Media Case Study

Improving Employee Retention Through Career Path Redesign

Introduction

The Impact of an Unscalable Job Architecture

A leading media giant pursued its goal of expanding its streaming service to a broader audience, resulting in growth of nearly $1B in annual ad revenue. However, the firm was challenged by its current job infrastructure due to its inability to positively impact employee satisfaction for sustained growth plans.

Employees needed more consistent job role definitions and job levels, clearer key competencies, and more straightforward career path options. Additionally, turnover had increased among high performers who couldn’t envision their growth path. Knowing how Alexander Group assists media firms with complex growth issues, the client engaged Alexander Group to assist with their job architecture redesign to ensure that the skills and capabilities of each role were well defined and aligned to hierarchy, function and discipline.

Project Approach

Examine Today, Design for Tomorrow

Project goals included improving employee satisfaction and talent retention while creating a scalable job infrastructure design to support continued growth. Alexander Group’s assessment involved diverse business units, including Enterprise Sales, Mid-Market Sales, SMB Sales, Specialty Sales, Marketing and Operations. These units comprised nearly 1,000 employees, 90 job profiles and 23 job families. The project approach included the following:

Assessing the current state job architecture

This assessment included analyzing the current job framework, processes and governance, and job definitions, levels, competencies and career paths.

Collecting data and distilling insights

Executive and manager interviews provided insight into current challenges and future job design needs. Data collection included organizational charts, employee rosters, job descriptions, competencies and career paths.

Key Findings

After collecting the data, reviewing written feedback and conducting design meetings, Alexander Group’s work revealed that an estimated 30% of existing jobs required either level consolidation or re-leveling. In addition, the project team selected approximately 25% of jobs to introduce additional job levels that would drive in-role progression. The client also needed platform job mapping, job leveling, assigned competency requirements and newly designed career paths.

existing jobs requiring either level consolidation or re-leveling

jobs to introduce additional job levels that would drive in-role progression

Recommendations & Outcomes

A Clear Path Forward

The client expects to launch the new job architecture after a two-quarter-long implementation phase. The launch includes newly designed:

Now includes a clear and consistent framework across teams and geographic regions

Reflect distinct required behaviors and skills to define platform jobs

Clarify and inform leveling and career advancement for each job and level

The most critical impact on the organization resulted from redesigning career paths. Alexander Group created both vertical (independent contributor-to-manager) and horizontal (independent contributor-to-independent contributor) career paths.

These improved design options were created to increase retention, match internal talent to the right jobs through horizontal pathways, and include new roles and functions within the company. As a result, not only were employees able to answer the question, “what’s my next move,” the company could now organically develop talent in a tight job market through new entry-level jobs and clear career paths. The expected benefits are a scalable job framework that introduces new roles and levels across business units and associated geographies. In addition, they anticipate that employees will be more satisfied due to transparent job levels, skill expectations, and career advancement visibility. Finally, the client is confident that this program will improve employee retention.

Clear Career Pathways Leads to Employee Retention

Media firms realize that the workforce wants more than the limitations of vertical trajectories; that they can also benefit from lateral or uniquely crafted moves across the company. Alexander Group has deep experience, along with exclusive benchmarks, to help media firms redefine career pathways and mobility through competency models, job and pay leveling, training and implementation.

Find out how Alexander Group can help your organization drive employee growth and retention.

About Alexander Group

Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.