Streamlining Your Small Business with Job Evaluations

As a small business owner, you want to keep your employees happy so they can perform at their peak and stay around longer. One of the factors that contribute to employee satisfaction is accurate pay—offering a salary that’s competitive for the industry and makes sense in comparison to their coworkers' responsibilities. 

To ensure you’re providing the right compensation for the job responsibilities, you need to conduct a job evaluation. Job evaluations offer a structured approach to leveling roles, benchmarking pay, and optimizing organizational structure. 

Quick definitions:
A job evaluation is a systematic process for defining the value of the different roles in your business. The goal is to compare them against each other and develop a structure to provide fair compensation. This way, every job gets paid what they deserve in terms of responsibilities, experience, and seniority. This is different from a performance evaluation because you’re not valuing the person but the job. 

This article breaks down the key benefits of job evaluation for small businesses, explores typical methods to conduct one, and offers practical tips for getting started—even with limited resources.

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Job evaluations. Don't skip them.

Conducting job evaluations doesn’t only help you guarantee accurate pay, they also allow you to: 

Quick overview of job evaluation methods

You can evaluate your jobs using different methods. These can be qualitative or quantitative and will help you assess the value of each role so you can rank them accurately. 

Qualitative methods: 

Quantitative methods:

How to conduct a job evaluation

Conducting a job evaluation means following a systematic process to determine the relative worth of various jobs within your business and pay them accurately. Remember, you’re not evaluating the person in the role, you’re assessing the job itself.

Here's a step-by-step guide to conducting a job evaluation:

It’s crucial that you come up with objective and accurate descriptions and assessments of each job. Here’s when reminding yourself and your team that you’re evaluating jobs and not people come in handy. It’s beneficial to involve HR professionals or external consultants, especially if you are conducting this process for the first time.

Link job evaluations to company strategy

As we’ve seen throughout the article, conducting job evaluations isn’t enough to become a fair and equitable employer. You need to use those findings to change your internal processes and strategy—and you should get approval from the owner or directors before you even start conducting evaluations. 

Then, make sure you use the job evaluation results to: 

How to use job evaluations to identify structural gaps

Job evaluations will likely reveal gaps in your organization’s structure. Picture this: You own a coffee shop and you identify that your job description for baristas doesn’t ask for a food hygiene certificate. This would be fine if you were only serving coffee, but since you’re now offering lunch and your baristas work near the cooks, you can’t risk cross-contamination. A job evaluation might force you to train your baristas on food hygiene or hire new ones with said certification.  

But you might also discover that you’re not paying people accurately for their responsibilities. This might be the case if you asked one person to cover multiple roles and ended up becoming a new position but with the same pay. 

Or you might find out that you have different job names that are essentially the same or jobs that could benefit from automation. For instance, let’s say your branch manager manually enters the punch card data into the system every Friday. Surely, you want the person in this role to have time to mentor the staff, streamline the processes, and talk to suppliers. A job evaluation could show you how you need to restructure the job description and where to leverage tools.

In the previous example, you could automate time tracking with Homebase’s time clock. There, employees can clock in and out of work from an app, get the manager to review and approve the timesheets in a couple of clicks, and send it over to payroll in minutes. This way, you can hire or train your branch manager to focus on other valuable responsibilities.

Job evaluation: Should I conduct one?

Job evaluations help you offer accurate pay to your staff, but they also help you streamline your business structure as you get to identify structural issues. This process, different from individual performance evaluations, focuses on assessing the job itself, not the person performing it. So, job evaluations help you review your operations and processes. 

By conducting thorough job evaluations, you can align roles and responsibilities with your business needs, redefine job descriptions, optimize your organizational structure, and benchmark compensation against industry standards. This ensures that each role is fairly compensated based on responsibilities, experience, and seniority, fostering a transparent and equitable work environment.

If you're ready to optimize your small business resources, offer competitive pay, and have clearly defined job descriptions, consider using tools to automate processes found during the evaluation. 

Using Homebase to get rid of manual HR tasks invites you to rethink certain jobs, reduce headcounts, and use the money to compensate your people better. Homebase offers a range of tools that are specifically designed for small businesses, helping you streamline your HR processes and align your workforce with your strategic goals. Plus, if you need help conducting your evaluations, an HR expert can hop on a call with you and advise you on how to proceed.

Your people make your business, don’t skip the processes that benefit them.