Questions about Engage.

Engage is a modern factor-based job evaluation methodology and tool used to determine the relative size of roles in an organisation in a structured, transparent, and defensible way. It focuses on the output and demands of the role rather than the person in the role.

Job evaluation is the process of determining the relative worth of one job compared with another inside an organisation by applying a consistent set of factors or criteria. The outcome is usually a grade, which then supports role hierarchy, benchmarking, and pay structure design.

Organisations use job evaluation to create a common language for role size, analyse role and pay relativities, benchmark externally, support fair pay structures, define progression, and improve consistency in role decisions.

Traditional approaches often rely heavily on job descriptions, indirect information, specialist evaluators, and processes that can become slow, bureaucratic, and hard to maintain. Engage is designed to be faster, more transparent, more inclusive, and easier to sustain internally. It can be used without full job descriptions and allows direct role knowledge into the process.

No. Job descriptions can be useful as a reference point, but they are not required. Engage works best when knowledgeable people participate in the evaluation and provide direct understanding of the role. Role descriptions are useful but not critical.

It means the role is evaluated based on what the organisation requires the job to do, not based on the current employee’s performance, personality, capability, tenure, or future potential. Performance and personal capability are separate issues and should not influence role size.

Job evaluation does not consider attitude, personal attributes, performance, future-state ambition, or proficiency of the current incumbent. It also does not by itself determine what an individual should be paid.

The core Engage dimensions are Technical, Managerial, Persuasive, Control, and Impact. These are used together to determine the relative size of the role. Influence can also be used as an alternate grid for certain flexible or person-related assignments.

The Technical grid looks at the knowledge required by the role and how that knowledge is applied. It assesses the depth, breadth, and integration of knowledge needed to perform the role effectively. It is about role design, not the personal qualifications of the current incumbent alone.

The Managerial grid looks at managerial complexity, especially coordination and business decision-making. It focuses on management in the role, not just supervision labels, and is concerned with decisions the role is actually permitted to make.

The Persuasive grid looks at how the role influences others. It includes general communication, collaborative selling, and individual selling depending on the nature of the role. For sales roles, upper parts of the grid are relevant; for most other roles, general communication is more relevant.

The Control grid looks at staff reporting, sites controlled, and related organisational control. It includes direct and indirect employees, but excludes dotted-line relationships. It focuses on the actual scope of organisational control in the role.

The Impact grid considers the importance and context of the role to the business, including the level of responsibility and reporting level. It looks at how the role affects the organisation’s operations, development, or strategic direction.

Influence is used as an alternate grid to Impact for more flexible roles and largely person-related assignments, particularly where projection and leadership influence are more central than standard structural impact.

Engage is designed to be fast and easy to use, with “5 judgments, 5 minutes” as a working principle. In practice, the exact time depends on the quality of role knowledge in the room and the complexity of the role, but the method is intended to be significantly quicker than many traditional approaches.

It means evaluators should look for the highest reasonable box or level that the role can genuinely justify, rather than marking conservatively by default. It is often easier to agree on what the role is not than what it is.

Engage uses factor-based structured judgment and algorithmic conversion, but it is not intended to feel like a mysterious black-box score. The process is designed to be transparent, with visible reasoning behind the judgments and their eventual conversion into grades.

Each role is evaluated across the relevant grids. The combination of references, together with weightings, is processed through an algorithm that converts the overall output into a grade. That grade can then be aligned to internal or external grading systems such as IPE, Hay, Patterson, TASK, or client-specific systems.

Yes. Results can be provided in the client’s grading platform of choice, including current in-house systems and global systems.

Ideally, a trained evaluation committee with Human Capital and representative business members should be involved. Engage works best when people with direct knowledge of the work participate, rather than relying only on indirect job documentation.

Traditional methods often exclude first-hand understanding and rely too heavily on position descriptions written by others. Engage is designed to include direct role knowledge because this improves accuracy, credibility, and trust in outcomes.

They can. One implementation approach involves multiple people performing the job, which increases buy-in and inclusiveness. Another uses a representative central committee, which can be faster but may reduce direct buy-in.

The executive session introduces executives to Engage, explains how role evaluation supports fair pay, agrees terms and definitions, discusses how executives can support the process, and often evaluates and sense-checks executive roles.

Briefing sessions help inform employees who may not be directly involved in evaluation sessions. They create awareness, answer questions, support transparency, and improve confidence in the process.

A sense check session compares roles against each other by grid references and grade, reviews changes, tests whether the outcomes make sense across the structure, and allows revisions where needed. It is a key quality-control step in the process.

A loop back session is used to communicate sense-check changes back to affected attendees and to allow them to challenge or comment on revised outcomes. It supports an open, dialogue-based process and helps improve transparency and buy-in.

Job evaluation supports pay by creating job grades, which enable market benchmarking and the design of fair pay structures. It helps determine the position component of pay, but pay decisions should also consider the person and performance.

Not automatically. A higher grade indicates a larger role, which usually influences the reference salary and pay range, but actual pay decisions also consider market position, person factors, and performance. Grading alone does not dictate what individuals should be paid.

After grading, organisations typically move into implementation activities such as title alignment, grade movement analysis, communication, line manager upskilling, appeals handling, and job evaluation policy development. Implementation support and policy are important value-adds.

Transparency matters because people tend to criticise what they do not understand, and because grading is often a sensitive part of change. This is not intended to be a black box. Transparency builds trust, reduces suspicion, and strengthens the process overall.