Over the last ten years, labor market instability, changing employment dynamics, and the effects of internet job search and application processes have contributed to what is known as “job title inflation”. Simply put, job title inflation is the arbitrary, thoughtless, or manipulative application of increasingly impressive-sounding titles to certain roles. Because technology, social media, and many other factors have contributed to significant changes in the workplace, many job titles and roles have moved away from easy categorization, let alone standardization. For both organizations and employees, this practice can be a double-edged blade, providing morale boosts and organizational loyalty but also contributing to confusion, jealousy, and other issues.
As a nonprofit leader, you know that exploring every possibility for employee attraction, retention, and advancement is critical to your mission. However, as the title suggests, job title inflation can also have the long-term effect of devaluing or eliminating the meaning of individual job titles, which could undo whatever benefits it brings. If you are considering a change in the way you assign job titles, it is worth considering the risks and other issues very carefully. Here are some of the key benefits and downsides of inflated job titles:
The benefits of improved job titles
Better morale and retention
Depending on how you structure and dole out promotions, offering a new job title to someone can help them to feel valued and recognized for their work. While this may be less impactful in the nonprofit sector, where most employees are already invested based on their commitment to the mission, elevating the title of a valued employee, even if it isn’t attached to any changes to their responsibilities, can give them a sense of achievement and reward. This is especially attractive when you weigh this against the high cost of employee turnover.
Little to no cost
From an organizational standpoint, job title changes are essentially free, at most requiring you to print new business cards or signage. For nonprofits with smaller budgets and little to no discretionary funds for raises, this can be a convenient way to thank loyal and hardworking staff. Retention is a constant issue for nonprofits, which often cannot compete with other sectors and do not have the resources or staff to create a compelling retention strategy. This means that even a change like adding “Senior” to the titles of a few long-term employees can make a difference.
Improved recruitment
Using more robust-sounding job titles can also help you attract better talent. Many job seekers will want to know that there is potential for them to earn new titles and responsibilities. Being able to point to examples of this in your org chart may help you recruit new team members and volunteers. It is worth noting that this will apply more for entry- and mid-level positions than management or executive roles, which tend to have different recruiting processes.
The risks of improved job titles
Internal and external confusion
One of the most commonly cited risks is that inflating job titles can render them meaningless, which contributes to organizational confusion. For example, a title that became popular in the last few years is ‘lead’, but the meaning of this title can change from organization to organization or even from team to team. Does ‘lead’ mean that they are managers with subordinates, or is it just a synonym for ‘senior’? This becomes especially problematic in roles which involve interacting with users, clients, or third parties, who could interpret certain titles to be more senior than they are, and send or request sensitive financial, personal, or organizational information.
Morale risks
Beefing up job titles carelessly without due consideration for the rest of the organization or the nature of the job itself can cause morale issues. There are a lot of ways this can happen, such as ‘promoting’ people too often with no change to responsibilities or remuneration, having an inconsistent or opaque promotion structure, or communicating about these promotions in a confusing way. These practices can lead to organizational disillusionment, as team members feel they are being given meaningless titles without any benefits. This can also create rivalries between team members or make people suspect favoritism, which can erode team cohesion.
Recruitment risks
Creating overly-impressive job titles can mislead prospective applicants into thinking they aren’t qualified for a role. For example, the addition of terms “lead” or “manager” to an entry-level role can give job seekers the impression that the role involves managing a team or being given a budget.
Choosing the right job title is an art, not a science
One of the difficulties of this increasingly popular practice is that when many organizations begin changing titles, it can impact on the job market and change or confuse the meaning of job titles in the marketplace. This lack of standardization means that offering more impressive job titles to your team can have a limited impact, and you should do so carefully and, above all, consistently. Transparency in the process, meaning, and responsibilities of each title, as well as a consistent effort to communicate why people receive these sorts of promotions, will help your team understand and feel truly rewarded by their new titles.
On the other hand, if you or your managers dole out titles arbitrarily, or make up new titles as you desire, this could lead to confusion and dissatisfaction, along with mistrust. While you can’t do anything about job title inflation in the whole labor market, if you can maintain trust and help your team get invested in promotions, it should create internal motivation in earning new titles.
Finally, new job titles with no added benefits or remuneration should be seen as secondary to actual promotions, raises, and increased responsibilities. Just because this practice is becoming more common does not mean you need to take part — it’s better for morale to create a clear, fair, and consistent approach to promotions that are tied to actual material changes.
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The information contained in this article is not a substitute for legal advice or counsel and has been pulled from multiple sources.
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