A system of levels is built with care. An intense period of work, trade-offs, an overall logic. And often, it is taken as a given, and one moves on to something else.
That is where the drift begins.
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. And after a few years, it no longer commands authority.
Why a system of levels drifts
The drift has a main cause, and it is more subtle than a simple lack of rigour or a poor grasp of the method.
Comp & Ben reasons in terms of the level of the function. The business, on its side, spontaneously reasons in terms of the level of the person. This is not a vocabulary misunderstanding that a clear definition would be enough to resolve. Even when the frame is properly set, staying centred on the function requires constant discipline. It is an almost untenable effort for the business, which has a person in mind, with their background, their engagement, their progression, and not an abstract function. Its focus is also to meet the expectations of its team, to ensure the team's efficient running and engagement.
To this is added a powerful driver. Levels are often tied to remuneration policies: bonus level, company car, stock options. The level is therefore not only a technical marker, it is a gateway to concrete benefits. One then understands why the business regularly pushes for a function to move up a level.
And it often does so with the best intentions: recognising someone, making a gesture, supporting a progression. The issue is not the intention, it is the lever chosen. The business bets on the level because it ignores, or underestimates, another lever: progression within the pay band, which allows a progression to be recognised without deforming the structure. This is a subject in its own right, to which I devote another article in this series, “Do not ask one compensation component to serve the purpose of another”.
After a while, the levels no longer reflect a logic of functions, but the accumulation of decisions made for people.
Keeping a system of levels alive
A system does not maintain itself. It is governed. Four practices help concretely.
The review committees. The level itself is set by the evaluator. The committee, for its part, relies on this expert opinion and examines each change request with method, in the light of internal consistency, to validate it. Its main value lies here: bringing together members able to carry and defend these decisions across the organisation. Depending on the size and maturity of the organisation, this committee can be single or split in two, one for the highest levels, one for the lower levels, with meeting frequencies adapted to each.
The review rhythm. Reviewing levels at defined intervals, rather than reacting to each request, allows you to stay in charge. To this regular schedule is added a crisis plan: during a major business transformation, which requires a massive reassessment, it is better to have anticipated who does what, in order to review quickly and well.
Monitoring with the business. Monitoring is not a solitary HR task. It is done with the business, which knows the reality of how its activities evolve, and by considering its financial results, which objectively show where its challenges are. Crossing the two allows you to realign levels with reality, rather than with an old snapshot.
Transmission. A system of levels that no one understands becomes a system that everyone contests. This applies to all, on a continuous basis, and particularly to new leaders: each manager who arrives inherits a system they did not build. If they do not understand it, they will bypass it, in good faith. Integrating this explanation into the onboarding of new leaders prevents the system from degrading with each managerial turnover.
Distinguishing the level of the function from the level of the person
There remains the underlying cause: the confusion between the function and the person. The practices above maintain the system, but they do not address this root.
One line of thinking is to explicitly organise two levels: a level of the function, which says what the role is worth, and a level of the person, which follows their real path, until this transitional situation resolves. Rather than denying the tension between the two, you make it visible and you frame it.
This allows transitional situations to be handled cleanly. A person who steps into a function of higher level without yet fully occupying all its aspects is not parachuted at the level of the function: they are positioned at their real level, with the corresponding salary, and progress until they fully occupy the role. Conversely, a person moved from their function, who temporarily holds a role of lower level while they reposition, sees their situation named rather than endured. In both cases, the progression path becomes visible.
All of this must be traced, explained and predetermined, in order to strictly limit the use of the gap between the level of the function and the level of the person.
This is a direction of thinking that has the merit of looking the reality on the ground in the face. And far from conflicting with pay transparency, it serves it: by naming and tracing these trajectories, it precisely avoids unexplained gaps between a person and the role they occupy.
The essentials
Keeping a system of levels alive is not an administrative task. It is what keeps it consistent, understood and shared, year after year.
A system that is maintained remains a governance tool. A system that is abandoned becomes, slowly, a collection of exceptions that no one can explain any more.
This is the governance over time that the HDH (HR Decision Hub) platform helps organisations to hold, in particular by recording their policies, their workflows and their RASCI, and by keeping the trace and the logic of each level decision.