CTIL

Their challenge

CTIL was formed in 2012 as a joint venture between Telefonica (O2) and Vodafone to create a shared network to enable 4G rollout and the reduction of operating costs. Employees moved across from Shareholder organisations and new people joined the business, both as permanent employees and contractors. This meant there was a wide variety of terms and conditions within a relatively small company (CTIL employs circa 100 permanent staff and a further 100 contractors.)

In order to create the conditions for the organisation to be effective, it was necessary to create an aligned struce, clear accountabilities, and to review the approach to pay and reward. This was a clear element in the HR Strategy, created by Lisa Marsh, when she joined as HR Director in November 2013.

Our solution

Under Lisa’s leadership, Project Manager Sarah Martyn was tasked with creating a unifying reward structure - with so many job titles, grades and contracts this initially appeared a labyrinthine task. Sarah says: "Innecto introduced us to its Evaluate™ tool which was just right for our needs: simple to understand, user friendly and straightforward. Most importantly it would give us the independence to be able to make sense internally of our roles and job levels."

Evaluate™ is a simple yet powerful cloud-based job evaluation tool developed by Innecto using its extensive reward experience and expertise. It applies logic to the complex process of creating a job structure: the user answers true or false to a series of statements about various factors in relation to a particular role. At the end an overall job evaluation result is given. The factors are generic and apply equally to roles across functions meaning that once multiple roles have been evaluated, the user can start to map out a structure of job levels throughout an organisation.

Sarah says "Evaluate™ captures roles really well enabling us to find the best fit even for supposed unique roles. We have pretty much assimilated Evaluate™ language at CTIL, using the descriptors when we talk about new roles. Being able to articulate job levels clearly has given us so much more clarity than we had before."

Key to the success of embedding the new job structure in the organisation was involving line managers. "Collaboration is a big focus at CTIL," says Sarah. "The annual engagement survey previously showed that people didn't understand how they were rewarded or whether they were getting a fair deal so we wanted to work with managers to address that."

The outcome

The People team worked with Innecto to set up some initial job evaluation workshops made up of HR colleagues and representative managers from across the business. They then moved to wider workshops, organised by function and inclusive of all line managers. "We gave them the information they needed and then let them work together to write job descriptions," says Sarah. "We evaluated the roles within the People team using Evaluate™ and validated the results with managers. This was such an important stage - the final outcome of the pay review would be directly linked to this point and we really wanted managers to feel invested in the decisions."

Innecto advised CTIL on the best salary survey match, analysed roles and pay against the market and provided a proposal for global grading and pay ranges. After further discussion with line managers, this was signed off by the senior team, and used in the annual pay review which went very smoothly, largely because managers had been involved in the process that led to the final decisions. In the few instances where objections were raised, HR were able to sit down with the managers and review the background. In each case, the original proposal was agreed.

Sarah says: "Having the intelligence to back up our decisions about pay and grading is a huge advantage moving forward. We are properly informed about the reward market and our position in it. We can be transparent in conversations about pay and also confident in challenging demands for more pay.

"We now have a robust framework that will feed into performance management, talent development and training needs. It has enabled us to look at organisational effectiveness and design. It has informed decisions which are critical to our next steps, shaping up for the future as we transition towards a more steady state business”