Assimilation Score - How can this be right...?

mooks

I was made redundant as part of a restructure a while back and am taking my employer to ET.

What happened was they deleted two managers (mine and a vacancy) and replaced it with another job at the same grade that took on the responsibilities of both jobs. This new job was pretty similar to my old one but my manager told me it was less than their threshold for automatic assimilation but refused to give me the job evaluation paperwork. I was later made redundant.

18 months later and I've finally got the paperwork, and looking at the way they've scored it, where the new job has a responsibility I wasn't doing, they've marked it as 0% match, but where my job had a responsibility that the new job didn't have, they've marked that as 0% as well - so it counts against me in both cases, even when I was doing something the new job wasn't. That doesn't seem right - surely if I was doing something that the new job wasn't, I shouldn't be penalised for it, but that's what the scores suggest.

If you remove the responsibilities I was doing but the other job wasn't, I end up 6% above the assimilation threshold. If you score them up, I'm well above the threshold.

Am I right here for thinking I shouldn't be penalised for doing things the new job wasn't? I can give more information if anyone needs it, but this just doesn't seem right...

Thank you so much for any help...

getmore4less

18 months later

ET is going to be an issue with that time

SarEl

Actually, I cannot see the point here - if the new job had responsibilities you didn't carry out then there is no match; and there is equally no match if your then current job had responsibilities that the new one didn't. It seems perfectly logical to me. But pointless because there is utterly no way in the world that a tribunal will allow a claim 18 months later.

mooks

Just to go through the points in turn...

The Tribunal is already in progress - the claim was submitted in December 2009 and is being heard in six weeks' time. The Respondent however, failed to provide the restructure paperwork until they provided their final Bundle - so Googlewhacker is right. I'd suggest their refusal to provide the assimilation matching evidence would count against them in any case, but there seem to be further issues with the document itself I'm hoping to get clarification of.

In response to SarEl's point though, the way the Respondent has done the job evaluation has been to add up the percentage matches (100% match, 80% match, 60% match etc. etc.) and then divide the total by the total number of items on the job descriptions.

So say for example, there's something on the new JD that I wasn't doing, then fair enough, that's a 0% match, but if there's something I was doing, but isn't listed on the new JD, that's also marked as a 0% match - which also counts against me, so when the average is taken, the score of 0% reduces the overall percentage.

So for the sake of argument, say you've got 4 items on a JD - let's say they're 'managing staff', 'writing strategies', 'managing budgets' and 'arranging meetings'.

The comparison says that because you're managing 5 staff in your job, and the new job manages 5 staff, that's a 100% match, and for the budgets they manage a budget of £100k and you manage £80k, that's an 80% match.

The new job is responsible for arranging meetings but I don't, so that's a 0% match, but you write strategies and the new job doesn't - that's listed as a 0% match as well.

The way the Respondent has scored this has been to add the percentages together (180), before dividing by the number of items on the JD (4) which comes to a 45% average - but the way this works means that even though I do a task that the new job doesn't, it actually counts against me by reducing the score. This is my point - if I'm doing something the new job isn't, surely it shouldn't count against me by bringing the overall score down?

By that logic, if you remove reference to the task I do, but the other job doesn't, you end up with a 60% average - which could be enough to mean I was automatically assimilated.

Is this making more sense now?

getmore4less

As laong as they only divide by the number of items on the new JD adding more zeros for items not there will make no difference to the average

SarEl

getmore4less wrote: »

As laong as they only divide by the number of items on the new JD adding more zeros for items not there will make no difference to the average

Thnak God for that! You know I always say up front that my maths is abysmal, but I was getting really worried because I couldn't work out how scoring 0 affacted the score either.

OP I am not sure how refusing to provide the evidence until the evidence bundle is required is going to count against them. What I am more interested in is why it has taken 18 months to get to a tribunal. That is an extraordinary length of time.

mooks

I look at things this way - say there are 10 items in total they're comparing against. 9 of these are a 100% match, and one is a 0% match.

Their scoring suggests 9 x items at 100% match = 900/number of items = 900/10 = 90% average.

Say that 1 item that's a 0% match is an item I'm doing, but the new job isn't. By rights, I'm more qualified but the average goes down.

Say there are 10 items, and there are 6 items I'm doing but the new job isn't. I might have previously been managing a budget of £1 million, 100 staff, and had responsibility for 10 areas of work, and the new job doesn't have any of those responsibilities. That's a 0% match in their book, so when they do the job comparison, there are 4 items where there's a 100% match, but 6 where they say there's a 0% match.

4 items at 100% = 400/10 = 40% average, meaning I'm not assimilated.

They're not dividing against the number of items that appear on the new JD - they're dividing against the total number of items.

I'm being penalised here for undertaking responsibilities the new job isn't.

When it comes to refusing to hand over the scoring documents, they simply told me the job wasn't enough of a match to be automatically assimilated. No evidence - I was expected to just take their word for it, with no knowledge of where the differences were. I appealed, specifically requesting a copy of the scoring matrix - they refused, meaning I had no foundation on which to build a case against assimilation.

mooks

The scoring matrix is an Excel spreadsheet with three columns - my old job, the percentage match in the middle, and the new job.

In my column are the responsibilities on my job description, and on the right, if there's a corresponding responsibility, the way that responsibility appears on the new JD. In the middle there's the percentage score.

Where my job has a responsibility that the other job doesn't have, there's a blank space under the new JD column, and it's recorded as a 0% match.

Likewise, if there's a responsibility under the new job, but not in mine, it's blank in my column and recorded as a 0% match in the middle.

They then add up the percentages in the middle column, and then divide by the number of responsibilities - the number of rows on the Excel spreadsheet.

This means that if I'm doing something the other job isn't, that counts against me - it's not divided against the number of responsibilities on the new job description - it's divided against all of them, so for every responsibility the other job has on the JD that I don't, it counts against me - and rightly so - but if there's something I do but the other job doesn't, that counts against me too, because it's an added responsibility at 0%.

It seems it doesn't matter on which side the 0% match exists, because it'll always count against me. Even if there were no 0% matches in the new job, all the things I was doing but the other post wasn't would count against me.

SarEl

What I think is that you are putting too much reliance on this. If this is their process and this is how assimilation is always calculated, then the tribunal aren't going to tell them that they can't do it that way. Tribunals cannot substitute their opinion as to how an employer should do something. Nor am I 100% (sorry!) convinced that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this way of doing things. Let's assume I have a job for a researcher, and so the skill I require is experience of research. Your expereinece is of strategy. I definitely want research, so you score nothing. I definitely don't want strategy, so you still score nothing. But that is all theoretical anyway - the tribunal cannot substitute its way of thinking for the employers. Your argument has to be based on process - that the process of the decision, and of the appeal, was flawed because they didn't let you have the scores so that you could appeal them, or they didn't consult properly, or they marked you down on something that wasn't true(such as you had a lot of time off sick when you had none). What you are arguing here is not process, it is method.

mooks

I appreciate I'm probably starting to sound pretty obsessive now, but from what people have said, I get the impression you're saying that the items on the old job description should be compared to items on the new job description, and any items that appear on the old job description that don't appear on the new job description should be disregarded - so yes, if there are 30 items on the new job description, the old job description should be scored against these items.

This isn't the case here - where there's an item on my job description that doesn't appear on the new job description, this has been added to the total number of items - so if there are 4 items on my job description that don't appear, those will be added to the 30 items on the new job description - increasing the total to 34. As all 4 of those items are rated as 0%, they drag the overall average down.

If this sounds completely irrational and illogical, that's probably because it is... The Respondent did things like this the entire time I worked for them - it was mad...

EDIT: I've just had another look at the scoring matrix, and there are 19 items on the JD for the new post, and there were 20 on my post, but there are 26 rows on the spreadsheet, which is what they've divided the total percentage by to get the average percentage. Divide the percentage by the number of items on the new JD and I'm an 83% match - well over the threshold...

mooks

SarEl wrote: »

Let's assume I have a job for a researcher, and so the skill I require is experience of research. Your expereinece is of strategy. I definitely want research, so you score nothing. I definitely don't want strategy, so you still score nothing.

I take your point here, but the scoring is simply for items on a job description - they took no account of qualifications, experience, sickness, disciplinary - anything. It's purely a comparison of JD items - and the roles are near as damnit identical.

Here's an example - in my old job, I was responsible for emergency planning, and this responsibility was removed in the new job. My doing this is entirely superfluous to the new job, and so is irrelevant to the job comparison - but that isn't the case. They've added the emergency planning responsibility to the list of 26 items at a score of 0% match. If the number of items goes up but the total percentage remains the same, as is the case here, the average percentage goes down.

I could have been responsible for taking the bins out, making cups of tea or licking my boss's shoes - what I'm saying is that they would add those to their total list of 'items' on the job descriptions, and they would count against me - rather than being disregarded.

For every item I did but the other job didn't, my average went down. It isn't a matter of my skills lying elsewhere - it's that everything ended up counting against me and bringing my average down.