FINE TUNING YOUR CLASSIFICATION PLAN

If your classification system has been in place for more than 5 years, you have probably experienced a number of reclassification requests. As you know, these reclassification requests come from employees, or from an encouraging supervisor, and often they come to your desk with a veiled request for a pay increase. Unfortunately, most jobs have probably not changed that much in terms of new duties and responsibilities. In fact, most of the time, the only change has been in the volume of work and the capability or performance of the employee. Sometimes these requests come with significant political overtones making it difficult for the HR department to turn down the request, even if their review of the job does not support a change (read: upgrade). To make matters worse, because of efforts to streamline HR departments, you may not have the time to consider each request, nor may you have a way of stopping them from coming into your department. This article will discuss some of the ways to resolve each of the issues, or at least provide some recommendations for you consideration.

The first solution to reducing the number of reclassification requests is to make sure that your pay system is up to date and competitive with the market. If you are reasonably comfortable with the job worth hierarchy of your classification system, updating your pay plan may be as simple (I am assuming that you have the political support) as conducting a market survey of selected benchmark jobs. Once done, this will help to keep the employees from trying to get a pay increase through the classification system.

The second way to reducing reclassification requests is to audit the manner and speed at which employees are moving through the pay ranges. Assuming that your pay ranges are competitive with the market (or within 5% of the market) if all you r employees are located in the lower quartile of the range and the average tenure of you r employees is upwards of 10 years, you need to be moving the employees through the ranges faster. A typical time line for moving employees through the range is as follows:

Although these are rules of thumb, they will vary by the level and complexity of the job. In addition, if your pay plan incorporates performance with pay increases, these timelines may vary. The point is, if your employees are not where they should be in the range because of restrictive range movement practices, if you correct this, the number of reclassification requests will usually diminish.

The third solution is to restrict the reason for the reclassification requests. In our consulting assignments, we traditionally recommend that reclassification request only be accepted if the job has changed by more than 25% of the duties. This may mean that the percent of time that a person spends on a task has changed by 25% or more, or the types of duties performed have changed. IN most situations, this is a significant change to a cob and thus it deserves to be reexamined.

Having outlined the simple solutions, we now come to the ones that are more vexing. They are the politically charged requests and the ones that HR cannot handle because of a lack of time or personnel. To these solutions, it may be wise to engage an outside consultant to help you review the jobs. This may sound self-serving (after all, we are consultant who do this type of work for a living), the fact is that an outside consultant can frequently provide you with objective advice and sound reasoning. And, they can do this is a timely fashion.

The result of hiring a consultant can be that your pay system retains its usability for a longer period of time, saving your organization both time and money of redoing the system. In addition, we have found that if an outside firm reviews your reclassification requests, the entire volume of reclassification requests go down. This is because the employees and manager realize that they have to mount a very strong case for an upgrade if someone outside the organization reviews the job.

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