Job Evaluation – Meaning and its Benefits to the Organization

Job evaluation is a process of determining the relative worth of a job. It is a process which is helpful even for framing compensation plans by the personnel manager. Job evaluation as a process is advantageous to a company in many ways:

1. Reduction in inequalities in salary structure - It is found that people and their motivation is dependent upon how well they are being paid. Therefore the main objective of job evaluation is to have external and internal consistency in salary structure so that inequalities in salaries are reduced.

2. Specialization - Because of division of labour and thereby specialization, a large number of enterprises have got hundred jobs and many employees to perform them. Therefore, an attempt should be made to define a job and thereby fix salaries for it. This is possible only through job evaluation.

3. Helps in selection of employees - The job evaluation information can be helpful at the time of selection of candidates. The factors that are determined for job evaluation can be taken into account while selecting the employees.

4. Harmonious relationship between employees and manager - Through job evaluation, harmonious and congenial relations can be maintained between employees and management, so that all kinds of salaries controversies can be minimized.

5. Standardization - The process of determining the salary differentials for different jobs become standardized through job evaluation. This helps in bringing uniformity into salary structure.

6. Relevance of new jobs - Through job evaluation, one can understand the relative value of new jobs in a concern.

According to Kimball and Kimball,“ Job evaluation represents an effort to determine the relative value of every job in a plant and to determine what the fair basic wage for such a job should be.”

Thus, job evaluation is different from performance appraisal. In job evaluation, worth of a job is calculated while in performance appraisal, the worth of employee is rated.