📝 Workday comp grade thoughts
One of my first projects at my new job was a first for me - fixing the compensation grades, profiles, and ranges. There's a lot of lesson's learned I want to write about, but the first was:
What do Workday compensation grades do and drive?
My research:
- Search Workday Community.
- Spend 30-90 minutes searching posts and finding very little conclusive evidence.
- Phone a friend or two who'd done this before consulting for their take.
The answer:
My super amazing consultant friend was able to distill it into a single sentence–
Compensation grades group jobs that you pay the same.
I didn't immediately understand what she meant. I understood it better with an example:
Blue Dot is a large consulting company that supports ERPs, like Workday and Oracle. Blue Dot pays the same for a job regardless of the ERP they support. A Workday consultant and an Oracle consultant are paid the same. So... John the 'Workday Consultant' and Jane the 'Oracle Consultant' likely have different job profiles, but the same grade.
What about geographic differences in pay? If they pay the same by region, use grade profiles. If not, then you may need separate job profiles, grades, or something totally different.
What does Workday say?
Nothing definitive. There is a Community Post out there titled, Build a Job Catalog to Stand the Test of Time. In it was a decision tree for grades:
- Do you associate ranges or guidelines to jobs at all?
- If no, then use two grades,
HourlyandSalary(assuming every country on any job profile has the same pay rate). - Do you have existing grades, bands, or levels that could define grades?
- If yes, then your grades, bands, and/or levels should be the grades.
- Do you "market price" individual jobs?
- If yes, then you will have 1 grade for every job profile.