Defense against the ‘Dark Arts’ of Job Evaluation: A Crash Course!

Let me start with a confession. I have made a living out of job evaluation – both as an external consultant (who conducts job evaluation and trains/certifies the client team on job evaluation) and as an internal process owner. I have had the opportunity to get trained/certified in three different job evaluation methodologies and practice two of them extensively. Job Evaluation can be a very useful tool to establish the relative size of jobs in a systematic manner and this can serve as an input to various processes like organization design, job banding, rewards, career pathing, talent movements etc.

Now, the question is “why would anyone need to defend against such a useful thing?”. It is because job evaluation requires the investment of time and money and because one can be at the ‘receiving end’ of job evaluation as a Business Leader, HR Business Partner, People Manager or as an employee – when job evaluation becomes more of a hassle than a help. For a Business Leader who values flexibility job evaluation can comes an unnecessary hurdle to pass (See Paradox of HR Systems for a related discussion). In such a case, the business leader might just take a decision on the grade fitment of an employee and ask the HR Business Partner to ‘push it through the HR system’ somehow. Similarly, for a manager (who is trying to keep an employee motivated by providing vertical career growth) or for an employee (who looking for a promotion), job evaluation can become a serious impediment to what one wants to achieve.

Job evaluation is not an exact science. While the job evaluation providers might claim that their methodology has been successfully applied across countries and industry sectors, it is indeed possible that a particular methodology (especially one with fixed factors and factor weightages - most of the popular job evaluation methodologies fall into this category) favors certain types of jobs. This can lead to situations where the job evaluation scores don't accurately reflect the contribution various jobs make to a particular organization. It has been argued that job evaluation is a 'rationalized institutional myth' - 'rationalized' because it has a clearly articulated methodology and a 'myth' because it is accepted as true because it is believed.

Job evaluation involves a significant amount of judgement (which can be subjective, even when guided by a well-defined framework and quality checks). In a way, job evaluation is more of a ‘negotiated agreement’. In such a situation, if one doesn’t have political power, one might be at a significant disadvantage as compared to people who have such power. In extreme circumstances, job evaluation can become a tool for ‘powerplay’. Yes, there are also situations where the job evaluation process owner gets a bad name even when he/she hasn’t done anything wrong.

So, what are some of the options for defending against job evaluation? The following discussion can give you some ideas.

Avoid it if possible

Job Evaluation takes significant time and resources. Job Evaluation makes practical sense only if the jobs are relatively stable. So, if the jobs in your unit haven’t yet stabilized, you have a good case for arguing that job evaluation shouldn’t be applied to your unit at this stage. A similar argument can be made if your operating strategy involves recasting jobs frequently (requiring frequent reevaluation of jobs which can be expensive and time consuming). Also, if job evaluation is not very commonly used by the companies in your industry segment, that can give you a good argument against the applicability of job evaluation.

 There are indeed ways to implement job evaluation in the above-mentioned contexts. It is just that it is a bit more difficult to do so and that the case is less compelling.

Create a lot of exceptions when you can

Here the idea is to be a bit generous with the grade-fitment of the employees before job evaluation becomes applicable to your unit. Sometimes, this happens automatically. For example, for a new unit that is doing a lot of hiring, this helps to attract better talent.  Once job evaluation takes place, these employees will become ‘red circled’ (exceptions where the jobholder's grade is higher than what the job is evaluated at). However, it is very unlikely that the organization will reduce the grade of an existing employee in such cases. Therefore, it continues till the employee continues on the same job. Another option here is to get a ‘powerful leader’ (competent authority) to grant exceptions – to allow an employee to be hired/fitted at a level that is higher than that indicated by the job evaluation results. If there are a very large percentage of exceptions, it adversely impacts the credibility of job evaluation process. Therefore, each exception can make the next exception a bit easier!

Of course, these kinds of strategies can create long-term issues and inefficiencies for the unit and hence they can backfire from a long-term point of view.

Rob Peter to pay Paul but do pay Peter back with interest when Peter’s job is being evaluated

This involves shifting some of the responsibilities handled by one employee to another employee when the latter’s job is being evaluated and then more than reversing the process (by moving even more responsibilities back to the former employee) when the former’s job is being evaluated!  Yes, this can be a complicated process and lead to ‘red-circled’ employees if the job evaluation is practiced in the company in a strict manner (which involves reevaluating all the impacted jobs when there is a change in responsibilities of a particular job/when a new job is created necessitating the job evaluation). However, this takes a lot of effort to track changes and reevaluate on an ongoing basis – especially if these changes are done carefully over a period of time.

Such a complicated process is required as ‘simply inflating the responsibilities’ is unlikely to work. Job evaluation supposed to be done based on approved job descriptions and hence just being creative about the job responsibilities won’t do -unless there is no such validation/approval process for job descriptions in place. Also, job evaluation is done top-down and a job is evaluated in the context of the constellation of jobs surrounding it (especially the job of the reporting manager) and hence inflating the job responsibilities can lead to easily noticeable overlaps that serve as a red flag to the person evaluating the job. 

If you can't convince them confuse them

If the person doing the job evaluation doesn’t put in enough effort to understand the organization context and the responsibilities of the other jobs around the role being evaluated, one might have a decent chance of getting a higher job evaluation by confusing the job evaluator on the contribution the particular job makes! A liberal use of organization-specific jargon might not also be a bad idea!

Other tricks of the trade

Positioning the job as a clear successor position to the manager’s job and arguing that the overlaps with the manager’s role are by design (because of the requirements of the particular context) might work in some cases! In most of the job evaluation methodologies, some of the factors tend to be hierarchical and hence the evaluations on those factors are constrained by the evaluation of the manager's job on the same factors). Hence, this approach is not always so easy. 

Most of the job evaluation systems work in such a way that ‘stealing responsibilities from the jobs of the subordinates’ won’t have any beneficial impact on the job evaluation score of the job being evaluated. Hence the attempt to steal responsibilities from the jobs of the peers and the manager!

Being in the good books of the ‘job evaluation overlord’ can also be highly beneficial because of the judgement and discretion involved in job evaluation. This might reduce the chances of the 'overlord' exercising his/her 'negative power' (the power to block) in the cases of imperfections in the job descriptions and/or in the rationale to justify a particular evaluation. In most contexts, often there are imperfections in the job descriptions and the rationales and even the ‘job evaluation overlord’ has to pick and choose the battles he/she wants to fight to avoid being seen as too bureaucratic/unrealistic. 

In lieu of a conclusion

So, where does this discussion leave us? Job evaluation, like most things in life and work-life is a mixed blessing. Job evaluation not an exact science (it is both a science and an art). It is resource intensive and can introduce rigidity into the system. However, job evaluation can serve as a very valuable input to organization design, job banding, rewards, career pathing and inter-unit talent movements.  

As we have seen above, it has been argued that job evaluation is a rationalized institutional myth. One of the key functions served by a myth is the maintenance of social order (order in the social system called the organization, in this case). In this sense, job evaluation elevates the decisions on aspects like band-fitment from the realm of 'common sense' to the realm of the ‘scientific'. It provides an explanation and justification for an organizational hierarchy that might otherwise have been difficult to explain. Job evaluation signals to the employees the notion that the current structure of inequality is right and just! Yes, organization reality is socially constructed to a large extent and maintenance of social order is very important in business organizations too!

Therefore, for an organization the key question is whether it adds net value in the particular context – considering the benefits, the cost, the effort required and the possible side effects. Of course, for an individual it is essentially a matter of whether it is a help or a hassle for him/her and hence the decision on ‘whether or not to attempt a defense against job evaluation’ is likely to depend on that (moderated by altruistic and masochistic tendencies)!

 Any comments/thoughts?

The leadership sandwich

This is a 'thinking aloud' kind of post. Usually, I find it difficult to do 'thinking aloud' kind of activities. My reasons (rationalizations!) for this revolve around my personality type (INTJ or 'Dominant Introverted Intuition' - in MBTI/'type dynamics' terms). Of late, I have been reading some books written by Alan Watts and I came across the the following "It is surely a kind of spiritual pride to refrain from 'thinking out loud', and to be unwilling to let a thesis appear in print until you are prepared to champion it to the death. Philosophy, like science, is a social function, for a man cannot think rightly alone, and a philosopher must publish his thought as much to learn from criticism as to contribute to the sum of wisdom." Inspired by this, I have decided to write this post.

The trigger for this post came from some of the conversations that I have been having with my son (the same guy who was the main character in my earlier post called 'Research and a three-year-old' - though he is now seven years old!). During the last academic year, he got his first taste of 'being a leader' - when he was made the 'leader' of his group/class on certain occasions/ for certain events and he has been sharing his experiences as a 'leader' - both good and bad -with me. These discussions about the 'leadership experiences' of a seven-year-old, made me remember a curious thing that I had noticed about the roles and designations - especially in IT/ITES organizations.

In these organizations, often there is a level called 'Team Leader' that appears - just above that of a Team Member - but below that of a 'Team Manager' or 'Project Manager'. Beginning with the Team Manager/Project Manager level, there are multiple levels of 'Managers'. But after these 'managerial levels', 'Leaders' (e.g. Business Leaders) again make an appearance. So we have a curious situation - we have managers 'sandwiched' by leaders. Hence the 'leadership sandwich' which forms the title of this post.

Now let me come back to the 'thinking aloud' part. I was wondering why this 'leadership sandwich' occurs. Why do we have levels/roles with the term 'Leader' in the title on both the sides of the levels/roles with the term 'Manager' in the title? Since too much have already been written about the 'Leaders Vs. Managers debate', I have no intention to get too deep into that tricky territory. But these kind of 'sandwich' situations interest me immensely - because I feel that some phenomenon similar to that of the 'U-curve' (which I have often written about and which is very close to the basic theme of this blog) might be operating here. In such cases something starts in one state - moves to the opposite state - and then comes back to the original state at a higher plane (creating a 'U' - shaped pattern). So I was wondering if 'Leadership' also follows such a 'U' - shaped pattern!

May be we can get a clue to the (leadership sandwich) puzzle if we compare the role of a Team Leader with that of a Team Manager. Typically, a Team Leader does not have formal authority (e.g. to hire, fire, evaluate and reward staff). So a Team Leader is forced to influence (get the work done) without formal authority. Team Managers (and the multiple levels of Managers above them) do have formal authority. Of course, the 'Leaders' who are at higher levels as compared to these 'Managers' also have formal authority - much more than what these 'Managers' have. But may be these senior 'Leaders' are supposed to influence (get the work done) without exercising their formal authority, though they do have a lot of formal authority. May be they are supposed to do the influencing in 'better/higher ways' (e.g. by creating an inspiring vision, by building a high performance culture etc.). So if we can say that "Team Leaders influence without formal authority because they don't have any formal authority and Business Leaders influence without formal authority because they choose not to exercise their formal authority" - then we have the description of a phenomenon that follows the U-curve - that too perfectly!

Now, let us come back to the second part of what Alan Watts said - the part which says that 'a man cannot think rightly alone and that he should publish his thought to to learn from criticism'. I have done the publishing! Over to you for your criticism!!

Influence of 'early career experiences'

What has been the impact of your 'early-career experiences' on you? For the purpose of this discussion, let us define 'early-career experiences' as 'experiences during the 'most impressionable part' of one's career and this would imply (for many people) experiences during the first few years of one's career/the experiences during one's first job. So please take a couple of minutes to think about your 'early-career experiences'. What do you remember about them? Do you think that they have impacted you in any significant manner? If yes, what has been the nature of the impact?

The importance of early life experiences on the psychological/behavioral development of a person is well known. But considering that one is usually much older when one starts working, can a similar phenomena occur - in the domain of one's basic assumptions about organizational life/work/career? In an earlier post (see HR professionals and Multiple Personality Disorder), I had speculated that 'traumatic' early career experiences might contribute to the development of some sort of a 'Multiple Personality Disorder' among HR professionals - especially among young MBAs in HR.

While I have been thinking about this issue for quite some time, the 'trigger' for this post came recently in the form of a discussion in an e-group that I am part of. This e-group consists mainly of my ex-colleagues from an organization in which I had worked a long time ago. We were discussing issues like"the reasons for the existence of strong bonds among us even though most of us had left the organization a long time ago"; "why do we often talk about the 'great experience' that we have had in that organization" etc. Now, there were multiple factors (at multiple) levels involved in the situation. I felt that one of the key factors involved (apart from the factors related to the organization context, nature of work, nature of inter-dependencies in the group etc.) was the profile of the members of the group/organization at that stage - most of us were at an 'impressionable stage' in our careers!.

It was the first job for many of us and I felt that it 'shaped' our definitions of 'what is good' in an organization/workplace context (i.e. the tacit/subconscious definitions of 'good' boss, 'good' team member, 'good' team, 'good' employer, 'good' learning opportunities and even that of 'good' work). Since other organizations (that we joined later in our career) are unlikely to provide environments that exactly match these definitions, the work experiences in them are likely to be perceived as falling short of 'the good old days'. I think that this is similar to the phenomena in which the traditional way of cooking in India (cooking with fire/heating food from the outside) influenced our definition of 'good taste'. This in turn made it difficult for a product like the microwave oven (that heat up food uniformly) to become popular in India* (other than for reheating the food) - till a new generation brought up on a more 'microwave-friendly' definition of 'good taste' became consumers.

So my hypothesis is that early career experiences can have a significant impact on our careers by influencing our basic workplace preferences and attitudes. Of course, there are other factors (like personality related factors) that can also influence our workplace preferences and attitudes. It would also be interesting to examine if the impact/influence of early career experiences reduces as one progresses in one's career (and gains more experiences/data points).

Any observations/comments?

*Note: I am not saying that this is the only factor that possibly worked against the popularity of microwave ovens. There could be many other contributing factors. For example, from a psychological point of view - fire has many important associations (i.e. fire symbolizes a number of things). It is a symbol of purity - for fire is considered to purify everything. Hence cooking food in fire can symbolize purification of food. Fire is also supposed to symbolize 'illumination', 'inner light' , 'holiness' etc.. It is interesting to note that in many of the cultures across the world there are myths related to 'theft of fire' (e.g. according to Greek mythology, Prometheus [whose name means 'foresight'] stole fire [which was available only to the gods at that time] from Zeus and gave it to the mankind). As I have said earlier (please see Myth and truth : 'So true that it can't be real'), myths often embody great truths.

Now let us come back to microwave ovens. From the above discussion, it can be seen that 'microwave-cooking' might have been at a disadvantage as compared to 'fire-cooking' because of the symbolic significance of fire. This argument becomes stronger if we compare microwave ovens to washing machines. As compared to microwave ovens, washing machines became popular in India much faster. One of the reasons for this could be that a washing machine is a more or less 'straight forward automation of an essentially mechanical process' (i.e. washing). So washing machines did not have to fight some of the above 'psychological battles' that microwave ovens had to fight! Anyway, since I am not an expert in marketing (or in microwave ovens/washing machines for that matter) let me not push this point any further !

Job and identity

Recently, I left the job that I had been doing for the past three years and took up a different type of job with another organization. I also got the opportunity to take a 3-week break in between - the first in my career that I have done so. I spent most of this time outside Bangalore - with some of my close relatives. This also meant that I met a lot people (the friends/relatives of my relatives) - and I was meeting most of them for the first time. One side effect of this was that I had to answer the question "So Prasad, what are you doing now?" - roughly 3 times/day - about 40 times in total, over a two week period.

Initially, I tried the answer "I am on vacation" - but that did not seem to work. People would wait for me to say more and if I did not say anything more they would ask me something like "What do you do for a living?". To this I tried to give the answer "I work mainly in the area of Organization Development". But even that answer did not seem satisfactory. Sooner or later people would ask me "Which company do you work for?". To this I tried answering "I am in between jobs" (or "I am taking a break") - but this also did not appear to work well (and sometimes this answer elicited a confused and/or sympathetic look/expression also). So finally I was forced to answer "I was working for company 'C1' till date ' d1' and I would be joining company 'C2' on date 'd2' ". While this turned out to be 'satisfactory answer' (from a social perspective), I did feel quite uneasy.

My uneasiness was mainly at two levels. At the 'social level' I was bothered about how would I have handled this question if I was not in a position to say that "I would be joining company 'C2' on date 'd2' ". At more personal level, I was wondering whether I can articulate a clear answer (just for my own consumption) to our initial question ("So Prasad, what are you doing now ?"), without referring to any of my employers (past, present or future!) or to the job titles. After I thought about it for a while, I felt that uneasiness at the first level was not a very important - as it was arising mainly from 'social desirability' and 'norms of polite communication in a particular social group' - and hence it should not bother one unduly so long as the 'economic viability' angle has been taken care of. The uneasiness at the personal level was more difficult to address. Once I resisted the temptation to 'destroy the question' by resorting to philosophical answers (e.g. one should be bothered about 'being' as opposed to 'doing'), the real issue became "Have I wrapped my identity too much into my job/career ?". I feel that this is an important question that needs to be looked at more carefully.

There are conflicting trends operating here. On the one hand, many of us spend a very large part of our waking lives at work. Many of the jobs are very demanding and they occupy a lot of our 'psychological space' - much beyond office space and office hours. Our 'passion for work', might make work and the achievements at the workplace very important for us. It has also been argued that in an environment where the role holder has the opportunity to shape the role to a large extent (and/or where people are expected to be responsible for managing/developing their careers), role identity and career identity are essential for success/effectiveness. On the other hand, these days many people routinely change jobs or even change careers. Again, often people are forced out of their jobs and careers by organizational changes(right sizing, restructuring etc.). Thus, if your identity is wrapped up in what you do, a change of job or a change of careers (especially if they were forced on you) becomes traumatic (much more so in the case of a job loss).

So where does this leave us? Developing and understanding our identity as individuals is essential for personal effectiveness. This would serve an anchor point for us when everything around us are changing. While job and career identities are useful from a job/career effectiveness/success point of view, they can't define who we are as individuals. Jobs and careers are like the cloths that individuals wear and change. Just as we can't let our cloths define us (though some of us might choose to express some aspects of ourselves through the way we dress), we can't let our jobs and careers define us completely. So it is very important for one to examine one's current definition of oneself and if the results don't show anything beyond job and career identity, it is time for investing significant time and effort for expanding the boundaries of those definitions. Of course, developing and understanding our identity as individuals is a lifelong process.

By the way, there is another reason for being careful about this 'sense of identity wrapped up in job' . It has been argued that 'sense of identity wrapped up in job' is one of the factors that could predict the risk of violent behavior at the workplace. So now the relevant questions are - "Are you at risk ?" and "Are you a risk ?" !!!

Related Link: HR carnival at Strategic HCM blog