mix. In the East Africa example, would you include Ethiopia? Rwanda? Tanzania? Uganda? Burundi? In Central America, would you look at data from all six countries for a position in El Salvador?

I believe a better approach is to use local market data for the regional office location. It’s usually the largest and most sophisticated market and typically has a more robust (but not necessarily the highest-paid) labor market. But how do you match regional jobs with local country roles? What if there are insufficient regional positions in your survey for a good measure of the market?

The simple solution is a regional “premium” which usually takes the form of an increased grade level. For example, in Kenya, if a country-based Brand Manager is an internal grade 8, a regional Brand Manager might be slotted as a grade 9. This reflects a premium for the regional role to compensate for added complexity, multiple market coverage, more customers, etc. You may debate if this is enough — that really depends on your business and how the jobs are actually structured.

This is a better approach because you end up using solid benchmarks to build your country market profile, and then overlay the regional jobs using mostly internal criteria. This makes sense because each organization structures their regional roles a bit differently, and none are really solid survey benchmarks.

Another point-of-view argues that a regional position competes for talent across many countries, so all of the countries are appropriate to consider in deciding on compensation levels. But, each country market is separate, impacted by multiple factors besides availability of talent. Consider standard of living, exchange rates, tax and social insurance differences and benefits, to name a few. It’s impossible to reconcile these factors into a truly blended regional pay rate, unless you are willing to just take the highest country as the starting point. Even if you could create a blend using multiple country data, there is a high likelihood that for more senior level professional roles, the sort that are usually regional, there won’t be clear benchmarks from every country of the region used in your blend.

One more issue to think about is how to treat foreign nationals in a regional office. Most regional offices will recruit nationals from neighboring countries. Are these incumbents expats, even if there is no possible role for them in their home country? Many will have previously migrated to the regional office headquarters and are then hired; will you provide any special benefits? How should expenses such as schooling be treated, especially if languages are different (for example, a Uruguayan in Brazil, or a French national in Germany)?

My view is “it depends.”

It depends on each unique situation, and sometimes it will be necessary to provide something extra. Generally, though, I would discourage treatment of locally-hired foreigners as expats, and even for those recruited from the region, a modified local-plus approach makes more sense for the company.

By now, you are probably thinking that this stuff is getting really complex. You’re right – this is a complicated subject. What is your experience managing pay for regional roles? What pitfalls have you encountered? What are your “better” ways?

WHY JOBS, NOT OBJECTIVES, MATTER WHEN MEASURING PERFORMANCE

Written by Bianca Valencia on December 10, 2020. Posted in Resources.

There is a lot being written about these days about the ineffectiveness of performance management. Some writers suggest that we just give up, throw in the towel and get rid of performance appraisals entirely. Others claim to have a better way. Many focus on the fact that performance discussions and feedback are actually more useful and more critical than the appraisal itself.

Of course, we also all know that even though appraisals can be difficult or tedious, they are necessary. All people need to know how they are doing, and they need to know this in a qualitative manner measured against well-understood, objective standards. Staff usually put great effort into their work. They need to know how their employer values this effort. To paraphrase New York’s famous ex-mayor, the late Ed Koch, they need to know “how they’re doing.”

The reason performance management is such a mess is because we are assessing the wrong things! We have made it into a pseudo-science, artificially dense and hopelessly complex.

In classic performance management, the employee develops a set of objectives, often aligned with corporate initiatives that are set at the top of the organization and cascaded down to all levels. Through these cascading objectives, employees focus on the critical activities which management believes will deliver the business results desired during that year. This approach fails to recognize that work is dynamic. Objectives change, become superseded, and new priorities emerge. Using cascading objectives for work planning has value, but as part of performance management it is highly flawed.

So how can the employee get a fair and useful evaluation? In many organizations, there will be some negotiation to remove unmet objectives and to substitute with tasks that actually got done. Companies spend inordinate amounts of time “calibrating” ratings in an attempt to promote some uniformity which in the end further undermines transparency and management accountability.

So what is the alternative?

Assess Performance Based on the Job

We think performance can be effectively measured by considering the job instead of the cascading objectives. Think about it. The context of the job defines expectations. These expectations remain constant through various operational challenges and changing priorities. You always expect your finance officer to ensure integrity in managing financial transactions. You always expect your brand manager to be seeking opportunities to promote your products and bring you market insights. These expectations have been designed into the job role. In each and every interaction, staff are judged against three simple measures:

Does this individual know what they are talking about?
Is this person listening to me and understanding my needs?
Can I count on this person to deliver to my expectations?

From the lowest position in the company through senior management, each and every day we are individually judged against these three basic parameters, which are informed by the job roles we encumber.

Here is a simple example:

Remember the last time you ate at a restaurant? There was a server who took your order, brought your food and looked after you from the moment you were seated until you finished your meal. You have no idea what objectives were agreed upon between the server and his or her manager. But I bet you have a very good idea of the server’s performance for your meal!

For example:

Were you greeting politely when seated?
Were the daily specials explained and were all of your questions about the menu choices answered efficiently and effectively?
Was you meal well-prepared and delivered promptly?

You get the idea. You can easily answer the above questions about your server at a restaurant. And if the answers were all yes, I think you’d agree that the server’s performance was excellent (be sure to leave a nice tip!).

We’ve assessed performance in this example based on our expectations of the job – the things good servers in restaurants are expected to do . Objectives are not needed because we know how to assess performance based on our expectations of performance for the job.

Performance can be measured against three factors – Purpose, Engagement and Delivery.

Think about our restaurant server again. The purpose of the job is to take your order, serve your food and maintain a high level of satisfaction through excellent customer service. For engagement, the server must communicate effectively with each customer, as well as the kitchen, busboys, and other restaurant staff, to ensure that everything goes well for your meal. Delivery is probably the easiest to understand – was the order delivered on a timely basis, accurately and in a way that makes the dining experience a pleasure for the customer?

The Birches Group Solution

At Birches Group, we’ve built our Community™ suite of applications around the three core factors of job evaluation – Purpose, Engagement and Delivery – mentioned above. Our Community™ Performance Management (PM) module uses the underlying job levels to create a consistent, graduated scale on which to rate performance based on the expectations of the job, rather than the completion of specific objectives. It’s a 360° approach which includes self-evaluation, manager assessment and feedback from peers and customers (internal and/or external to the organization).

The best part about Community™ PM is its simplicity. It is easy to use and takes just a few minutes to complete a review, but provides both employees and managers with robust feedback suitable for a meaningful performance discussion.

Let’s not give up so fast on performance appraisals. Instead, let’s try managing them differently.

We have — and it works! Contact us to learn more.

BASICS OF WORK WHITE PAPER

Written by Bianca Valencia on August 26, 2020. Posted in Featured, Resources.

Organizational design and job evaluation can be simple things to understand. By not focusing on the simple, clear and purposeful aspects of work, many HR “gurus” have made this simple starting point more complex than it needs to be. The result is staff and managers who are unclear about their purpose and role, which results in ineffective organizations. To clear things up, we need to go back to the basics.

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THE COMMUNITY PLATFORM

Written by Bianca Valencia on August 26, 2020. Posted in Featured, Resources.

Birches Group Community™ is an integrated talent management solution that’s simple to use and brings clarity around the value of work. We fuse job design and evaluation, compensation management, skills development, performance management and consulting to bring order to your business.

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LETS TALK ABOUT WORK – INTEGRATING HR

Written by Bianca Valencia on July 10, 2020. Posted in Resources.

Human resource management is more alchemy than science. The mysterious ways HR tries to blend policies and approaches to create an effective workforce usually has the same disappointing outcomes as Medieval conjurers had with trying to turn lead into gold. We at Birches Group think constantly about this challenge and why HR struggles to become more of an organized discipline.

The analogy of alchemy to the state of HR is particularly apt. Alchemy as a foundation of science existed across the planet and held sway for centuries. Only with the introduction of intellectual rigor and modern methods of scientific inquiry that relegated alchemy to its final resting place with astrology and magic. A large reason for the fall of alchemy: the rejection of ancient wisdom.

Many approaches to modern HR management similarly rest on broadly accepted notions that when examined with greater rigor simply do not hold up. Equally HR often just cannot see the self-evident, fundamental contradictions that are starkly present before our very eyes. A critical confusion reigns in HR’s (mis)understanding of jobs where it muddles the purpose of work (i.e. the focus of the job) with features of incumbency (i.e. the person in the job).

To bring rigor to HR it is necessary to bring clarity to the distinction between jobs and people. This may seem obvious but it is all too rarely found in most HR programs.

In Birches Group, our point of departure is that with clarity on job design all subsequent HR functions — from compensation setting through recognition and reward — can be well aligned and integrated. Without clarity on jobs all that follows is out of focus and usually stymied in effectiveness.

There are many approaches to job design and evaluation. Most of the classic approaches fail on two basic points:

the evaluation criteria include elements related to the person and not the job; and
the methodologies are dense making them inaccessible to non-HR managers, and therefore are not compelling or convincing to the rest of the organization.

However, the biggest weakness in conventional job design and evaluation is found in the information which is gathered about jobs themselves.

The job description in most organizations is a rather loathsome document. Managers hate writing them, often cutting and pasting rough fitting passages from other job descriptions. The result are descriptions of extreme inconsistency and questionable value either to support good job evaluation or as a founding document in support of other HR functions.

And it is of little wonder how this situation arises. HR gives managers little to no guidance about how to describe work. Little more than a blank piece of paper with possibly some identified boxes is provided. No briefing about the distinguishing features which define different job levels and how teams are formed are provided to managers.

Birches Group has pursued a different approach. Firstly, we have lifted the veil on job evaluation. No more pseudo-science of point-factor evaluation; No multiplicative factors which overlap and blend person-based characteristics with job elements. Simple and accessible is our mantra. All that is needed is all that we give. We use just three factors to illuminate distinctions in work, and organize work into four clear and complementary clusters of job levels. The components of team are readily available for managers to understand how teams are formed.

And as for job descriptions? Yes, we have developed a simple methodology which uses just six functional statements, no more or less, linking job design to the underlying factors which distinguishes its level. Using this approach, managers are free to craft jobs with clarity which are compelling for staff and consistent for the organization.

Getting job design right is just the first step in making HR a rigorous discipline. What makes our methodology radical is we have not stopped here. The principles and tools which support job design and evaluation in Birches Group have been refined and adapted to form the foundation for all following HR functions. Rather than the disjointed disconnect that generally prevails in HR between structural policies (those governing jobs and pay) from people management policies (those which guide recruitment, development, and reward), our approach is seamlessly connected. We start with jobs and really, where else would you start? Jobs are at the foundation of every organization. It is the conversion of mission into action. That is why it needs to be done right. The simplicity of our approach, our methodology, positions HR to partner with the business function by demonstrating a true role in building an effective workforce. Only HR can undertake this role, it’s about time we start.

Gary is the founding and managing Partner of Birches Group. He has worked in the areas of organization design and compensation management for over forty years. Following a career with the United Nations, Gary has led the Birches Group consulting practice working with many leading international organizations in over 100 countries. Gary has pioneered a new simpler way to integrate job design with skills and performance through Birches Group’s Community™ platform. He is recognized as a global expert on job theory and design delivering workshops and lectures around the world

IT STARTS WITH JOBS

Written by Bianca Valencia on July 10, 2020. Posted in Resources.

The Birches Group solution for job evaluation is Community™ Jobs. In a prior article, we explained a bit more about our integrated approach to HR management through the Community™ platform. In this article, we will delve more deeply into how organizations establish their internal structure, and how to measure it.

Community™ Jobs is intuitive. It segments the workforce into groupings of jobs that are clearly distinguishable from one another in a progressive manner, zeroing in on the placement of jobs step by step.

The How and The Why

The first step is to determine into which of two categories a job falls:

The How and The Why

This division of an organization can be traced back to the military. The Roman Army was the first large organization where roles were arrayed according to rank: the enlisted (“How” jobs) and officers (“Why” jobs). These military structures have been adapted by private and government institutions over time, and while they certainly have evolved a lot since Roman times, the fundamentals are still the same.

The two categories are complementary:

Why jobs focus on managing and leading the organization, and the origination and delivery of policies, products, and programs.
How jobs focus on executing processes and transactions, including quality control, under predetermined guidelines.

Let’s take a closer look.

The Community of Work – The Four Job Clusters

Within the categories of How and Why, we have identified two clusters of related jobs within each group, as shown in the diagram below:

Job levels found within each of the job clusters defined above possess similar characteristics based on their purpose and contribution toward the organization’s mission.

Fourteen Job Levels

Once jobs have been classified into their appropriate clusters, using the three job evaluation factors of Community™ – Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery – it becomes possible to finally evaluate jobs, level by level, into Birches Group’s fourteen Community™ job levels.

Beginning with physical or manual roles at BG-1 under the General cluster, all the way to organizational leadership at BG-14 in the Leadership cluster, the fourteen Community™ job levels can easily be adapted and used to determine equivalent worth amongst jobs in any organization. The table below shows the values for each factor by level.

When an organization’s jobs have been aligned to the fourteen Community™ job levels, a foundation is established to easily ensure internal equity, measure market competitiveness on pay, assess skill level among staff and manage performance evaluation, using the integrated Community system™.

To learn more about Community™ and how it can support your organization, contact us.

Bianca manages our Marketing Team in Manila. She crafts messaging around Community™ concepts and develops promotional campaigns answering why Community™ should be each organization’s preferred solution, focusing on its simplicity and integrated approach. She has held various roles within Birches Group since 2009, starting as a Compensation Analyst and worked her way to Compensation Team Lead, and Training Program Services Manager. In addition to her current role in marketing and communications, she represents Birches Group in international HR conferences with private sector audiences.

JUST THREE THINGS: HOW PURPOSE, ENGAGEMENT, & DELIVERY CAN BE USED TO UNDERSTAND YOUR ORGANIZATION AND SUPPORT YOUR HR PROGRAMS

Written by Bianca Valencia on June 19, 2020. Posted in Resources.

In our work with hundreds of organizations, many apply long-standing, well-accepted approaches for the management of human resources. The HR function is steeped in traditional methods and so-called best practices for everything from job evaluation and compensation management to performance management. At Birches Group, we believe for organizations to innovate and thrive, they must be willing to try new things. Our Community™ Jobs approach provides a fresh perspective on one of the most misunderstood areas of human resources – job design and evaluation. Good job design and clear job evaluation are critical to fully support all other programs in HR.

How Community™ Jobs is Different

Job evaluation is traditionally a highly technical area of HR, reserved for the “job evaluation high priests” to compile results and share with the organization. Usually, job evaluation systems are complex and hard to understand, using many different factors to determine results.

Birches Group built Community™ Jobs to be simple and transparent, and easily understood by HR, managers and yes, even staff. We also believe that job evaluation forms the fundamental underpinning of everything HR does – from compensation and recruitment to development and performance. Every area of HR is impacted by job evaluation and job levels.

Just Three Things

Community™ uses three factors to assess work: Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery, across fourteen job levels, as shown in the diagram below:

The primary factor is Purpose, which answers the most critical question: why does this job exist in the organization? Purpose enables us to examine each role within the organization and determine its primary objectives and how it supports the overall mission of the organization.

The second factor of Community™ Jobs is Engagement, identifying how each job interacts and collaborates with internal and external stakeholders to carry out its function.

Delivery, the third factor of Community™ Jobs, examines how each role plans, organizes and delivers work to fulfill the organization’s mission. It focuses on how a job manages tasks, transactions, services, projects, or programs under its purview.

The three Community™ factors taken together allow us to understand how an organization conducts business across all levels of work, starting with defining the purpose of its jobs, determining their level of engagement, and examining how each of its roles organizes and delivers service.

The Six Indicators

For each of the three job evaluation factors, we have identified two indicators to connect the job directly to the skills and knowledge required for success:

Each of these indicators is used in applying the Community™ Jobs evaluation methodology. But importantly, the same criteria are also used to develop standards in the other modules of Community™. Community™ Skills allows organizations to measure experience explicitly by evaluating an employee’s accumulation of skills and knowledge over time. Community™ Performance provides a standard for measuring achievement by considering how employees have performed against the standard established for their job level.

Job Evaluation in Action

What are some examples of how job evaluation results (job grades or levels) can be used in other areas of human resources? Here are just a few:

Job descriptions. One of the most unstructured and tedious task managers face is writing job descriptions. And most of the time, they are just a listing of tasks and inputs. Birches Group believes job descriptions should be purpose-driven, output-focused and written from the perspective of what the job must deliver. Our approach for job description writing uses the job evaluation factors and indicators as a basis to describe duties and responsibilities. Best of all, no job description will ever exceed one page!

Salary bench-marking. We use Community™ Jobs as the job evaluation methodology when conducting our salary surveys in over 150 countries. Every employer’s jobs are matched to a Birches Group level, enabling a consistent and fair comparison to jobs in the market with similar levels of contribution to the organization.
Salary management. Organizations use job grades to build salary structures, which in turn provide managers with tools to optimize the organization’s competitive position and ensure high levels of employee engagement.
Skills assessment. Managers will often say that employees with more experience should be paid more. But there is no standard for measuring experience other than time, until now. Using the Birches Group Community™ job levels, we have developed explicit measures for each job evaluation indicator, arrayed over five separate skill levels. This skills assessment tool can be used for multiple purposes, including pay management, learning and development planning, succession planning, promotion readiness, and ensuring unbiased application of starting salaries, to name a few.

Performance management. The same three factors used for job evaluation – purpose, engagement, and delivery – can be used to measure achievement. For example:

Purpose – Does the employee have good ideas?

Engagement – Did they listen and adapt to customer feedback?

Delivery – Did they deliver on time with high levels of quality?

Community™ Performance has a structured approach to measuring achievement by linking back to the job evaluation factors.

By focusing on the Community™ Jobs factors — Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery — managing all areas of HR is now possible using a simple, consistent, and integrated approach.

INTRODUCING COMMUNITY™ – INTEGRATED HR MANAGEMENT FOR ANY ORGANIZATION

Written by Bianca Valencia on June 17, 2020. Posted in Resources.

As the human resources function has improved and modernized over the years, a lot of positive changes have resulted. HR in many organizations is now a respected partner to business leaders, and increasingly are being asked to provide strategic insights about the overall people management for the organization. In most HR departments of any size, there is usually a “hard side” – job evaluation, compensation, benefits, etc. – and a “soft side” – recruitment, learning and development, succession planning, and performance management. These two sides of HR are often managed separately and from totally different perspectives.

And that’s a problem!

While some argue this arrangement has worked in their organizations, what they don’t realize is this disconnect between the hard side and the soft side of HR has led to many of the issues organizations face today – poor job alignment, loose enforcement of compensation policies, and how reward and recognition are often confused with each other.

For the longest time, organizations have managed these areas separately, patching together using different tools built on different methodologies. How can we expect HR to provide a clear base of policies if their own approaches are not aligned and don’t even use common standards?

Community™ – HR Management Integrated

Community™ is Birches Group’s methodology and platform that integrates critical areas of human resources: job design and evaluation, compensation management, skills measurement, and performance management. Community™ uses a simple, clear, and consistent approach across all areas of HR, and the key is Jobs.

We provide a robust and powerful job evaluation system, Community™ Jobs. It is designed to focus not only on the nature of work and its value, but also connect the purpose of each job to the fundamental skills required for the role and the corresponding metrics that define its success. The job levels defined using Community™ Jobs extend the job levels into all other areas of HR – compensation and benefits, individual skills assessment, and performance management.

Organizations using Community™ are able to integrate the key areas of their HR program and achieve better workforce engagement. When participating in salary surveys, performing market analysis is easy because all job levels are mapped to Birches Group’s Community™ levels, which serve as the common standard across all comparators. Community™ Skills makes it easy for managers to assess the accumulated skills and knowledge of their staff using explicit criteria outlined across five skills stages, anchored to the Community™ job levels. This enables companies to understand the capacity of their workforce and provide focused learning and development to build capacity for the future.

And finally, performance management becomes a seamless process because using the Community™ job levels to evaluate employee achievement by considering what outputs are expected for the job. A 360-degree approach is used to capture the perspectives of the employee, the manager, and peers with whom the employee interacts, inside and outside the organization.

Community™ Solutions

Birches Group’s Community™ platform offers four solutions – Jobs, Market, Skills, and Performance, all integrated into one intuitive platform. Jobs and Market define the structural elements of an organization, while Skills and Performance focus on the organization’s people and capacity.

Organizations can enter the Community™ system through any of its solutions depending on their needs. Using Community™, organizations can start by defining jobs and job structures, and use these to ensure a competitive market position. Skills provides a mechanism to measure individual capacity, and can be used for setting individual pay, learning and development and more. Performance is focused on how the achievements of individual staff are measured and rewarded.

Through Community™, our clients have access to an integrated solution that aligns both structure and capacity using one simple approach. It closes the gap that many systems have failed to address, bridging the hard side with the soft side of human resources.

LET’S TALK ABOUT WORK: THE FUTURE OF WORK

Written by Bianca Valencia on June 17, 2020. Posted in Resources.

The Future of Work

Nowadays the HR community often finds itself in the midst of a whirlwind. There is almost no end to the articles, conversations, and learned prognostications about the future of work. By all accounts, it seems we stand on the precipice of a new world which will be vastly different from the world of work in which we all labored at the end of the twentieth century. The revolutionary changes which are just beyond our horizon are expected to either herald the long-awaited man-made utopia where we are freed of mindless repetitive tasks or the frightening dystopia where we are reduced to characters best depicted in Disney’s Wall-e.

As all this swirls around us, managers and staff are often looking to HR to provide some guidance, some safe path that will get us to and through this uncertain future while magically sparing most of us from little more than having our hair mussed. Within the HR community, we are generally dumbfounded. We just don’t know what to do since we simply do not know what to expect! We have all seen in the past twenty to thirty years the gradual disappearance of many classic office positions and occupations which fifty years ago formed the backbone of office functions. Stenographers, switchboard operators and typing pools have gone the way of blacksmiths and bridle makers. So, we labor on and for most of us, we will deal with the future when it gets here. It is not that we are confident that we can confront the challenges; it’s just that thinking about them makes our heads hurt, so we would just rather not.

Understand the Future by Remembering the Past

There is no point in being either Pollyannish or morose about the future. As with most things regarding the future, insight into the future of work can be gained by taking a few steps back and looking at what has happened at similar crossroads we encountered in the past. This is not the first revolution. The current challenge is often referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, and it is said that the changes which are coming will be unlike any past transition. Yes, technological change can be very intimidating, but to assert that what is coming will be disruptive in a manner far exceeding past transitions isn’t quite right. The changes in society that came in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth represented a massive shift in so many industries that the transformation which occurred touched every life on the planet. In the space of twenty to thirty years, ocean travel was transformed from wood and canvas to steal and steam. As a result, it enabled not only faster and larger forms of transport, it supported the massive waves of migration which defined this period. With trains and cars, the millennia dependence on horsepower disappeared. As a result, farms, which were the “gas stations” of the day concentrating on the production of fodder, shifted to growing a wider range of crops for human consumption, lowering food costs and supporting a population shift to urban centers.

The electrification of cities and factories not only spurred new methods of working, it transformed lives in unimaginable ways. Inventions such as refrigeration (have you seen your iceman lately?) and the creation of modern sanitation and high-rise elevators literally enabled the cities we know today. Air travel, radio and television were just a few years further on in the transformation of how we work and live.

Through all of these changes, the simultaneous destruction of old jobs and creation of new ones took place at a dizzying pace. Another important change occurred that fundamentally redefined how we work. Time began to matter. Before travel in steamships and trains, it was not possible to accurately determine the time it would take to travel between two cities. With the invention of the steam engine and all that followed, schedules could be devised, and our lives more closely governed by the ticking of the clock. Time standards were developed in the 1880’s to bring order to the mess created by railroads, which each set their own time.

Time measurement combined with the development of more modern methods of production such as the assembly line transformed how we defined work from the effort to produce a finished product to a series of inputs that together make up the process that results in a finished product. Moving from outputs — being paid for what we produce – to becoming a provider of one of many of inputs which contribute to production – led to the restructuring of work and reward. Salaries were born. We would not be paid for what we produced, but for the time we spent at work, molting into the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday definition of work.

The Next Revolution is Upon Us

What scares many of us today is the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday construct is crumbling before our eyes. How can we value contribution if not through the measurement of time? The answer to this question also lies in our past. It is to focus on the outputs we create and not how long we spend making them. Returning to an output-based foundation for defining work is not an easy transition. Our minds and behaviors have been so conditioned and regimented by the clock that we fear without a time-based approach we will be exploited and find ourselves continually at work. Conversely, the promise of focusing on outputs can liberate us from a daily regimen and provide us true recognition for what we actually accomplish.

This is the challenge that lies before us: Can we transform our thinking and concepts of work that are only slightly more than 100 years old to enable a return to a view of work that prevailed for millennia before that focused on true value? Our only certainty is that how we work in the coming years will bear little resemblance to the man in the gray flannel suit that so colors our subconscious.

In our next blog on Let’s Talk about Work, we will examine how the new world of work is emerging and how human resources can help lead organizations through the changes that are upon us. To map this path forward, all we need to bring is an open mind, and perhaps to let go of some time-worn notions. It has been done before; after all, who ever thought humans could fly… until we did!