A colleague and I made a rookie mistake in our very first work system redesign project.
Through a great deal of joint effort over many months, the organization had been transformed from a traditional assembly line where workers could only perform a few narrowly prescribed tasks to a high performance work system where, among other things, workers could:
- Build the entire product from beginning to end individually.
- Manage all aspects of process and product quality.
- Plan and execute their own daily and weekly production schedule.
- Continuously improve and innovate the process and the organization.
All of these activities happened in self-managed teams. It was a huge transformation for the organization and its team members.
It became evident pretty quickly that paying people according to their old pay grades, based on now outdated job classifications, no longer made sense.
The organization needed to pay people for acquired and applied skill. The client needed a skill-based pay plan.
Along with the client, we gave ourselves a crash course in skill-based pay plans and even sketched out a framework for what we needed. Armed with our homework, we met with the Director of Compensation in HR, confident that he would see the misalignment as we saw it and come to our aid in putting a solution in place.
His reaction surprised us.
