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Davis Sibanda Labour Matters
IMPROPER management of job evaluation implementation has been a source of many expensive legal disputes between employers and workers.
Not everyone who has participated in job evaluation can facilitate job evaluation as it is a complex process with legal implications thus requiring that one must be trained and experienced to facilitate its installation in an organisation.

Job evaluation involves two important parts, and that is job grading and salary structuring and each of these processes require a different set of skills from the facilitator or facilitating organisation. It also involves the complex exercise of selecting a grading method.

The first mistake organisations make is to engage consulting firm that has over 50 years documented experience in job evaluation yet it will be handled by individuals with one or two years experience and have hardly handled any job evaluation project.

What employers need to note is that most job evaluation exercises are driven by labour disputes related to fairness in compensation and the desire by the employer to manage payroll costs. There are many other reasons but cannot be covered in this article. For reasons given, job evaluation has to be handled by a seasoned practitioner who is capable of quickly understanding the business that the organisation is involved in, labour politics and also understands job evaluation principles.

The job grading exercise should sit on a stable organisation structure. The organisation must review its structures first and ensure that all the structures are stable and where there is a need or desire to restructure the organisation, this must precede job grading so that the job descriptions are based on the new structure. I have seen organisations who restructure after job grading resulting in content shifts that necessitates regarding of some jobs as the jobs will have changed. This is an avoidable cost. Admittedly on a few cases the job grading exercise will expose job overlaps and gaps requiring revisit after grading but that becomes a minor exercise.

In the grading component of job evaluation employee engagement is important irrespective of method used and with Paterson and Castellion grading methods, worker participation in the grading is vital as failure to do so violates the principles of job evaluation and workers can litigate and have the job evaluation exercise declared a nullity. Even for senior management where the grading is usually done by consultants or facilitators without participation of workers, the affected workers have to participate in the writing of their job description and the reasons why the grading will be done by consultants explained.
The salary structuring is normally done by consultants following salary structuring principles that include plotting of graphs to see the spread of salaries and working on getting the appropriate curves, salary surveys and crafting various salary structuring options as guided by nature of the business, linkage to performance management and others.

In conclusion, employer wanting to implement job evaluation must do it correctly and ensure the use of facilitators who fully understand the particular job evaluation method to be used so that the exercise is cost effective and labour relations appropriate.

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be contacted on: email: [email protected]  cell: 0772 375 235