19 – minutes read
Image: Shari Jo via Pixabay.com
Those of you who have been following my colleague Dr Ross Wirth and me on our platform Futocracy.network will know that we have been working together for the last five years or so researching the future of work and organisations. Since 1 May 2022, our Management Minefield newsletters have been a way of reflecting many of our emerging views and some of the challenges currently faced by organisations.
The optimum performance of an organisation does not depend on its financial resources
or using the latest technology, rather it is determined by how it uses its employees. If there is any doubt about this statement, you only need to look at the impact when employees withdraw their labour irrespective of how much is automated or other forms of technology used. As I write this newsletter the UK is going through a period of industrial unrest with strikes in some public services. Some commentators argue that because more people work from home (WFH), the negative impact of the strikes is less than in previous decades. Currently, this may be true. However, if the infrastructures used for WFH were withdrawn through lack of employee activity in the power sector or internet infrastructure, for example, the impact would be pretty much instantaneous and detrimental to almost all organisations. The location of work is not the subject here. It is about the nature and management of the work itself.
Increasingly organisations are competing within a knowledge-based economy and the people part of the business remains the most important resource that is becoming more decisive for the success of any organisation (Hosain, 2015; Moyeen & Huq, 2001; Schuler, 1990; Werther & Davis, 1996). It is accepted in most quarters that an organisation enriched with committed, motivated, talented, skilled, and competent people can achieve any challenging goals it wants to. In the modern business world full of diversified challenges, success is entirely dependent upon the way organisations are using the capabilities of their people (Absar & Mahmood, 2011).
The relationships between the organisation as an employer, the people who are employed in organisations, and the way that work is undertaken by those people has been the subject of much research and commentary. The outcome has been an increase in methods to optimise the way work is achieved, the tools necessary to achieve that optimisation, and the actions and behaviours of leaders and managers to ensure that the processes supporting that optimisation are undertaken and outcomes achieved. The outcome from the employee perspective is one of necessary compliance at the cost of personal motivation.
With this important relationship between the work undertaken by people and organisational success it is ironic that organisations seldom capitalise on this increasingly educated asset, people. The performance management systems and management methods are all about gaining compliance of the workforce. When compared to say 20 years ago, the language is now softer and the titles of the HR and other managers less bureaucratic sounding yet have the same agenda to ensure that management’s targets are met. Targets to be met is a legitimate requirement. Yet, it is how the work and people are aligned that will ensure reasonable outcomes are achieved, not management or leadership manipulation.
The people side of the business is increasingly taking centre stage with the employees becoming more aligned in their expectations of what work means for them and the degree of commitment that they will give in return; WFH is part of this discussion.
A major part of our research has led us to realise that almost all organisations are designed to maintain control of what is being created or provided by organisations. Few organisations focus on and support the work itself in ways that assist the organisation to be effective.
In this newsletter we are focusing on the nature of work and how it is increasingly important to look at how the work of people is understood and agreed.
Historically and in most cases today, the Job or Role Description is the major document to do this. This raises an important discussion, does it still have a place in future organisations, or do we need to look at the nature of work differently? We explore this in three separate newsletters.
Today we discuss the current approaches and what this approach means for an effective organisation. In next week’s issue we offer insights to some aspects of organisational design, focus, and management that need to be understood when considering the redesigning of an organisation’s foundation. The third newsletter goes into some different approaches that we suggest can lead to more suitable organisational designs for both today and the emerging future.
The eventual aim is to encourage people to join an organisation that meets both their individual needs and expectations with a view to committing to that organisation as a part of a community that delivers success.
A Job (or Role) Description is the common tool used by organisations to show how they describe work activities. This document forms the foundation for both management and HR functions. Job descriptions are used for a range of reasons from hiring, conducting performance reviews, and many more people (HR) related functions. A good job description is purported to define and describe what a position may involve or require. It may also include relationships with other people in the organisation such as supervisory level, managerial requirements, and relationships with other colleagues. Whilst there is no single best design, a general search across a wide range of HR focused business websites and recruitment organisations indicates that a good job description in 2022 should:
Provide a clear understanding of what the duties and responsibilities for a particular position are
Protect an organisation legally
Ensure a consistent understanding across departments of how different job positions and roles help the organisation grow
Lay the foundation to facilitate ongoing performance management
Help employees create personal goals for advancing in their current role
Create boundaries regarding employees’ responsibilities
Length of employment – permanent or temporary
Justify an employee’s pay
Support training and development activities
Before moving on it is important to realise that the job description has its origins in the function of job analysis, which has its roots in the ideas and activities of the school of scientific management heralded by the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor over 100 years ago. In a previous newsletter (July 10, 2022, “Towards a Future-Proof Organisation”) we discussed how his research was published in distorted and dishonest ways to support his ideas, many of which persist and are in use today.
In the early days the job analysis also included attributes considered necessary to carry out the job. These were based on skills, knowledge, abilities, and any other characteristics considered necessary. Subsequently psychologists became involved in job analysis and Morris Viteles was considered one of the early exponents of this work. Over the decades job analysis has become more defined and the term Job Design became more popular using various processes that have remained constant to such an extent that I remember writing about the same methods in my MBA thesis in the late 1970s. These are: (i) observational method, (ii) interviews, (iii) questionnaire, (iv) checklists, (v) technical conferences, and (vi) diary.
These in turn are aimed at producing a job description containing job title, job purpose, job duties and responsibilities, required qualifications, preferred qualifications, and working conditions. Reading many job descriptions today reveals there has been little change over the last 40 years, albeit some of the titles and language used are different.
Job descriptions have become an important part of the transfer of major elements of recruitment to online processes by stating specific skills or abilities that are necessary for a position. They seldom describe the environmental pressures that apply to the position, which leads to people searching sites such as Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, Comparably, Blind, and more. These sites purport to assist readers in judging the recruitment hype versus the reality of working at a range of organisations based on the experience of current or past employees, including their inherent bias.
This infers that a good job description needs to tell the applicant what the position may involve or require in the organisational context, which then enables the potential applicant to decide that they are not a good fit for the position or are not interested in it. This not only reduces energy and cost for both parties, but also in some countries reduces an organisation’s legal liabilities in the process subsequently.
To date, and for most organisations, the job or role description has served an important purpose to ensure that the overall tasks that need to be done are identified. The tasks are what differentiates jobs from one another and as such have a distinct purpose. Jobs are the building blocks of an organisation’s structure. Where the job is undertaken identifies its position and level within an organisation. The level of the position typically determines the duties and degree of responsibility of the job holder. The responsibilities within most organisations today are based on a hierarchical system often associated with the term bureaucracy. The hierarchical delineation of power and responsibility is how the nature and timing of work is controlled. The control of the work and people is predominantly undertaken through performance management systems. Performance management systems are designed to ensure the alignment and progress of the work meets the declared business objectives, which are aligned to meet the organisation’s shareholder value or equivalent.
In a steady and consistent work environment where change is limited, this approach has been very successful in achieving the desired business outcomes. In doing so it has treated the people undertaking the work as machines in an interconnected system in line with Taylorist ideas and applications. As in any well-oiled machine the maintenance consisted of repair (training), removal of parts (dismissal, redundancy, retirement), and updating (recruitment, technology, re-engineering) and only changing the actual machine model as a last resort (survival).
This industrial age process of managing organisations is now under severe stress. Prior to COVID it struggled to cope with not only the changing demands of the business-to-consumers (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) environment, but also with an emerging multi-generational workforce of differing ideals, and significant technological changes. Post-COVID the workforce demands for greater flexibility using technology to support their arguments has added to the woes of organisations.
The predominance of top-down managerial control of organisations is now beyond repair and a new model of organisational design and management is required. (The machine model of organisations is now wearing out.).
We suggest that the starting point is the nature of what work means and how it is identified, undertaken, and in due course, how it is managed.
If we are to start at the work level, it is important to understand the reason for the work being needed in the first place. This is particularly important as many job descriptions used by organisations are generic across industries and seldom, if ever challenged and changed. In our examination of job descriptions Ross and I often found copy and paste from the internet and the occasional minor change added for a local feel and fit.
Since its introduction in 1985 by Michael Porter the use of the concept of a Value Chain has become a common starting point for many organisations to improve performance and/or competitive advantage. (The Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance). The idea behind this approach is to assist companies to take stock of their processes by gaining an insight into what goes into each of its transactions. The desired outcome is to maximise the value that is created at each point in the chain and thus share more value to the customers as well as capturing a greater share for itself. In essence, this enables the opportunity to identify a better understanding of the company’s competitive advantage. There is a direct relationship between the value chain and the nature of work.
The value chain model has two main sections: Primary activities (directly associated with producing and delivering the product or service) and Secondary activities (staff or support functions that enable the primary activities). For this short newsletter, we will only use the primary activities as a foundation for discussion because the whole model is now pretty much out of date. When Porter introduced the model, it was leading edge stuff at a time when being Big was a key aspect of competitive advantage and profitability. (Sales has moved on to arguably two categories, the distinct and the generic, which is an interesting discussion for another day).
Primary activities go directly into the creation of a product or the delivery of a service. The sorts of things we can expect to see here are shown in figure 1. These are:
Inbound logistics, which includes the elements we call “supply chain management” today.
Operations, which refers to the activities related to turning the raw materials and components into a finished product (or service).
Outbound logistics, which in the past was related to distribution, packaging, sorting, and shipping. Some organisations today include this within the gambit of “supply chain management” so that the whole circle is squared.
Marketing and sales relate to all the activities associated with the marketing and sales of the product or service, which includes promotion, advertising, and pricing.
After-sales services are the activities that take place after a sale has been completed. It includes the installation, training, quality assurance, repair, maintenance, and customer service.
Whilst not discussed here today, the secondary activities relate to procurement (which today may be included in the primary activity of supply chain management), technological development, human resources management, and the infrastructure, which relates to the company overheads and management, including financing and planning.
Figure 1: Value Chain Primary Activities
Taking the activity “Operations” in the value chain as an example, it is common to identify the jobs that need to be done to complete the activity. Having identified those jobs, they are then broken down into specific tasks (see figure 2), which are then used to create the processes to achieve the primary activity as well as being part of the job description process discussed earlier. Figure 3 illustrates these levels of description. Whilst the initial momentum is from the bottom upwards there is also the top-down process to validate that the tasks connected correctly ensure that the primary activity is completed as required. This control process assumes that the bringing together of all the tasks ends in the completion of the primary activity.
Using this traditional approach, the link between the job description and actual completion of the primary activity (operations) requires constant maintenance at all three levels (tasks, jobs, and processes) to ensure continuity if any changes are made to any part of the task process, including minor changes to the product. This maintenance of the processes and associated tasks is typically undertaken by process design experts and not always in consultation with the actual workers. Our experience of working with organisations demonstrates that there is a major difference to the official expert processes when compared to those actively used by the workforce. One of the major reasons for this is the expert versions are designed for compliance and a safety net for organisations in legal defences if things go wrong. They are not necessarily the most efficient or effective way of achieving the desired outcome of the workflow. A Swiss watch that is designed for all eventualities when a simple Swatch is sufficient for day-to-day work comes to mind. A major risk in optimising processes is that things that do not need to be done are optimised as opposed to being removed. For more about this topic see our newsletter published 14 August 2022, The Quiet Quitters. (https://managementminefields.substack.com/p/the-quiet-quitters)
Figure 2: Moving from primary activities to individual tasks.
Image: Butterfield & Wirth 2022
We now have a job description for each of the three jobs, A, B, and C shown in figure 3. Each of these jobs have clear tasks that are identified as necessary to complete the individual jobs A, B, and C. If the job description is a good one, the relationship between the three jobs will be explained, but our research indicates that this is seldom the case.
Figure 3: Schematic overview of the operating relationships between job descriptions and Primary Activities.
Image: Butterfield &Wirth 2022
There is a separate process that brings together the output of each of the three jobs to create the completion of the primary activity called operations. This process is shown in figure 4 connecting the job descriptions at the top of the schematic and a dotted line to show that the processes operate at the primary application of operations.
Figure 4: Schematic overview of the operating relationships between job descriptions and Primary Activities using Integrating Processes
Image: Butterfield & Wirth 2022
This general overview described what traditional job descriptions are and where they sit in the context of achieving desired business objectives. It demonstrated the importance of getting each stage correct. This means having a clear idea of the constituent parts of the primary activity, which are typically called jobs that need to be undertaken. Each of these jobs is then analysed to identify the constituent tasks necessary to complete that job. The tasks are then used to assist in defining the job description as well as identifying the processes required to link them all together within the job and link that job with other jobs that are necessary to achieve the primary activity. Seems to be quite an easy process, so what is the problem?
If something seems to be too easy, then it usually isn’t easy. This is the case of using job descriptions in today’s business world. Let’s look at some of the helpful aspects of job descriptions and some of the problems that they can cause.
Typically, a job description is not very detailed when used for recruiting purposes. It must be long enough to be substantive and yet short enough to keep the attention of candidates. Whilst the length of the job description will vary depending on the role, the current trend is between 300 and 600 words. This is between half, and a full sheet of A4 typed or one or two screen lengths on desktop and mobile, with the latter being a preferred medium for the younger candidates. The main aim is to attract qualified candidates.
It is not unusual to have a more detailed job description available for those candidates who request it and/or for use during the selection and induction processes. The devil is in the detail and a less detailed job description may attract the wrong candidates, with the associated difficulties of time wasting on both parties. Equally, a detailed job description is not always helpful
Whilst a detailed description may help candidates to self-select out of the process, it can become a straitjacket for the recruiters and subsequent managers when a candidate is accepted. For example, during the applicant screening and/or selection process, the job description is used to analyse whether an applicant qualifies for the position and whether additional training would be necessary. It also sets the tone regarding expectations of the candidate who is accepted.
A major disadvantage of a job description is the limitations employees may place on themselves because of the job description and refuse to do other tasks not listed in the job description. This then limits the productivity of employees and organisation as a whole.
This is made worse when a job description summarises activities and is less explicit than the tasks of the job warrant for successful implementation. At the same time, jobs change frequently as new technology or improved ways of doing things are introduced. This means that tasks are dropped or added accordingly, which not only creates more administrative updating tasks but also may need authority or agreement with trades unions or works councils in some countries. Such discussions then typically end up about new remuneration packages, promotion, or training demands.
In some countries the job description is a legal document and any demand or request for work to be undertaken outside of that agreement can lead to a legal violation.
Job descriptions are also an integral part of salary negotiations, not only at the recruiting stage but also during the period of employment. At the initial recruitment stage, it is often a discussion between the parties based on several factors such as candidate expectations, market value, and urgency of the need for the skills on the part of the organisation. The outcome tends to be a win-win situation if the candidate joins the organisation. However, job descriptions are also an integral part of the organisation’s performance management and evaluation system. It is this process that determines salary increases and bonus eligibility. The job description is a reference for determining how an employee spends their time at work. It provides a measurable focus for an employee's energy and attention. In our newsletter published 7 August 2022 “Understanding Leadership and Management” we discussed how performance management systems are part of the control mechanisms of organisations that lead to compliance as opposed to motivation (https://managementminefields.substack.com/p/understanding-leadership-and-management)
In effective and successful organisations, a job description not only identifies and clearly communicates the tasks of the job but also the responsibilities of the job holder. It also includes information about the working conditions, tools, equipment used, knowledge and skills needed, and relationships with other positions including the immediate boss. Whereas a poorly written job description can lead to confusion and miscommunication, which leads to the employee feeling that they do not know what is expected of them. Our collective experience and research suggest that the latter form of job description dominates the employment landscape. This is reinforced by the current dissatisfaction being expressed by the global workforce through well publicised behaviours such as the ‘Big Quit’, ‘Quiet Quitters’, and significant research on the lack of employee engagement with their employer organisations. For more discussion on these three subjects read our previous newsletters published on 8 May 2022, “The Big Quit – challenging the hype and solutions”; and 14 August 2022, “The Quiet Quitters”. (https://managementminefields.substack.com/archive?sort=new)
The job description is an important and powerful document that supports the whole structure and management of traditional hierarchical organisations. The implementation and maintenance of the work processes connecting the organisational tasks and associated employee behaviour are the major source of management power to ensure that the outcomes of work are as mandated. In our previous newsletters and our associated work on the Futocracy.network platform we have demonstrated the difficulties associated with running organisations where the focus is on the control of work. We argue that it is now time to focus on the work itself as the base of the power that drives organisational success.