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“The real value of having the system is to be able to benchmark for 95 percent of the population,” says Tom Nohl, vice president of compensation and benefits. “It gives managers a game plan to manage future salaries, and it makes their lives easier because they have something to show employees as the basis of salary decisions.”

The first step was to work with local Newell Rubbermaid operations to capture current compensation data and then identify Newell Rubbermaid benchmark jobs. Local market data was collected from 25 locations in 15 countries.

The unique needs of the company — given its many different lines of business and locations — meant there likely would be widespread variations in the way compensation and benefits were managed. Watson Wyatt consultants conducted an audit on the existing system, looking at compliance issues, internal equity and external competitiveness. The result was a global picture that provided practical information for the development of a consistent approach to managing rewards.

Armed with this information, Watson Wyatt sent the project on the road. Watson Wyatt teamed with Jennifer Eck — international HR manager for Sanford, a Newell Rubbermaid business — and local HR representatives for some of the company's other major businesses (Rubbermaid, Levolor and Calphalon) to create a global grading committee. This was an opportunity to incorporate local nuances — and get key entities within the organization to buy in from the beginning.

Implementing the Global Grading System

At the start of the project, each country was doing its own salary administration based on historical pay data and recruiting efforts, an approach that didn't fit well in a growing multinational company. The SPG acquisition added 550 international employees in Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Enter Watson Wyatt's Global Grading System (GGS), which groups jobs based on roles and responsibilities. The grades are then used to determine the salary range for each job, which allows organizations to manage pay for jobs of comparable value and to help determine pay increases. Information is simple and consistent enough to develop grades that work across the organization but broad enough to allow for cultural differences.

Grading system in hand, Newell Rubbermaid representatives looked at market pay competitiveness in each country to determine salary ranges. Working with local human resources or functional managers, Eck and her teams conducted sessions to match Newell Rubbermaid's benchmark positions to Watson Wyatt's survey data. At each location, they identified between seven and 20 market-priced jobs. Using standard job descriptions, they considered any job that was equivalent to 80 percent of the Newell Rubbermaid job to be a good match.

At a Glance A Fortune 300 company known as one of the leading consumer and commercial products companies in the world Sales of more than $7 billion in 2002 and a powerful brand family, including Sharpie, Paper Mate, Expo, Parker, Waterman, Colorific, Rubbermaid, Stain Shield, Blue Ice, TakeAlongs, Roughneck, Brut, Calphalon, Little Tikes, Graco, Levolor, Kirsch, Shur-Line, BernzOmatic, Goody, Vise-Grip, Quick-Grip, Irwin, Lenox and Marathon, all registered trademarks Corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and approximately 47,000 employees in 55 countries worldwide

"Each salary range is a grouping of jobs with similar value — both within Newell Rubbermaid and in the external market," says Watson Wyatt consultant Sean Butler. "For the purpose of determining salary ranges, value is based on a combination of how a job compares externally to similar jobs in the local market and seven other factors: functional knowledge, business expertise, leadership, interpersonal skills, nature of impact, area of impact and problem-solving."

Watson Wyatt tackled global leveling, market pricing and salary structures, being careful to avoid a situation of "bad data in, bad data out." "Job grading had to be done right in order to get the salary structure right," says Butler. "Newell Rubbermaid was committed to performing the first two steps — global leveling and market pricing — with the involvement of regional and operations people, not just HR. That was a key to success."

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