Today is job evaluation and salary benchmarking of a small number of finance roles for a client. I evaluate the roles and sense check the outcomes against our database for the client, and the central database. I call Andy up on teams and chat about the outcomes. Whilst we are looking at the income recovery officer role, Andy reminds me that he has just done a similar role for another client, and we look at that one together. Happy with the scores, I pull in the benchmarking data the team have collated. Our fabulous Kickstart team are great at collecting job data off the internet and we pull in all the data from our other resources. I sense check what we have and look to see what trends we can observe from the comparator roles. Then I pull up a template and put all the information into the report. At that point I park it – I like to go back and read it cold before I send it out.

 

I pick up a couple of calls from my phone and check WhatsApp and Teams for other messages while I’m making another drink. It’s raining, so I won’t be going for my usual walk at lunchtime, but I will make sure I take a break then. 

I touch base with Lindsay, at Menzies Law and we talk about work I’ve completed for them. She’s been talking to a potential client, and we arrange for a call. After the call we will compare notes and pull together a quote, but that won’t be until next week now. 

 

After lunch, I pick up the queries from a pay structure review meeting I had with another client. I have selected the three options I believe will suit their needs and have costed out the impact. I plot the job scores and current salaries in a chart and then overlay different type of structure to see what fits naturally. I also consider the client’s preferences (no point doing a lot of work on an option they hate). I like to cost by individual where possible, but we can always do it on FTE per role if it’s easier for the client. This one is by individual. I work through the options identifying the impact on the individual job holders. Who gets the largest increases, who gets the smallest. I tweak the options until I feel I’ve got the best possible outcome and then create some visuals in PowerPoint with the results and send them over to the HR Director for her comments. If she is happy, she will send them on requesting confirmation of which option they prefer. We book a call to talk about next steps and arrange for me to visit and talk to their staff group about it.

 

I call Brandon my Kickstarter on Teams and check he’s ok with his workload. Being a Kickstarter with RRM is not an easy journey – we’ve had them doing real work from day one and the best way I can express the impact is this – every twenty-five hours they spend researching jobs on the internet is three days’ worth of time back for me. It’s made a huge difference to us. We’ve had them working on benchmarking jobs, collating, and updating job descriptions, updating our databases, and writing reports on a variety of reward and HR topics, and generally working together as a team to get the urgent stuff done. But this is real work, sometimes it’s boring and sometimes it’s interesting. However, there is always plenty of it. I remind Brandon to find some excel training. I cannot emphasise enough how important excel is for our business and I am happy to pay for some training to get the additional skills he needs – he knows some of the good stuff, but there is so much more he could be doing in excel (and to be honest, I think he enjoys the challenge!).

 

I pick up a few more emails before going back to the client report and checking it one last time before I send it out. 

 

I take some time to review my actions from my business plan and then pick up emails with the steering group regarding the next BIISN networking meeting I’m chairing. It’s not the first networking event I’ve chaired, but we’ve got a challenge with this group because a large number of students from an overseas university are coming along. It’s good because we are an international group, but we need to ensure they get the most out of the meeting without disrupting it for all the other attendees. The meeting starts with an interview and the steering group member that arranged this one, has confirmed the topic and interviewee so I’m comfortable I have everything I need for that. So, agenda/script – tick, interview – tick, attendees – tick.

 

Brandon drops me a quick chat message to say he’s done for the day. Then I meet on zoom with the provider to talk about the work for digitising the capability matrix model. This model has been built in excel and it aligns the client’s strategy to a set of corporate capabilities, so that they can measure individual and organisation performance and see where the gaps are. The RAG rated outcomes for the reports give a quick and easy visual image of the gaps for any cohort group the client selects. Digitising it will make it so much easier for the client to use as they will be able to access it online (and of course remove the reliance on our VBA coding skills).

 

One last chat on Teams with Andy and the day is nearly done. I check my to do list for the morning – and highlight the item I’ll need to do first. Then I switch off the screen and head down to the kitchen for dinner.