Do you find at times you feel forced to give inadequate answers about questions about progression and pay policies, or what skills a person needs to work on/demonstrate to get to the next level?  In early phase start up the scrappy all-hands-on-deck kind of structure inherently gives employees a sense of stretch as they progress exposure to new and different challenges and opportunities for new role duties emerge with the companies growth. But as you scale and roles become more streamlined, there is a risk your employees will start feeling like their roles are stagnating or not really going anywhere.  Unless you or your managers can get more purposeful with your progression process, the great resignation may continue to bite harder than you think in the coming years.

Progression is a term that encompasses promotions, pay rises and personal development.  Commonly businesses focus first on supporting the personal development of their team members through 1:1 monthly development review check-ins and goal setting, with a smattering of exposure, education and experience activities in support.  But the reality is, many of us SMBs are failing to adequately provide clarity or guidelines (aside from subjective opinion) around how progression is handled inside that particular business.  Employees are therefore commonly having the following questions unanswered:

  • What do I have to do to progress? What standard do I need to meet to get promoted or am I already at the top of where I can grow to here?
  • When will I progress? How long do people expect me to stay in this role? When will I be considered for promotion?
  • When do I talk about progression? What conversations and meetings are “appropriate” places to discuss my development and progression? Does my manager have all the answers they need or will I be yo-yo’d between them, HR and the MD?
  • Where can progression lead me? Can I only progress here if I become a manager? What roles and responsibilities can I grow into?  What can I expect to earn if I progress?

Assessing value creation

Ideally, promotions and pay rises should be based on the value creation of the role holder.  It is challenging to do this perfectly, but having a more consistent and objective framework to define how promotions work and what conditions need to be achieved helps mitigate against the tendency to base this on factors such as how long someone has been here or vague instincts about whether someone was ‘ready’.

So – what’s the solution?  If this is a topic you want to tackle in your business, then ideally you need a career progression framework – ideally including pathways for your ICs as well as People Managers to grow and progress.

This is not a small undertaking, nor a one-off exercise but it is a valuable one to under take as a major project, with potentially major rewards.

It involves defining every possible role at your company, showing everyone what roles they could progress to and what they need to do or demonstrate to get there.  In doing so you will have to define (and possibly modify) the entire team’s roles, titles, responsibilities, salaries and career paths, and calibrate into a coherent alignment.

If you are looking to retain your staff or boost your candidate attraction, then making a progression framework your priority will serve you well.  The earlier you get it in place, the easier it is.  Typically HR Optimisation suggests it is time to start tinking about this kind of framework when you hit 30+ employees and ideally before you hit 80.

The purpose of a career framework

Monzo have a great example of an Engineering progression framework and neatly summarise that Progression frameworks have three purposes:

  1. They help everyone that works at your company understand where they are at the moment, and take ownership of their progression.

If you know where you sit on a framework, you can set and work towards goals that’ll take you to the next level whether that’s as a people manager or an individual contribtor

  1. They better equip managers to have more productive conversations about progression with the people they manage.

Discussing progression is easier if what’s expected of you is clear. Managers can use these frameworks to support people to set personal development goals. And it also assures everyone that all managers are using the same tools to assess their performance so there is more consistency across your company.

  1. They help you make sure you are taking a consistent approach to the way you assess how people are performing, and how you are compensating them.

Using frameworks and making them transparent means managers can evaluate people’s performance against a common set of criteria.  Once embedded, if your career framework is the only tool against which you determine job level entry points, progression, and pay grades then your employees will sit up and take notice and really use this as a powerful tool.

Although it’s impossible to be totally scientific (especially for example a unique role in your business that has never been hired before, or someone has specialist skills that aren’t widely available), having a guide that managers and DRs share helps make things more consistent.

 

How to get started on developing your framework

For some ideas and inspiration in starting your career framework I suggest checking out the open source collection available via progression.fyi ,   Buffer and Monzo.

Your HR Optimisation consultant Hannah Powell is on hand to help support, guide or project manage as it can be a meaty piece of work to define, calibrate and roll-out your company’s job levelling and career progression framework.  The result?  You’ll have a more consistent and objective framework to define how promotions work and what conditions need to be achieved to be successful in current and next role.  It will enable you to talk with more confidence about how to progress in role, to the next level, and better explain comp decisions, in turn this typically will dial-up employee engagement and give people better inspiration, clarity and certainty that they have a longer term career future at your company.

Be prepared that this is not a one-off project exercise and job levels, key behaviours and inter-rater consistency need regular monitoring, and likely this project will be delivered in phases, with you going deeper  and more granular over time into role specific (rather than just level specific) career pathways as both the model and the business matures.

For help with your career framework’s please contact us on hello@HROptimisation.co.uk to arrange a free no-obligation chat.

 

 

 

Hannah Powell