The A B C of job evaluation
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ANY management technique that covers more than a quarter of Britain's employed workers, and which is growing rapidly, must have some relevance to the road transport industry. Job evaluation yields advantages to management, unions and employees and it seems to present a positive, constructive policy line through the minefield of labour relations problems. With dustmen, London Underground train guards and port workers disrupting the economy with careless abandon, it is high time that the country as a whole committed itself to some agreed principles in labour relations.
In road transport, job evaluation is by no means a novelty. When British Road Services were established the staff department had to undertake a major job evaluation exercise grading the managers and staff of acquired companies into appropriate salary divisions. There was some suspicion—natural in the prevailing circumstances—that the previous salaries of the people taken over were of major influence in determining the grades they were given. Aggrieved staff could appeal to representative committees; some were mollified by the award of personal allowances over and above the salary attached to their defined grade, and these personal allowances were ultimately extinguished with successive general salary increases.
The National Board for Prices and Incomes is certainly not the first organization to advocate job evaluation but in preparing a simple guide, issued free, which is based on a full report (No. 83, price 5s 6d and its supplement, price 6s 6d) the Board has made a very useful contribution to popularizing management education. For every transport manager prepared to wade through a lengthy report a dozen may be game to read a 12page, brightly written, leaflet.
Rational basis What is job evaluation all about? It is used chiefly by employers and unions who wish to introduce a new pay structure or reform an old one. It sets out to rank jobs in order of importance on a rational basis, as opposed to their ranking by traditional rule-of-thumb methods. Given agreement on principles as between the two sides, all grades of employees, white collar as well as manual, should regard the resulting pay structure as fair.
The road transport industry is an excellent candidate for the universal application of agreed forms of job evaluation. If its labour relations—in terms of days lost through strikes—bear favourable comparison with the worst of the strike-prone industries few on the management or trade union side would profess to be satisfied with the industry's labour relations. The reform of pay structures is an important means of achieving greater efficiency and it is significant, I think, that the preliminary findings of the TASC unit of the Road Transport Industry Training Board seems to indicate that the smallest firms in the industry could very profitably begin to reform themselves by defining in writing the duties and responsibilities of their staff, particularly their supervisory and management staff. Clearly, no progress towards a comprehensive job evaluation system can be achieved until this particular exercise is accomplished.
Job assessment As its name suggests job evaluation means that the job is assessed, not the man who does it. What the job involves in terms of skill, effort, concentration—even physical strength and endurance—is important and these factors relate to the job and not to the man or woman doing it.
Of course, the qualities of the person now doing a job are not ignored. After a joint study by management and trade union has created a framework for a pay structure there can well be discussions to determine the appropriate reward for performance or length of service of the employee concerned. But such "plus factors" have nothing to do with job evaluation as such.
Job evaluation is not a technique for determining the rates of pay: the pay negotiations begin when the job evaluation process is completed. The aim is to analyse the various jobs in a firm in order of their difficulty and responsibility. In road transport there will be some knotty problems to solve in determining the relative difficulties of some jobs—the traditional high pay of trunk drivers may not stand up to stringent logical analysis.
After the initial examination of jobs and their ranking in order of difficulty and responsibility, jobs are usually grouped into grades or categories. It is at this stage that managements and unions get together to attach pay to the various grades.
The simple approach to a management technique like job evaluation may not be the best one. A straightforward approach —known as non-analytical—would be to list all jobs, assessing each in relation to the others, with a final list showing jobs in the order of their importance and responsibility.
The weakness of this approach is that the job assessors are only required to decide whether one job is more important than another—not how much more important.
Particularly where there is a complex pay structure an analytical approach is to be preferred. With this, jobs are assessed (and numerical values given) under a number of headings—reasoning ability required, muscular strength, manual dexterity, unpleasantness of job, etc. Thus, by comparing total numerical values it is possible to gauge how much more responsible one job is compared with another. The relative importance of very different jobs can also be assessed. The PIB found that the analytical system known as "points rating", enabling assessors to give a points score to each job, was by far the most popular in its survey of nearly 8,000 establishments.
Discussing four possible methods of approaching job evaluation the PIB says of the simple "ranking" method, that the first stage is to write a description of each job defining its duties, responsibilities and the qualifications required for its successful performance. "Key jobs" are identified— for instance, the most and the least important jobs, a job midway between the two and others at higher or lower intermediate points. The remaining jobs are then looked at by the evaluation panel and placed in order around the key jobs. Finally, the ranked jobs are put into grades and pay levels for each grade are fixed.
Simple to apply The PIB says of this method that it is easy and simple to apply, especially to small firms. It can be introduced quickly and economically, and it is flexible in operation, but it cannot indicate how much more difficult one job is than another. Hence, assessors cannot easily explain why they have ranked a series of jobs in a certain order.
Another approach, known as grading, starts from the opposite direction; grades are established before the jobs are examined. A number of grades are decided on and grade descriptions prepared. Jobs are then examined, matched against the grade descriptions and slotted into the appropriate grade. The lowest grade, for instance, may cover simple work done under constant supervision. Each succeeding grade recognizes increasing levels of skill and responsibility.
The grading method, says the NB, is simple to apply to a small range of jobs, is comparatively inexpensive, and is readily understood by those whose jobs are examined. But it relies greatly on the judgment of assessors and becomes increasingly hard to apply as the range of jobs widens. It is a valuable technique where jobs are similar in nature but differ in responsibility levels. Since jobs are compared against grade definitions it is a rather less subjective method than ranking.
Analytical methods
The chief value of analytical methods is that they show how much more difficult one job is than another. The points rating system applied to manual workers would have regard to the following:
1. Skill and experience: Education; training; experience in the job; accuracy; dexterity.
2. Mental requirements and responsibility: Reasoning powers; memory; concentration; initiative; teamworking; supervision; responsibility for safety; care of equipment; avoidance of wastage of materials.
3. Physical requirements: Standing; walking; lifting; pulling; pushing; agility; sharpness of vision.
4. Adverse working conditions: At a height; under ground; awkward position; noise; dirt; heat; cold; danger.
Factors vary in the case of staff and managerial jobs, due to the differing nature of the work involved. Education, experience, responsibilities carried, mental and social skills, physical condition and general job requirements, are all relevant factors.
Because some factors are more important than others more weight must be given to them: either more points are allowed for some factors than others or the number of points scored under each factor is multiplied by a predetermined figure.
Once the factors have been defined and weightings established, "key" or "benchmark" jobs are evaluated as reference points. Then, when other jobs have been described and analyzed, they are examined against the factor definitions and benchmark job scores are allotted a points score. The PIB points out that some jobs may score nil under certain factors.
With points rating, the sum of each factor, duly weighted, produces a total points score, so that every job can be given a score and all can be placed in order. Various analyses may be necessary before a grade structure and associated pay levels are decided.
The conclusion of the PIB about points rating is that, properly used, it can be more objective than other methods of job evaluation, but its use of figures "may imply a greater precision than is warranted". But it can be used in many different situations, is very adaptable and can easily be explained to those affected. The assessors can explain . why particular grading decisions have been taken and when jobs change they can be reassessed in detail in a way not allowed with the simpler methods of ranking and grading. But it is slower and more expensive than these methods.
The analytical factor comparison approach uses only five factors—mental, physical and skill requirements, responsibility, and working conditions. Key jobs are selected on the basis that their wage levels appear to be "correct"—fairly related to one another and in line with rates prevailing in the district.
These jobs are analyzed factor by factor, and a decision is made as to how much of the current wage rate for each job is being paid for each factor. With a job paying £16 a week, the mental requirements factor might be put at £4, physical requirements factor at £2, skill £5, responsibility £3 and working conditions £2. (It may be diverting to consider the recent dustmen's strike on this basis!) A scale is prepared for each factor showing the value allotted to each key job in respect of that factor. The remaining jobs are then evaluated factor by factor against these scales, and the sum of all the individual factor values gives the total rate for any job.
The PIB's verdict is that the factor comparison method produces what is virtually an in-built weighting system tying evaluation closely to existing acceptable pay differentials. But the development of such a scheme is complex and not easily explained to employees. Success or failure depends basically on the selection of valid benchmark jobs which are acceptable to management and unions. Although jobs are examined analytically, the system suffers from the defect that job evaluation and the allocation of money values are combined in one process. The advantage of points rating is that the two processes are separated.
Strong reactions Of course it is easy to pooh-pooh the whole idea ofjob evaluation. Despite the sop thrown to individuals—who can be rewarded by merit or seniority plus payments—many workers react strongly against the philosophy of job assessment in terms of relative importance. As the recent strikes of dustmen and rail-guards have shown, when the chips are down the humblest grade of worker can throw a massive spanner into the works.
British industry—and this applies in many sectors of road transport—is hopelessly compromised by its pay structures. Job gradings, certainly job rates of pay, have been greatly influenced over the years by labour shortages—supply and demand factors. How many transport managers can search their hearts and affirm that they have never upgraded a half-skilled fitter to the skilled grade, often with a dollop of merit pay thrown in, in order to retain a useful man? Job evaluation would be much more tenable if it had been introduced at the start of the Industrial Revolution, 150 or more years ago. By now, we might all be conditioned to accepting the pay/status slot decreed for us by our betters—whether the gentlemen in Whitehall or our employers.
This said, it remains true that many industrial relations matters concern the pay and status of individuals. The current trend towards local negotiations provides an opportunity to employers and trade unions to jointly attempt to build more logical and fairer pay structures. It would be a bold man who would assert that claims for area parity will not be made.