How job evaluation can help with organisation design and workforce planning

Most people know job evaluation can be a useful tool for helping organisations simplify pay benchmarking and manage pay relativities, but what a lot of people don’t know is that it can also be used to help organisations with organisation design and workforce planning.

Organisation and Workforce

Organisation design is a key discipline of HR that is concerned with shaping an organisational structure, with the aim of aligning it with the purpose and strategy of the business and the context in which the organisation exists.

Workforce planning is a core process of human resource management that is influenced by organisational strategy and ensures the right people with the right skills are in the right jobs at the right time.

How Job Evaluation can help

A robust job evaluation scheme, such as our own PAYgrade job evaluation system, can help organisations systematically analyse their organisation structure, role accountabilities and spans of control to establish whether they are aligned with the purpose of the business and the context in which the organisation exists. If they are not then the findings garnered through job evaluation can be used to support the business case for redesign.

Once a business case has been established job evaluation can then be used to model various scenarios to help identify what roles, and therefore what skills, will be needed to deliver the business strategy. Appropriate workforce plans can then be developed to ensure the right number of people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time to deliver organisational objectives.

Finally, job evaluation can be used to assess the impact of design choices on factors such as remuneration, benefits and the overall total pay bill.