Measurement for Measurement: A comedy or a tragedy? By Steven Watson

The humble measure of an Acre. Been puzzling me since childhood since parents proudly talk of the garden being an eighth of an acre. Now an acre is not what it seems. A practical measure, historically understood as an approximation of the amount of land an ox could plough in one day. And a furlong (meaning furrow length) was the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting. It varied according to the amount of clay in the soil. Local variations. Confusing.

And not only these measures but the variations between us the other side of the pond on barrels, gallons and other measures.

Not to mention the Hand, four inches (amazingly my hand is just that!) but 62 inches is 15.2 Hands. Confusing. And we can use the measure of Hands to define the various levels in the equine family, Horse, Pony (sub divided into small, medium, large) but a miniature horse is smaller than a pony. What happened to a miniature pony? Aha! Maybe the historic origins of a job family.

At least horses are measurable. What about the conundrums of clouds? Classified into families but acknowledging the futility of measuring the precise characteristics of volume, perimeter and content. But still immensely useful for straightforward weather prediction. And in addition, broad, practical descriptions of effect of the wind from the Beaufort scale. However, even the most complex mathematics still struggles to give precision to those forecasts.

No wonder the System International units were invented. Concise, organised, interelated and clean.

Euclidian space: multi dimensional, explains the universe; but let’s not go there today!

So, given the rough and ready nature of measurement, why do we impose so much reliance upon the numbers generated from HR ‘measures’ with outcomes impacting upon the employees. We apply judgments to performance, judgments to competencies and in my current professional world, judgments to the size of jobs. We get a number and Lo! Suddenly, this number becomes inflexible as the atomic clock.

Yes, this anorak has come back to job evaluation. There are more JE measurement schemes than the entire planet has for measuring the rest of our existence and endeavours. More measurement dimensions that Euclid. An apparent denial that, in reality, there are a relatively few number of job variations. Hundreds, maybe thousands, but surely not the self indulgent presumption that each job is worthy of individual assessment. Cloud nine. Blissful unawareness. Cloud cookoo land. Unaffordable, unrealistic, unwarranted, unprecise (sic) and unnecessary.

The measurement schemes themselves are acknowledged to be unscientific. It is simply a judgment, hopefully sufficiently objective and analytical to have merit in the determination of pay. Maybe even fair pay. And pay structures themselves are often coarse with few levels of differentiation. There can be more words of explanation about the words in a scheme than the number of original words in the scheme itself. What is the size of ‘complex’? What is the difference between ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’? Yes, ‘local variations’, the job evaluation equivalent of clay in the soil.

Surely, the business case is to review the ‘rules’ regarding job measurement so that the real endgame of delivering equal pay can be achieved without breaking the resources piggy-bank.

Or was it a horse?

I advocate a change of the Equal Pay Act, soon to be subsumed into the new Equality Bill, in its current form. It’s now old law, not fit for purpose under the current understanding of work, social aspects of work and the more modern way of organising and managing work.

We need greater clarity about the measures, the permissible extent of job variations and material differences, generic descriptions and mechanisms for group assessments.

Why not have a Linean equivalent for classifying work? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck it probably is one.

Time for a change? What’s your experience?