How hospital made the switch to career banding
How hospital made the switch to career banding
Some surprised by the change in salaries
North Broward Hospital District in Fort Lauderdale, FL, knew that employee education came first when the facility decided to switch from a traditional job family position-controlled salary structure to one that compensated based on skill and competency.
In the traditional system, employees were placed into one of 25 job descriptions in 14 salary grades.
In career banding, health information employees are assigned one of nine functional job titles: director, manager, systems consultant, systems administrator, systems analyst, systems specialist, coordinator of operations, and operations technician. The job title was then assigned into one of the five career bands: operational, technical, analytic, consultant, and leadership.
Fitting the right person to the right job
"It was a way to take the old job descriptions and identify where employees fit in the new scheme," says Karen Ondo, North Broward’s vice president and chief information officer.
The new system took about six months and about 1% of Ondo’s salary budget to implement, including creating job descriptions, policies, procedures, and new forms. Ondo kept employees informed of the implementation process.
"At key decision points in the new process, I would communicate to them our thoughts, our [goals], and how they would be affected," says Ondo. All employees were evaluated for the new system at the same time. (To see how the rating process works, see cover story.)
Managers matched employees’ skill acquisition to competitive salaries for those skills. Some employees were pleasantly surprised at their raises. One employee, for example, received a $16,000 increase. Other employees found that their salaries were higher than warranted by their skills.
"In theory, some people were being paid too much because they generally had been here a long time and got an annual increase every year," Ondo explains. "When we rated them according to our new scheme and to their skills, they were being paid a lot of money but their skills acquisition was on the low end. There was quite a difference in what we should be paying them as opposed to what they were being paid."
North Broward made a commitment to educate these employees and to provide them opportunities to acquire the skills they needed to stay close to the salary they were making. Some chose that route, but others decided to leave the organization. "They decided to leave because they did not want to acquire the skills and did not want their salaries lowered."
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