Why Job Evaluation Won't Go Away

Job evaluation continues to be an important topic in compensation, long after many compensation experts decided to ignore its existence to pursue more exciting and "hot" topics like incentive pay.  The truth is, however, that job evaluation exists, formally or informally, in every organization that pays employees wages or salaries.  Since beginning an informal series of posts on job evaluation here, I have noticed that these are some of the most widely viewed on the blog - further evidence that the topic remains relevant and of interest.  Or, as another (Dan Purushotham, Ph.D., on the WorldatWork website) has put it so well-

As long as there is work to do, there will be a need to establish the worth of work.  And as long as human beings do this work, there will be a need to establish the relative worth of this work.            

Comments

[Frank Giancola]

Ann,

This research confirms your position:

In 1997, 219 WorldatWork members, who are mostly compensation professionals, were contacted to learn more about new work patterns and pay practices in their organizations. The survey, ‘‘The Jobless Organization:
Survey of the Impact of New Job Design on compensation,’’ was focused on large organizations in
the private sector that were not heavily unionized. The researchers
concluded that, contrary to the report’s title, traditional jobs have
not disappeared, and went on to say that more than 80 percent of the surveyed firms still have traditional job evaluation programs and fewer than 15 percent made adjustments to these programs to take into account the nature of revised work, such as hybrid jobs, team jobs, or skill-based pay jobs.

The 2003 Survey of Compensation
Policies and Practices, completed by 1,226 WorldatWork members,
found that 96 percent still use some form of job evaluation, causing the
researchers to note that contrary to some contemporary literature, job evaluation is very much alive and well in organizations.

Frank


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AB- Thanks for sharing the research results - very interesting. It seems, perhaps, that the reason job evaluation appears to be here to stay is that the notion of a job continues to be the most relevant way in which to consider human work. I remain open to considering other possibilities, but have yet to see another concept that works well enough to threaten the primacy of jobs.

[Frank Giancola]

I came to the same conclusion in a recent article:

For over 35 years, compensation
professionals have been told that two forces are seriously challenging traditional pay programs: jobs are being replaced by roles, and work is becoming too unstable to administer in job evaluation plans,
making skill-based pay plans the logical replacement.

Despite the significance of these claims,
no one has offered specific examples of this new age work or empirical evidence to support these
common assertions. In-depth articles on the
concepts are nonexistent. Yet they are proposed
as rationale for organizations to adopt new
compensation systems and are regarded by some
experts as the key compensation issues of the
decade.