Compliance keeps an organization out of trouble. Structure is what makes it work. The two are the same subject seen from different ends: a pay practice nobody can explain is both an equity problem and a legal one, and a job description that does not match the job is both a hiring problem and a classification problem.
This service addresses the structural side: who does what, what it is worth, how people are selected and promoted, and whether the managers in place can carry the responsibility that has been given to them.
Symptoms
- Two people doing the same work are paid differently and nobody can say why
- Every offer is negotiated from nothing, so pay reflects negotiating skill
- The best individual contributors were promoted into management and are struggling
- Job descriptions were written at hire and never touched again
- Hiring decisions rest on impressions nobody wrote down
Work undertaken
Four areas.
Job architecture
Job descriptions that describe the work as performed, including the physical and scheduling requirements that matter for accommodation analysis; levels that mean something across departments; and a structure that makes exempt classification a documented determination rather than an assumption attached to a title.
Compensation structure
Pay ranges built from market data and internal relationships, rules for where in a range a person sits and what moves them, a defensible answer to why two people are paid differently, and the pay-scale practice California expects of employers at the relevant size.
Hiring and selection
Structured interviews with criteria set in advance, interviewer training on what may not be asked, evaluation recorded at the time, background and reference practice that respects the rules on criminal history inquiries, and offers that do not create obligations nobody intended.
Managers and organization
Training for people who became supervisors without ever being taught to supervise, spans of control that a human being can actually hold, reporting lines that match how decisions are really made, and a design that survives the next twenty hires.
A position
Structure is not bureaucracy.
Small organizations resist this work because it looks like the beginning of the machinery they left larger employers to escape. The objection is fair, and the answer is that the alternative is not freedom. It is arbitrariness.
Where there are no pay ranges, pay is set by who asked. Where there are no criteria, promotion goes to who is most visible to the person deciding. Where there is no written expectation, discipline arrives as a surprise. Every one of those falls hardest on the people with the least standing to object, and each of them is also, incidentally, how discrimination claims are built.
The point of structure is not control. It is that the same question, asked about two different people, gets the same answer.