What Team & Plan do I need for my Job Architecture Project?
SkillsTrust
• 4 minute read
Short answer: To build a job architecture for the EU Pay Transparency Directive, you need a project team with five roles: an executive sponsor, a project lead, a job architecture owner, a job evaluation working group and a pay data lead. You also need a time-boxed plan of roughly six to eight weeks for the initial build and a governance process to keep the architecture current afterwards. You do not necessarily need an in-house Rewards function. A capable generalist HR team, with the right structure and tooling, can get this done.
If you have landed here, you have probably already accepted the uncomfortable truth: job architecture is the foundation of Pay Transparency Directive compliance, and there is no way around it. The directive requires you to group your jobs by "work of equal value," and a job architecture is the structure that lets you do that in a way that you can explain and defend when an employee asks, "Why is my job at this level?"
The good news is that the who and the how of this project are far more straightforward than most people expect. Below is the team and the plan we recommend based on what we have seen work across dozens of companies.
Who needs to be on a job architecture project team?
Job architecture is one workstream within your overall pay transparency rollout. Check out our EU Pay Transparency Roadmap for a step-by-step guide to implementing pay transparency in your organisation.
Job architecture is a technical sub-project, and it needs a small dedicated project team. These are five important roles:
1. Executive sponsor — typically your CHRO or CPO
Typically, your most senior HR leader. They are ultimately accountable for compliance, they sign off on the job architecture, and they are usually the ones briefing the board and the executive team on the topic.
2. Project lead — typically your Head of HR
This is the person running the full pay transparency rollout on a day to day basis. In a smaller organisation this may be the same person as the sponsor. In a larger one, it is usually a separate role and often the Head of HR.
3. Job architecture owner — typically an experienced mid-level HR executive
Job architecture involves a fairly high degree of complexity. It is important that there is one person accountable for overseeing the details. This is the role most people overlook, but it is arguably the most important on the team.
During implementation, this person manages the details of the job architecture build. They deeply understand the job evaluation methodology and how the relativities between jobs come together. This role requires someone who knows the organisation, is familiar with the many different kinds of jobs in it, and has the capacity to get into the weeds.
Importantly, this role does not end when the initial job architecture set-up project is complete. The job architecture owner is the frontline for governance decisions afterwards, so selecting the right person here and ensuring that they have sufficient capacity is very important.
4. Job evaluation working group — varies by company
The architecture shouldn't just be built by one person behind closed doors; it needs consultation to ensure that job evaluation scores faithfully reflect the reality of roles across the organisation.
The EU guidelines describe a gold-plated approach: a gender-balanced group of five people from across the company, including employee representatives, who each score all jobs independently and then come together to calibrate all scores. This is an extremely labour-intensive approach. If you can do that, wonderful. But for most companies, that is simply not achievable with the resources available.
A pragmatic take on validation
Here is the approach we have seen work well in practice:
Start small. Get a first version of the job architecture built by a compact evaluation group — perhaps your HR business partners, who between them understand the different corners of the business. Get that version one up and running over a defined period. Then start your wider consultation: with executives, employee representatives, managers, and so on.
You should absolutely expect multiple rounds of consultation as you roll this out. Keeping the initial group small is what keeps the project moving.
5. Pay data lead — typically a Payroll or Finance executive
This is the person who prepares the pay data that is combined with the job architecture to enable pay gap analysis, and who can answer questions about data quality. Note that pay gap reporting under the directive should be run on payroll data, not contractual pay data. The Pay Data Lead is often brought in from Payroll or Finance to support this project.
What does the implementation plan look like?
Once you have your team in place, the implementation itself is a sequence of steps:
Select your job evaluation methodology and scoring tool. If you are unsure about which job evaluation approach to choose, start by reviewing the EU Guidelines for Gender-Neutral Job Evaluation. This is a practical set of resources for companies by headcount. For companies with more than 15 job roles or more than 250 employees, the recommended approach is the point factor method. You can administer this in Excel or for a less administratively burdensome experience, use it in purpose-built software.
Set up and train the team on the methodology.
Gather or create job profiles for each job covering skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions demands. Check out our article on what a job profile should include.
Carry out preliminary evaluation of the jobs against the four factors.
Validate the scores through the validation process described above.
Those steps get you to a first version of your job architecture. You can use this to run your first dry-run pay gap report and see if you have any job categories with a gender pay gap of 5% or more.
How long should it take?
In our experience, aim to run the initial job architecture build as a six-to-eight-week sprint. These projects have a tendency to sprawl and become draining. A time-boxed sprint with pace behind it is one of the best predictors of getting to the finish line.
The biggest constraint on hitting that timeline is having your job profiles and pay data ready to go, and having your team available to do the validation. If you can plan for data and team availability up front, the sprint becomes very achievable.
Don't forget: the day you finish is the day it starts to go stale
Job architecture is a significant upfront investment, and once in place it is valuable well beyond compliance (ex. workforce planning, career frameworks). But it is only useful if kept current, and the business will keep moving the moment you finish.
Check out our job architecture governance guide for more information on maintaining a job architecture over time.
Do I need outside support to set up my job architecture?
If you have a strong compensation team that already knows job evaluation, you may need very little outside support.
If, like many companies with even several hundred employees, you have a team of HR generalists, you may want support across some or all of the steps above.
Four questions are worth asking before you decide on the right type of support:
Cost: What can you afford, whether that is a Rewards hire, a consultant, or software?
Defensibility: Will the type of support you select ensure that your job architecture is compliant? Will it map to the directive's four factors so you can demonstrate that your jobs are grouped by work of equal value?
Effort: How much internal time will it demand from your team? For example, how quick and easy will it be for your working group to contribute feedback on evaluated jobs?
Future-proofing: If you spend money on support, will it be a one-off temporary fix or will it leave you with a system you can maintain over time?
It is definitely possible to run this in-house with the EU's Excel toolkits if your budget is very tight, especially in a smaller company. It is a lot of manual work, and version control and collaboration across dozens of job profiles get painful quickly, but it is possible.
If you go the software route, watch out for two things in particular: many general HRIS pay-gap modules assume you have already built a job architecture and give you nowhere to store, maintain or collaborate on your scoring. Many work from contractual pay data rather than payroll data which means that you still have a significant exercise in-house to map and analyse payroll data for pay gap reporting.
Whatever you choose, the point is the same: If you are putting in the time, effort and money, make sure what you end up with is defensible and durable.
The bottom line
You do not need a specialist Rewards function to build a job architecture for the Pay Transparency Directive. You need a well defined team and a six-to-eight-week sprint with your data ready in advance, and a simple governance process to keep it fresh afterwards. Get the team and the plan right, and the hardest part of compliance becomes manageable.
If you’re working through this and want to sense-check your approach, just drop us a line. We’re happy to chat.
Book a call or email us info@skillstrust.org
