Position Grade

A position grade is the level a job sits at: G1 to G12, or Worker, Staff, Officer, Manager. It is the word you use when you want to say "all our grade 7 and above" on a report or a training nomination. It records seniority. It does not decide money.

Where

People Directory › Setup › Position Grade

Who uses it

The implementation consultant, once at setup

When

First, before Position and before Position Structure

Needs first

Nothing

What it is for

Every company has a grade ladder, and every company uses it for the same two things: deciding who is senior to whom, and selecting groups of people without naming them one by one. "All grade 5 and below get the shoe allowance." "Supervisory grades and above attend the fire safety course." This screen holds that ladder.

Be clear about what the grade does not do. A grade in PeopleNest is a label. It does not carry a salary range, it does not cap what you can pay somebody, and it will not stop you entering a figure outside the band for the grade. There is no band on this screen to breach. The grade holds a code and a name, nothing else.

Pay comes from somewhere else entirely. The money attached to a job lives on the Salary Structure named on the Position, and the rates inside it come from Pay Scale. If a client asks you to enforce "a grade 6 cannot earn more than 180,000 rupees", that control is built with a pay scale, not with a grade.

What the grade genuinely does, and does usefully:

• it rides along onto the employee when a position is given on Employee Organization Assignment, so every employee has a grade on their record,
• it prints on employee reports and appears on the performance dashboard as a way to slice results,
• it is a selection criterion when nominating people for training, and
• it is one of the four things Position Structure uses to declare which job and level combinations are legal.

That is the whole of it. Treat the grade as the company's vocabulary for seniority, and keep money out of it.

Every field, in plain words

Position Grade

Field	What it means	What to put in it	Notes
Position Grade	The short code for the level.	G07	Required. Must be unique. Use a code that sorts correctly: G07 sorts above G10 only if you pad it, so pad it.
Name	The level written out, as HR says it.	Grade 7 - Supervisory	Required. This is what appears on reports and in lookups. Translations are kept per language.
Block	Retires a grade you no longer use.	Leave clear. Tick it if the ladder is restructured and an old grade must stop being offered.	Ticking it stops the grade being offered on new records. Employees already on it keep it, and old reports still read correctly.

Three fields. There is nothing else on the screen, and in particular there is no minimum salary, no maximum salary and no pay scale link.

How to configure it

1. Get the client's grade ladder on one page before you start typing. Ask for the document HR actually uses, not the one in the handbook, they are often different.
2. Decide how many grades you really need. A 500 person manufacturing company usually runs between six and twelve. More than that and nobody can remember which is which.
3. For each level, enter a padded code and a name: G01 / Grade 1 - Helper, G04 / Grade 4 - Machine Operator, G07 / Grade 7 - Supervisory, G10 / Grade 10 - Manager.
4. Save each one. Leave Block clear.
5. Now go and build the pay bands where they belong, on Pay Scale and Salary Structure. Do not expect the grade to enforce them.

Scenarios

We want the system to stop HR paying a grade 4 more than the band allows

The grade cannot do that. Build the band on Pay Scale and attach the matching Salary Structure to the Position. The pay side of the product is where limits on money are set and checked.

Naming your pay scales after your grades keeps the two readable side by side, for example grade G04 paired with pay scale PS-G04. They are still two separate things, but anybody looking at a record can see which band is meant.

Our workers have grades and our managers have titles, not grades

Create grades for both anyway, including one per management title if that is the vocabulary used. An employee with no grade is harder to report on than an employee with a slightly artificial one, and the field is used for selection in several places.

We are restructuring from twelve grades to six

Create the six new grades. Move people onto them through their Employee Organization Assignment, dated from the restructure date. Then tick Block on the twelve old grades. Do not reuse an old code for a new level, the historical records still point at it and the report for last year would read as nonsense.

What it is connected to

• Nothing has to exist before this screen. It is usually the first thing created in People Directory.
• Position Structure lists grades on its lines, declaring which Category, Position and Grade combinations are legal.
• Position Task and Position Planning name a grade.
• Employee Organization Assignment carries the grade onto the employee, and Employee Basic Information shows it.
• Training Need and Training Schedule use grade to select who should attend.
• The performance dashboard slices results by grade.
• Pay is not connected. Salary Structure and Pay Scale hold the money and are reached through the Position, not through the grade.

If something looks wrong

• "The grade is not limiting the salary we can enter" - it never will. The grade holds no amounts. Put the limit on the Pay Scale.
• "Grades are listed in the wrong order" - the codes are not padded. G7 sorts after G10 in a text list. Use G07.
• "It will not save, it says the grade already exists" - the code is in use, possibly by a blocked grade from an earlier structure. Grade codes must be unique whether blocked or not.