Flexible job descriptions with clear responsibilities, single reporting lines, and adaptable salary ranges foster employee satisfaction and avoid rigidity.
Job descriptions. I never cared for them. But the HR people always tell us we need them. Do we really?
The answer to the question above is both “yes” and “no.”
We do need basic roles and responsibilities, and the individuals in those roles need to understand who their boss is (who they report to), what their goals are, and how their performance is going to be measured. These things are good.
We don’t need rigid role definitions, arbitrary experience requirements, titles that mean nothing in terms of functional job differences, and/or rigid salary ranges that can never be strayed from. These things are bad.
Putting these job descriptions together in a meaningful way is never easy. If you ask the individuals involved to list their current duties and responsibilities their first thought is probably going to be, “Are they getting ready to fire me?” You have to do this as a firm-wide project, ask everyone for their list, and explain what you are doing and why so that paranoia doesn’t run rampant.
A few other pointers:
- Too many titles with no difference in function or responsibilities is bad. Don’t do it. Many times I find companies cannot distinguish between multiple levels of engineers in any way other than their titles. Doing that leads to a lot of unhappiness of the people involved.
- Duties and responsibilities for each role should always include “other duties as assigned.” When you ask someone to do something, I don’t ever want to hear, “That’s not in my job description.” It will get an immediate negative reaction from me.
- Each person reports to one and only one other person. No reporting to committees or naming of three different individuals all as being supervisors for anyone. This is fundamental rule of management called, “unity of command,” and it’s critical. Many of you will wonder how that works in a matrix organization structure. It works with one person being the individual’s permanent boss, and anyone else they do work for has to understand who they need to go through to get the services of the individual in question.
- Let’s not have rigid salary ranges. Someone will always deserve more than that. Why turn them off by publishing a “max” for that role. It accomplishes nothing. Let the government operate that way if they want to, but we don’t have to over here in the private sector.
If you disagree with me or have other thoughts on this topic that you’d like to share, please drop me a line at mzweig@zweiggroup.com. We would love to hear from you!
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
