Reasons for a Job Evaluation
Job evaluations have many purposes within business organizations. While they may be perceived as focusing only an individual's performance, they actually help the organization take a look at its structure, allowing it to make changes to improve its competitiveness or efficiency. Internally, businesses can perform job evaluations to ensure that the jobs are still relevant and that the employees are still living up to expectations.
One of the primary purposes of a job evaluation is to analyze the needs of the organization. Job evaluations allow managers to perform a "physical" on the health of the business. The evaluation can be company-wide, looking at the needs of the organization as a whole or specific to one position within it, where a business seeks to add or eliminate job duties from a particular position.
Certain jobs in an organization are absolutely critical to the success of the business while others could be classified as collateral. One of the common methods of job evaluation is to compare, contrast and rank the positions in a company against each other, according to resources on Managers-Net.com, an Internet archive of management articles. From a budgetary standpoint, this can be extremely helpful for determining areas where more money or manpower are needed as against those areas that can be cut back or even dropped to save company resources.
Job evaluations permit employers to assess the employees responsible for each particular position. Once a company has ranked and ordered the positions within the company, individual evaluations can provide the information necessary to create or eliminate positions. Also, by evaluating an employee’s job performance, the company can determine if additional compensation or bonuses are needed. In "Conduct a Job Evaluation," Susan Heathfield of Microsoft argues that employees need "clarity about their roles and responsibilities" within the organization in order to know what is expected of them; defining these roles helps improve the evaluation process.
Job evaluations may expose areas in the company that need to be strengthened. A company striving to keep up with the competition may need to add or create new positions. Through subsequent job evaluations, the organization can continue to adapt and grow and keep laying a foundation for the success of the business.