Job Evaluation - conspiracy or cock-up?
The Corporation's current campaign to demonstrate that it is consulting staff about its new job evaluation scheme may serve that purpose. However, the impression on most of those attending its "Roadshow" sessions has been that the project threatens the long-serving and conceals the method of its operation.
Over a year since its announcement, the sessions reveal that significant features have been dropped or are still to be agreed.
UNISON's view is that this could have been avoided if the Corporation had adopted the new scheme negotiated by the majority of other local authorities and all three public service unions (T&GWU, GMB and UNISON) - for the link to the National Joint Council (NJC) scheme click here.
A particular concern is that the Corporation's stance of insisting that the implementation of the scheme must be cost-neutral is against the guidelines of the NJC agreement.
What staff attending the sessions did learn about the Corporation's scheme is as follows.
The objects of the scheme are:
1. to update our present 15 year-old one and, in particular, to get rid of overlapping salary points between grades
2. to ensure compliance with Equal Opportunities legislation
3. to reduce the total number of grades from 19 to between 10 and 12
4. additional bonus payments are to be introduced in 2007 - the bonus scheme is still at the "initial thoughts" stage (!)
5. implementation of the scheme is to be cost-neutral
6. 100 benchmark posts have been identified but their grading has yet to be agreed
7. 600 posts nominated by departments will be evaluated by November 2005
8. there will follow a "matching exercise" to slot in all other posts by May 2006
9. contrary to initial expectations, and in contrast to most other local authorities' practice, SAGE software will not be the means of the evaluation. The Corporation will use pro-forma questionnaires.
10. between 15 and 20 staff will be trained as "facilitators"
11. 600 information packs are being prepared for evaluated post-holders
12. it is the responsibility of individuals to make sure their departments have an up-to-date job description for their posts
13. the present Job Evaluation scheme's provisions will cease September 2005 and there will be a gap between then and the operation of the new scheme
14. it remains to be agreed that any protection of individual post-holders will be phased out (with individual variations!) over three years - 5 years if the remaining difference between the new salary and the prior one is greater than 10% after the three year period (sic)
15. because the implementation has to be cost-neutral, any additional salary cost due to upgrading will have to be balanced by redundancies
16. post-holders given new grades will keep the relative incremental point on their old grade
17. a booklet will be published "this summer" giving the scheme's evaluation criteria
18. if any jobs are found which cannot be slotted in among the 600 evaluated, more evaluations will take place - no method was given as to how such posts might be identified
19. any queries about the identification of the 600 posts must be addressed to individual departments since they are the selectors
20. market forces supplements will be maintained for as long as the market conditions obtain
21. the scheme is purely internal to the Corporation - no comparison is made to jobs outside the Corporation
22. any recent changes to grading may still be affected by the new evaluation
UNISON comment
The projected sure-fire, computer-based, new Corporation job evaluation scheme has taken over a year to reach a stage at which
1. the scheme's details are still not available to staff
2. the use of computer software has been dropped
3. the grading of benchmarks has still not been agreed
4. no evaluations have taken place
5. no agreement has been reached about the protection of downgraded posts
This poor result may not be the fault of the Town Clerk's staff who had the job of implementing the scheme, but it is a result which could easily have been avoided by choosing the National Joint Council scheme which everyone else uses - already equality-tested, running on GUAGE software, and giving plenty of case-studies to draw on.
Why the Corporation has chosen to tread its own muddling path in this is a matter for conjecture.
Conspiracy theory offers the explanation that it considers the scheme so threatening that its details must remain hidden from staff until the last moment - hardly a conducive approach for an authority hell-bent on acquiring Investors in People accreditation.
The cock-up interpretation is that, whoever made the choice of an untried, bespoke scheme did so out of some pretentious belief in the Corporation's uniqueness and trusting in the acquiescence of a compliant workforce and tame trade unions - then simply couldn't make it work. In this version, no doubt, the culprits also trust that those employees charged with the implementation of the scheme will bear the blame of failure!
