Need Suggestions For Revised Grading

My company had broad categories of Executive, Officers, Managers ( in ascending order). Within each there are 4-5 grading ranging from Asst. to Sr.
Being an MNC, recently there was a confusion at corporate level regarding officers grading and Chief Executive Officer designation. Hence we want to relook at our grading structure and either substitute Officers with a similar nomenclature or look at broadening the Executive category and eliminate 'Officer' grading.
Request suggestions from u guys based on your experiences and the current grading & designation structures in ur organisations.

Dear Nirmala,

I assume from your description of the case that you have designations like Asst.Excecutive, Junior Executive, Exceutive, Senior Executive, Asst. Officer, Junior Officer, Officer, Senior Officer, Asst.Manager, Deputy Manager, Manager, Senior Manager so on and so forth.

You are looking at minimising the job titles, by eliminating either the designations containing the term 'officer' or 'executive' and having one common title for both categories.

When you are undertaking such excercise, it is better to look at all the designations for the purpose of reducing the number of designations in the company and also for coming out with few layers in the organisation structure and possible broadbanding of salary grades in future.

You can probably think of using the title 'Associate' in lieu of 'Executive' or 'Officer'. Also, eliminate the words 'Assistant', 'Junior', 'Senior' etc. from the job titles. Instead, you can have, for instant, titles such as - Associate-HR(Grade A), Associate-Materials(Grade C), Assocaite - Finance(Grade B) etc. The grades A, B, C etc. need not be mentioned in the business cards of these employees or in any routine document except in the office order communicating the change of designation to the individual employees. This means, all are associates, but they know for themselves what grade they are into.

All the 'Officer' and 'Executive' designations could be replaced as above.

You may probably retain designations with the term 'manager' contained therein, but possibly reduce the levels like Junior, Assistant, Deputy, Senior etc., if you have so many. Or, alternatively, anybody other than the manager or above, but in the categories from Junior Manager to Deputy Manager, could be redeignated as Senior Associate with appropriate grades followed by as in the case of associates.

For your information, in a reputed auto ancillary company in Chennai, all from Assistant to Manager of every dept. are designated as ' Members'. They carry designations like 'Member-Production', 'Member-HR'

What I have given you only are few suggestions, and you may have to choose a way that is acceptable to your top management.

Regards,

Govardhan