Grading and Salary Fixation for Employees
Categorizing or grading every employee's designation in an organization, especially in manufacturing companies like steel, cement, sugar, power, chemical, and mines, from Kalassi/Peon to GM/Director (i.e., unskilled to top management) is an important task for the HR department. This should be done in such a way that every employee's qualifications, experiences, and salaries are taken into account to avoid complaints of anomalies later.
It is also crucial that this is done carefully and properly so that the HR department staff, who prepare annual increments, promotions, fitment, benefits, etc., can understand the categorization. This allows them to program it into the computer while making increment and promotion orders with salary grades for hundreds of employees at once.
The salaries should be fixed for each grade/category/level so that employees in each grade have a particular salary range/band in descending order, from GM down to unskilled employees. Such categorization helps the HR department to group all employees from unskilled to top management. It is required for HR, MIS reports, and filing various returns. It will also help interview panel members to fix a particular candidate's designation in a grade matching his salary and post for the new candidate, considering his qualifications and experience vis-à-vis existing employees in the particular department to which the new employee is going to join/recruited, to reduce heartburn and anomaly problems among existing employees later.
Salary fixation for each employee (based on qualification, experience, and job knowledge) is one aspect, whereas fixing his grade/category depending upon his designation is another. The second aspect, i.e., categorizing/grading/grouping hundreds of employees into various grades, is important to determine how many engineers/officers, managers, and mechanics are there at a particular time. State laws require the filing of returns to the District Industries Centre, where the company has to state how many people of the particular state are given jobs, category-wise, such as skilled, supervisor, etc. In Karnataka, every company has to file a KANNADIGAS report to provide statistics of Kannadigas employed in manpower returns quarterly.
I have attempted to categorize all employees' designations as follows (from unskilled to top management in Excel format) so that every employee's designations in labor-intensive units like steel plants are covered in ascending order, starting with:
Un-Skilled, Semi-Skilled, and Skilled (Skilled - 4 Levels like Jr. Operator, Asst. Operator, Operator & Sr. Operator)
Supervisory (4 Levels - Jr. Supervisor, Asst. Supervisor, Supervisor & Sr. Supervisor)
Officers/Engineers (4 Levels – Jr. Officer/Jr. Engineer, Asst. Officer/Engineer, Officer/Engineer, Sr. Officer/Sr. Engineer)
Managers (7 levels – Jr. Manager, Asst. Manager, Dy. Manager, Manager, Sr. Manager, AGM & DGM)
TOP MANAGEMENT (5 Levels – GM, Sr. GM, CGM, AVP, VP, CEO, PRESIDENT, DIRECTOR, E.D. & M.D.)
However, the categorization, levels, and designations could be changed as per the organization's needs and the nature of industries. The position is different in software and other types of companies compared to steel, cement, etc., as stated above.
As salaries will vary depending upon qualifications, experience, location, type of industry, etc., the same can be grouped to fit into appropriate grades. I request respectable Cite HR senior members to review the above and provide us (in a statement form) the types of categorization/grading of all designations available for the benefit of HR managers who need such a list not only for their work but also for convincing senior management whenever salary and designations are to be reviewed/re-fixed. Even though there may not be fixed norms for revision or change, it will be helpful if seniors provide some formats/guidelines that will show categorization/grading of all designations for better presentation, as there is a saying, "something is better than nothing." This will help many HR professionals, just like standard quotations/specifications, comparative statements with rates for products like cars, bikes, etc.
I request Cite HR senior members to provide more information on this important aspect of HR to help HR managers categorize employees for various HR and MIS reports and also for recruitment teams.
Regards,
C.Neyimkhan, HR Consultant, Ex: AGM (HR&A), Hospet, Karnataka, S. India.
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