Job evaluation is not only a technical act – An evaluation score is not an end in itself. It is consistency, cross-checks and business validation that turn a hypothesis into a defensible position.
Evaluating an organisation: where to start? – Evaluating the functions of an organisation is not running through a list. It is building a structure, in a precise order, from the top down.
Job titles: one word, several meanings, several uses – The job title is probably the HR element whose importance is most underestimated, when it matters as much to the organisation as it does to the employee who bears it.
The life of levels – A system of levels is not a deliverable that gets completed. It is a living structure, which deforms as soon as you stop looking after it.
A career ladder is never verified on its own – A career ladder, looked at on its own, almost always seems consistent. The levels follow one another, the progression seems logical. It is by confronting it with the others that you see whether it really holds.
What a leader is: defining it in your governance – The word leader is everywhere, and by being everywhere, it no longer says much. Yet, at the time of pay transparency, in a crisis, in a transformation, it is essential to know who these leaders are, and what this implies.
Do not ask one compensation component to serve the purpose of another – A remuneration policy has several components: a base salary, a bonus, benefits. Each one has a precise role. Most remuneration difficulties come from one and the same mistake: expecting the wrong purpose from a given component.
Pressure on base salary: often symptomatic – When the pressure on base salary intensifies, it is often a symptom more than a request in the strict sense. A queue of requests is then no longer a workload to handle: it is a dashboard to read.
Salary benchmark: positioning, structuring, revealing – The salary benchmark is too often reduced to a salary comparison. It is in reality a Comp & Ben governance instrument that sheds light on market positioning, remuneration structure, and internal culture.
Pay band at recruitment: do we really position on the role? – Positioning a candidate artificially low in their pay band to keep room above them: the intention is understandable, but an offer is positioned on the real fit between the person and the role.
Numbers and human resources – “Numbers are not really my thing.” A seemingly harmless little sentence, yet it hides a broader relinquishment: giving up on understanding an entire part of the company.
Remuneration in its rightful place – Retaining, motivating, recognising, giving meaning: we often entrust these issues to remuneration alone, and for good reason, it is the best-known lever, the one we imagine as a universal solution. Yet it is not a Swiss Army knife.
Comp & Ben, the silent cost of hasty decisions – In remuneration, speed is not the risk. The absence of a framework is. A decision made in a few minutes can create a precedent, an expectation, sometimes an inequity, and produce its effects for years.
A sound job evaluation also starts before the evaluation itself – Who owns a job evaluation request? The question may seem secondary, but it is decisive. Before applying the methodology, there is the exact nature of the request, its context, the information to gather and the owner of each stage. A flowchart at the end of the article traces the request from intake through implementation.
Expatriation and pay transparency: what governance? – An expatriation assignment is justified without difficulty when you know why it is necessary to send this employee abroad, what purpose is pursued and for how long. Without a clear framework, the status never ends and the gap becomes hard to explain, to the local teams as well as to the expatriate.
The instruments of operational Comp & Ben governance – With pay transparency coming into force, it is more useful than ever to define your governance, your full set of rules and procedures, and to equip yourself for the long run. Equipping yourself costs less than deciding under pressure every time.