General Consultancy & Strategy
Organisational work that changes the structure itself: grading, pay architecture, policy, succession and the operating model behind them.
Employers who cannot explain, in writing, why two staff are paid differently.
What the work covers
- Job analysis, job descriptions and job evaluation (HAY-MSL, Peromnes, computer-aided)
- Salary surveys, salary scale design and rationalisation
- HR policy and procedures manuals
- Organisational structure review and restructuring
- Succession planning and talent review
- Mission, vision and core values facilitation
- Change management support
What you are left holding
- Job descriptions for every role in scope
- Grading structure and salary scale with minima, midpoints and maxima
- Implementation cost and phasing plan
- HR policy and procedures manual
The work in detail
This is the structural work: what the jobs are, how they rank against each other, what each grade should pay, and which policies hold it all together. Clients usually arrive with a symptom rather than a diagnosis: unexplainable pay differences, a structure nobody can draw, staff turnover concentrated in one band, or a board asking why the wage bill grew faster than the headcount.
The sequence matters and it is often attempted in the wrong order. Job analysis comes first, producing descriptions of the work as it is actually performed. Job evaluation then ranks the jobs, not the people, applying the same factors (knowledge, problem solving, accountability, working conditions) to every role in scope, using recognised methods such as HAY-MSL, Peromnes or computer-aided evaluation. Only after grades exist does market data help, because a salary survey answers a question about a graded job rather than about a job title.
The uncomfortable step is plotting current pay against the new structure. Almost every organisation finds a few long-serving staff above their band and a cluster of recent hires below it. That picture is the evidence for change, and we cost the correction and phase it. Those below the minimum come up first and those above the maximum are frozen rather than cut, so the plan is affordable and can be announced with a straight face.
General Consultancy & Strategy
Scenarios, for reference
Two officers, same work, different pay
A bank could not explain why two officers doing comparable work were paid differently, and a grievance had been filed. Job evaluation established that the roles were in fact of equal weight, the anomaly was quantified across the whole structure, and a phased scale corrected it over two cycles rather than in one disputed year.
A wage bill growing faster than the establishment
An agency’s payroll had drifted because every appointment was negotiated individually. We built a grading structure and scale with defined minima and maxima, so subsequent offers followed a rule instead of a negotiation.
A restructuring nobody could implement
An organisation had an approved new structure and no job descriptions to fill it with. We wrote descriptions for every post, mapped existing staff against them, and identified where redeployment was possible and where recruitment was unavoidable.