Broadbanding positions

[Meli]

We are looking into broad banding positions in areas of skills shortage i.e : planners, surveyors and engineers. Would anyone have any advice on what has worked ....or hasn’t?!?

I am particularly interested in hearing from government agencies although any organisation that has implemented a broadband progression/ salary structure with success would be great.

[DaveG]

Excuse my ignorance but I don't even know what broadbanding is!

Can you please explain what it is.

Thanks,
Dave

[tshaw]

Nearly all Local Councils and Government agencies refer to pay rate structures as Bands and then each band will have specific levels or steps. Employees proceed up the banding after performance reviews etc.

Each specific Banding refers to a group or job activities, requirements, qualifications etc required to do the work

There are many terms for this such as levels, bands, grades, steps etc.

What I tried to explain above is much better understood if you have a look at a previous EBA or Award.

http://www.wagenet.gov.au/WageNet/Se...48&quickview=Y

[Lance]

Here are a couple more articles explaining broadbanding:

http://humanresources.about.com/od/g...oadbanding.htm

http://www.auxillium.com/broadbn2.shtml

[rockyhr]

Broadbanding is a great option and something that offers organisations plenty of benefits. However a quick tip is to ensure that the work at the higher band is actually required and actually performed. A relative worth system suffers when an organisation pays employees at the higher band simply to satisfy recruitment/retention needs. UIf that is all you are considering using it for my advice would be to look at market loading or a market aligned pay system which is transperant and justified to meet recruitment/retention needs.

[Alli]

A government agency I worked for had broadbanding for some specific roles. However to get across the hard-bar (one band to the next) the employees were required to undertake an assessment, peer and team leader for team members and for supervisors it was their team members and their manager. They also had to have a performance agreement in place and to meet the requirements of the deliverables.

[HRbeat]

We already have a salary band structure, but I couldn't really say it's a broad band. In this structure, I find that most Managers has a tendency to allocate their employees to the higher end of the band more than the lower end of the band. There is also a tendency during salary reviews for employees to jump from a lower end to the higher end of the band, and it may not necessarily be congruent in terms of internal parity and performance.

Besides clear levels within a band and placing a criteria system in place, does anyone have any solutions/ideas?

[DaveG]

I agree with rockyhr.

In the current climate employers of almost all professional disciplines need to make sure their bands are not completely out of whack with reality, because not only will they not be able to hire anyone, they will also start to lose people, especially in the disciplines referred to by the original poster Meli.

If the band is moving with the times so to speak, this will help avoid parity issues when taking on new staff. This would also enable employers to pay people more without actually promoting them. I know there are budget issues to consider but sooner or later you will lose your staff if you fall too far behind the market.

This is an issue all employers need to address because unless we have a major economic downturn the situation is just going to get worse as the baby boomers retire (because of our lower birth rates in the last 20 years).

[J1P]

Most large organisations have some sort of broad banding system in place.

If you are going to have a broad branding system in place, then you will need an objective, reliable, and defendable system by which you can make determinations about which roles sit in which band, ie ideally some sort of Job Evaluation Tool

Certainly the two most well known Job Evaluation systems out there are Hay and Mercer. Both systems share common attributes, and generally have the same strengths, and the same weaknesses.

CSi have recently re-launched their JE tool in conjunction with Wattson Wyatt. I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on the tool and I was fairly impressed with the tool, as it addressed a lot of the detracting facets of the Hay and Mercer tools.

However I wonder if a broadbanding system is neccesarily what you are after. Broadbanding systems can help maintain relativity to market on the pay side of things, but this requires a direct link between your market data and the JE tool. In addition JE helps manage internal relativities and can even be helpful on org and role design. However it seems your main concern is retention of roles that are hot in the market place? How do you anticipate that broad banding will help in this area?