Effective Job Evaluation and Employee Socialization Processes

Understanding the Job Evaluation Process

Job evaluation is performed internally and does not take into account the wage rates in the marketplace or what other firms are doing. It focuses only on the value of the tasks that make up each job.

The 6 Steps of Job Evaluation

1. Conduct Job Analysis: The study of what, how, and why of various tasks that make up the job.
2. Determine Job Specifications: Identify the worker characteristics that an employee must have to perform the job successfully.
3. Write Job Descriptions: Identify, define, and describe each job in terms of duties, responsibilities, and working conditions.
4. Rate the Worth of All Jobs: Use a predetermined system to assess the value of all positions.
5. Create a Job Hierarchy: A listing of jobs in terms of their relative assessed value.
6. Classify Jobs by Grade Levels: The job hierarchy is reduced to a manageable number of grade levels.

Advantages of Job Evaluation

• Rational, objective, and systematic.
• Easy to set up and administer.
• Facilitates the implementation of criteria to explain internal, external, and individual equity.

Disadvantages of Job Evaluation

• Bureaucratic, mechanistic, and inflexible.
• Harder to implement in smaller and younger businesses.
• Harder to maintain in businesses that change frequently.
• Less appropriate at higher levels of an organization.

The Importance of Employee Socialization

Socialization orients new employees to the organization and to the units in which they will be working. Socialization can make the difference between a new worker feeling like an outsider and feeling like a member of the team.

Although many people use the terms orientation and socialization synonymously, we define socialization as a long-term process with several phases that helps employees acclimate themselves to the new organization, understand its culture and the company’s expectations, and settle into the job. We view orientation as a short-term program that informs them about their new position and the company.

The socialization process is often informal and, unfortunately, informal can mean poorly planned and haphazard. A thorough and systematic approach to socializing new employees is necessary if they are to become effective workers. The first step should be an orientation program that helps new employees understand the company’s mission, reporting relationships, and how and why things work.

The Three Phases of Socialization

Socialization can be divided into three phases: (1) anticipatory, (2) encounter, and (3) settling in.

At the anticipatory stage, applicants generally have a variety of expectations about the organization and job based on accounts provided by newspapers and other media, and this can lead to dissatisfaction.