Defining Departments
Departments, denoted as Job Departments are the general group of Job Families that involve similar types of work, training, or knowledge. Departments are often discernible by the broader team this role falls in at your company, and the top line business metric the team owns.
An example of a Department is Marketing. The Job Families Brand Marketing and Product Marketing would fall under the broader Marketing Job Departments.
Defining Job Families
Job Families are the more specific group of roles that involve directly related types of work. Job Families often share very similar titles. Promotions within a team often occur linearly within a job family. An example of a Job Family is Data Science which would include titles such as Data Analyst, Data Scientist and Analytics Manager and Business Analytics Manager.
Finding the Right Job Family or Department
Generally, you want to use Job Families when looking at compensation benchmarks. When you use Job Families you are pulling from data that very closely matches the job or team you are looking for.
That being said, sometimes you’ll want to use Departments when analyzing compensation benchmarks. Using Departments to find compensation benchmarks can be useful when:
- Employees will fulfill responsibilities associated with multiple job families: Employees and teams scope and responsibilities don’t always fit within a single job family. This is often the case with small or new companies, in which case using Departments can be a good way to acknowledge a broader set of responsibilities
- You’re not sure which exact job family is the perfect mapping for a role: Departments will encompass a set of closely related job families, so if you aren’t sure which job family best aligns with a employee/team, Departments are a good way to make sure you don’t incorrectly assign a team to the incorrect Job Family
- You want to increase the sample size associated with the compensation benchmark: If a specific level or location doesn’t have enough employees to return a compensation benchmark, you can use the Department rather than the Job Family to power a compensation benchmark that has enough employees to return results
- You want to simplify your compensation benchmarks: Rather than maintaining 75 benchmarks for unique job families, you can maintain 15 for the different job families; however, in this simplicity you will lose some nuance in how different job families under the same department are paid
Here’s an analogy: If you use Departments you’re essentially comparing apples to apples; when using Job Families you’re comparing Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.