By Claire Watt, Founding Director of Ditton HR
A well‑designed pay and grading structure is a powerful tool for HR teams, helping organisations build fair, transparent and strategically aligned reward systems. By placing roles in a clear hierarchy and grouping them into defined grades with corresponding salary ranges, employers can ensure consistency and objectivity in pay decisions.
A robust structure can help HR leaders:
- Create clear logic behind pay rates, roles and career paths, supporting consistent and evidence‑based HR decision‑making.
- Align reward practices with organisational strategy, such as incentivising key behaviours or high performance.
- Improve transparency for employees, helping them understand how their role and pay compare internally and externally.
- Ensure fair and equitable reward, demonstrating that jobs of equal value are paid consistently and reducing the risk of discrimination claims.
- Support structured salary progression and promotion processes, reinforcing clarity and trust in reward decisions.
- Promote equality and compliance, helping prevent gender pay gaps and other forms of unequal treatment.
Our guide provides practical insight for employers looking to improve pay transparency, clarify how job value is assessed, and establish a coherent reward strategy.
Whether you’re developing a full pay and grading structure or simply setting out the principles behind your pay decisions, this resource will help you build fair, consistent and future‑ready reward practices.
In this guide, learn about:
- Different pay and grading structures
- Business case
- Analysis of current arrangements
- Project planning
- Project team and responsibilities
- Costs
- Consultation and communication
- Risk management
- Scope
- Designing a pay and grading structure
- Job evaluation
- Choosing the right structure
- Placing jobs into the structure
- Linking pay to grading
- Progression
- Avoiding discrimination
- Preparing for implementation
- Assimilation to the new structure
- Appeals procedure
- Management and review
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About the author
Claire Watt, Founding Director at Ditton HR
Claire Watt is the founding director of Ditton HR, which offers HR and training services to organisations to ensure that they have easy access to high quality HR advice and support.
Claire is a qualified HR and training professional who is a fellow member of the CIPD and has more than 14 years’ experience in HR and training, 11 years as leading the HR function. Claire is a psychology graduate with a master’s in personnel and development and qualified in psychometric testing (Level A and B). Her experience spans across the legal profession, retail, tourism, not-for-profit and charitable sectors. Her most recent role before starting at Ditton HR was as executive director of people at Samaritans.
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