This "Bright Spot" shares a point of progress, as part of Leading Edge's Gender Equity in Leadership Project.

In 2020, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund (The Federation) created a new framework of “job architecture”— a system for aligning jobs based on the type of work performed. Similar to the idea of salary bands—but operating even more comprehensively—the new system sets a uniform, easy-to-understand set of levels that covers job descriptions, job titles, job levels, and compensation. Going forward, it will help the organization develop a template for career paths, criteria for career advancement, and information about how frequently compensation and promotion decisions are made.

By putting more structure and regularity into job titles, descriptions, levels, and pay, the Federation has made its personnel system:

●     More fair. Using clear and predetermined criteria for personnel decisions leaves less room for biases to distort them.

●     More rational. Creating the system and fitting roles into it forced clear and rigorous thinking about every aspect of the Federation’s work.

●     Easier to analyze. The “job architecture” system will make it easier for Federation management to benchmark its structure and compensation against the market, understand how salaries map onto value created, and track DEI goals and benchmarks.

The Federation leadership hopes that the system may also give its professionals at all levels of the organization more confidence and trust that their work is properly understood and valued by management.