Writing Job Specifiactions (Gary Dessler)

The job specification takes the job description and answers the question, “What human traits and experience are required to do this job effectively?” It shows the hiring criteria for the job, in terms of what kind of person to recruit and for what qualities you should test that person. It may be one section of the job description, or a separate document. Often the

employer makes it part of the job description.

Specifications for Trained versus Untrained Personnel

Writing job specifications for trained employees is straightforward. Here your job specifications might focus mostly on traits like length of previous service, quality of relevant training, and previous job performance. The problems are more complex when you’re filling jobs with untrained people (with the intention of training them on the job). Here you must specify qualities such as physical traits, personality, interests, or sensory skills that imply some potential for performing or for being trained to do the job.

For example, suppose the job requires detailed manipulation in a circuit board assembly line. Here you might want to ensure that the person scores high on a test of finger dexterity. Employers identify such human requirements either through a subjective, judgmental approach or through statistical analysis (or both). Let’s examine both approaches.

Specifications Based on Judgment

Most job specifications come from the educated guesses of people like supervisors and human resource managers. The basic procedure here is to ask, “What does it take in terms of education, intelligence, training, and the like to do this job well?”

There are several ways to get these “educated guesses.” You could review the job’s duties, and deduce from those what human traits and skills the job requires. You can also choose them from the competencies listed in Web-based job descriptions like those at www .jobdescription.com. (For example, a typical job description there lists competencies like “Generates creative solutions” and “Manages difficult or emotional customer situations.”) O*NET online is another source. Job listings there include lists of required education and other experience and skills.

Writing Job Descriptions (Gary Dessler)

The most important product of job analysis is the job description. A job description is a written statement of what the worker actually does, how he or she does it, and what the job’s working conditions are. You use this information to write a job specification; this lists the knowledge, abilities, and skills required to perform the job satisfactorily.

There is no standard format for writing a job description. However, most descriptions  contain sections that cover the following:

1. Job identification
2. Job summary
3. Responsibilities and duties
4. Authority of incumbent
5. Standards of performance
6. Working conditions
7. Job specification

Job Identification

The job identification section contains several types of information. 

The job title specifies the name of the job, such as telesales representative, or inventory control clerk. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) status section identifies the job as exempt or non exempt. (Under the FLSA, certain positions, primarily administrative and professional, are exempt from the act’s overtime and minimum wage provisions.) Date is the date the job description was approved.

There may also be a space to indicate who approved the description and perhaps a space showing the location of the job in terms of its facility/division and department. This section might also include the immediate supervisor’s title and information regarding salary and/or pay scale. There might also be space for the grade/level of the job, if there is such a category. For example, a firm may classify programmers as programmer II, programmer III, and so on.

Realigning HR to Deliver Business Results (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

Two things will help us implement the new Human Capital Strategy by realigning HR to deliver business results: 

(1) splitting the HR administrator, fixer, and strategic partner roles, and 

(2) aligning the human capital organization to deliver the four strategic objectives.

Split the HR Administrator, Fixer, and Strategic Partner Roles. 

In 1964, Chaney and Owens conducted an academic study that makes a persuasive case that individuals with different personalities tend to migrate to jobs that fit. From a sample of 900, they looked back to high school and found that engineers disliked verbal activities and courses where discussion was involved, were slow in dating and preferred to spend time reading or in problem-solving activities. Those who became sales reps were only average in math and science capabilities, dated earlier, enjoyed meeting new people and had more friends and were leaders in different activities.

Sure, there are some good “sales scientists,” but not many, and trying to make a scientist into a sales rep may result in frustration by both parties. (As the saying goes, “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it frustrates the pig.”) The study provides an important lesson for HR. The all-in-one HR business partner model has not and will not deliver value because it is based on an assumption that people can perform well in very different roles that require very different talents. It is time to admit defeat and completely separate the administrative, fixer, and strategic roles.

A more radical solution is to follow the Innovator’s Dilemma model of creating a stand-alone unit for the discontinuous work of strategic HR. The head of HR administration should report to the corporation’s top operations executive or CFO. This reporting relationship was very common in the days before the promise of strategic HR. It was common because it made sense. If the core capability of administrative HR is operational excellence, then operations is the right place to report. (See Figure 3-5.)

Next, build a fully separate organization reporting to the CEO that provides change leadership and organizational consulting to top leaders. Calling this organization something other than “human resources” might be wise as an HR title brings with it a set of internal customer service expectations that will no longer apply. This new “human capital” organization will comprise a set of full-time consultants who are educated and trained to improve the performance of people and organizations. Human capital business consultants should spend 100 percent of their time identifying opportunities to improve customer and shareholder satisfaction and should be evaluated by their impact to both. Their customer is external, their investment model is ROI-based, and they are business performance advocates.

Aligning the HR Structure (Bradley W Hall,PHD) - Part 2

HR Is Structured to Produce Programs and Policies Rather than Business Results

Let’s say, as a general manager, you see a leadership deficit in your business unit. Who in your HR function is accountable for improving leadership performance? The organizational development department is not; it creates competency models and assessment tools. The talent management department is not; it runs the succession planning cycle. The performance management department is responsible for appraisals, the compensation department makes pay decisions, and the training department develops and delivers courses. So which department manager will stand up and say, “My department is accountable for growing leaders”?

Today, the answer is “nobody.” 

The reason is that today’s HR is aligned by subprofession (e.g., training, staffing, compensation), the same as it was thirty years ago. Let’s call these subprofessions by their new name, Centers of Excellence (COEs). COEs are factories that produce state-of-the-art HR tools. They are not designed to produce business results and often operate as uncoordinated product development units, as indicated by Figure 3-4, which shows the COEs of one institution.

Many companies refer to both first-level (e.g., organizational development) and second-level (e.g., HR metrics) organizations as COEs. If this was an automobile engine, each COE unit  would be producing a different engine part. The problem is that there is no blueprint of what

the completed engine will look like or do. Just as it is unreasonable to build parts to an engine without a blueprint of the finished engine, it is unreasonable to build HR tools and processes without a Human Capital Strategy.

Aligning the HR Structure (Bradley W Hall,PHD) - Part 1

Today’s HR organizational structure is misaligned with a Human Capital Strategy of sustained competitive advantage through people. There are two critical areas of misalignment:

1. Strategic and administrative work remains tangled.
2. HR is structured to produce HR products and processes rather than business results.

Strategic and Administrative Work Remains Tangled

Several decades ago, sales and marketing organizations were commonplace. Over the years, marketing was split off into its own organization. Although the purpose of both functions is business development, each requires a different approach and skill set. The same is true with accounting and finance. Accounting is an old profession, and finance recently emerged from accounting with the rise of capital markets. The purpose of both functions is to leverage financial capital, but each uses different methods to accomplish the task. Like sales and marketing and accounting and finance, administrative and strategic HR are both about people, but each requires a different approach and skill set.

Over the past decades, the HR profession has aspired to create fundamentally different outcomes, but it has attempted to do so inside the walls of traditional HR. As the model presented in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997) would predict, it is difficult to create a business that represents a discontinuous change inside an old organization: The old will strangle the new. When an organization needs new capabilities, it may need a new organizational space where those capabilities can be developed. Christensen suggests that a successful approach is to spin off an organization so that the new capabilities can be managed in a very different way than in the mainstream business. This has not happened in HR; the old is strangling the new.

Today’s Human Resources Function (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

Throughout history, virtually all breakthroughs required replacing a current model with a fundamentally different paradigm. Scientific examples include germ theory and the theory of relativity. Federal Express and Amazon.com are business examples of a paradigm shift, and W. Edwards Deming’s statistical process control is an example of a professional shift. In each case, these new paradigms emerged and completely challenged existing “truths.” The HR profession has yet to go through its paradigm change.

Think of today’s HR model as an engine with four elements:

(1) structure (i.e., who reports to whom, roles, and accountabilities),

(2) systems (i.e., performance measures, business reviews), 

(3) shared values (i.e., beliefs, values, culture), and 

(4) skills (i.e., talents, knowledge). 

Methods For Collecting Job Analysis Information Part 2 (Gary Dessler)

Observation

Direct observation is especially useful when the job consists mainly of observable physical activities—assembly-line worker and accounting clerk are examples. On the other hand, observation is not as useful when the job entails a lot of mental activity (lawyer, design engineer).

Nor is it useful if the employee only occasionally engages in important activities, such as a nurse who handles emergencies. And reactivity—the worker’s changing what he or she normally does because you are watching—also can be a problem.

Managers often use direct observation and interviewing together. One approach is to observe 

the worker on the job during a complete work cycle. (The cycle is the time it takes to complete the job; it could be a minute for an assembly-line worker or an hour, a day, or longer for complex jobs.) Here you take notes of all the job activities. Then, ask the person to clarify points not understood and to explain what other activities he or she performs that you didn’t observe.

Participant Diary/Logs

Another method is to ask workers to keep a diary/log of what they do during the day. For every activity engaged in, the employee records the activity (along with the time) in a log. Some firms give employees pocket dictating machines and pagers. Then at random times during the day, they page the workers, who dictate what they are doing at that time. This can avoid requiring workers to remember what they did hours earlier when they complete their logs at the end of the day.

Methods For Collecting Job Analysis Information Part 1 (Gary Dessler)

We’ll see that there are various ways (interviews or questionnaires, for instance) to collect information on a job’s duties, responsibilities, and activities. The basic rule is to use those that best fit your purpose. Thus, an interview might be best for creating a list of job duties. The more quantitative position analysis questionnaire may be best for quantifying each job’s relative worth for pay purposes.

The Interview

Job analysis interviews range from unstructured interviews (“Tell me about your job”) to highly structured interviews containing hundreds of specific job items to check off.

Managers may conduct individual interviews with each employee, group interviews with groups of employees who have the same job, and/or supervisor interviews with one or more supervisors who know the job. They use group interviews when a large number of employees are performing similar or identical work, since this can be a quick and inexpensive way to gather information. As a rule, the workers’ immediate supervisor attends the group session; if not, you can interview the supervisor separately.

Whichever type of interview you use be sure the interviewee fully understands the reason

for the interview. There’s a tendency for workers to view such interviews, rightly or  wrongly, as “efficiency evaluations.” If so, interviewees may hesitate to describe their jobs accurately.

Conducting a Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

There are six steps in doing a job analysis, as follows.

Step 1: Decide how you’ll use the information Some data collection techniques—like interviewing the employee—are good for writing job descriptions. Other techniques, like the position analysis questionnaire we describe later, provide numerical ratings for each job; these can be used to compare jobs for compensation purposes.

Step 2: Review relevant background information such as organization charts, process charts, and job descriptions.Organization charts show the organization-wide division of  work, and where the job fits in the overall organization. The chart should show the title of each position and, by means of interconnecting lines, who reports to whom and with whom the job incumbent communicates. A process chart provides a more detailed picture of the workflow, particularly the flow of inputs to and outputs from the job you’re analyzing. (In Figure 2, the quality control clerk reviews components from suppliers, checks components going to the plant managers, and gives information regarding component’s quality to these managers.) Finally, the existing job description, if there is one, usually provides a starting point for building the revised job description.

WORKFLOW ANALYSIS AND JOB REDESIGN Job analysis tasks such as reviewing current job descriptions enable the manager to list what a job’s duties and demands are now. Job analysis does not answer questions such as “Should this job even exist?” To answer such questions, one must conduct a workflow analysis. You may then deem it necessary to redesign the job. Workflow analysis is a detailed study of the flow of work from job to job in a work process. Usually, the analyst focuses on one identifiable work process (such as processing an insurance claim), rather than on how the company gets all its work done. The accompanying HR as a Profit Center feature illustrates workflow analysis.

The Basics Of Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

Talent management begins with understanding what jobs need to be filled, and the human traits and competencies employees need to do those jobs effectively. Job analysis is the procedure through which you determine the duties of the jobs you are analyzing and the characteristics of the  people to hire for them. 

Job analysis produces information for writing job descriptions (a list of what duties the job entails) and job (or “person”) specifications (what kind of people to hire for the job). Virtually every personnel-related action you take—interviewing applicants, and training and appraising employees, for instance—depends on knowing what the job entails and what human traits and skills one needs to do the job well. 

The supervisor or human resources specialist normally collects one or more of the following types of information via the job analysis:

● Work activities. First, he or she collects information about the job’s actual work activities, such as cleaning, selling, teaching, or painting. This list may also include how, why, and when the worker performs each activity.

What Is Talent Management? (Gary Dessler)

Talent management is the goal-oriented and integrated process of planning, recruiting, developing, managing, and compensating employees. When a manager takes a talent management perspective, he or she:

1. Understands that the talent management tasks (including recruiting, training, and paying employees) are parts of a single interrelated talent management process. For example, having employees with the right skills depends as much on recruiting, training, and compensation as it does on applicant testing.

2. Makes sure talent management decisions such as staffing, training, and pay are goal directed. Managers should always be asking, “What recruiting, testing, or other actions should I take to produce the employee competencies we need to achieve our strategic goals?”

Strategic Human Resource Management (Gary Dessler)

Managers formulate corporate strategies, and then competitive strategies for each of their businesses. Then, we’ve seen that once a business decides how it will compete, it turns to formulating functional (departmental) strategies to support its competitive aims. One of those departments is human resource management and its functional strategies are human resource management strategies.

What Is Strategic Human Resource Management?

Every company needs its human resource management policies and activities to make sense in terms of its broad strategic aims. For example, a high-end retailer such as Neiman-Marcus will have different employee selection, training, and pay policies than will Walmart. Strategic human resource management means formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims. The following Strategic Context feature illustrates this.

What Are HR Audits? (Gary Dessler)

Human resource managers often collect data on matters such as employee turnover and safety via human resource audits. One practitioner calls an HR audit “an analysis by which an organization measures where it currently stands and determines what it has to accomplish to improve its HR function.” The HR audit generally involves reviewing the company’s human resource function (recruiting, testing, training, and so on), usually using a checklist, as well as ensuring that the firm is adhering to regulations, laws, and company policies.

In conducting the HR audit, managers often benchmark their results to comparable companies’. Sample measures (metrics) might include the ratio of HR professionals per company employee. HR audits vary in scope and focus. Typical areas audited include the following:

1. Roles and head count (including job descriptions, and employees categorized by exempt/ nonexempt and full- or part-time).

What Do The New Human Resource Managers Do? (Gary Dessler)

For much of the twentieth century, “personnel” managers focused mostly on day-to-day activities. In the earliest firms, they took over hiring and firing from supervisors, ran the payroll department, and administered benefits plans. As expertise in testing emerged, the personnel department played a bigger role in employee selection and training. New union laws in the 1930s added, “Helping the employer deal with unions” to its list of duties. With new equal employment laws in the 1960s, employers began relying on HR for avoiding discrimination claims.

Today, employers face new challenges, such as squeezing more profits from operations. They expect their human resource managers to have what it takes to address these new challenges. 

Let’s look at 10 things today’s HR managers do to deal with these challenges.

Why Is Human Resource Management Important to all Managers? (Gary Dessler)

Perhaps it’s easier to answer this by listing some of the personnel mistakes you don’t want to make while managing. For example, you don’t want

● To have your employees not doing their best.

● To hire the wrong person for the job.

● To experience high turnover.

● To have your company in court due to your discriminatory actions.

● To have your company cited for unsafe practices.

● To let a lack of training undermine your department’s effectiveness.

● To commit any unfair labor practices.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE Carefully studying this text can help you avoid mistakes like these. More important, it can help ensure that you get results—through people. Remember that you could do everything else right as a manager—lay brilliant plans, draw clear organization charts, set up modern assembly lines, and use sophisticated accounting controls—but still fail, for 

instance, by hiring the wrong people or by not motivating subordinates.

Determining the Optimal Blueprint for Your Organization (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The key question to answer here is: What is the most effective Human Capital Strategy for your organization? How can you know if your company is improving the performance of its human capital? How can you know if your company is managing its human capital more effectively than its competitors are? 

The Human Capital Lagging Indicator 

Is there a single measure that concludes human capital improves year- over-year? Or, should we judge the efficiency of a human capital strategy by measuring changes in each of a set of key positions? 

A 2007 McKinsey Quarterly article stated that the value of “intangible capital” of the world’s top 150 companies, as measured by market value less invested financial capital, increased from $800 billion in 1985 to $7.2 trillion in 2005.6 However, annual reports still focus on how a company uses its financial capital—not how it is growing its in- tangible values, the most important of which is human capital. 

Strategic Human Capital Components (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The human capital vision creates a concrete and measurable definition of success; the strategic components are plans that describe how to achieve that vision. Achieving the vision requires excellence in four components. (See Table 2-2.) If all four are well-executed, it is likely that your organization will have a sustained competitive advantage through people. The first three strategic components are critical roles - roles that are most important for customer and shareholder satisfaction. The fourth component enables the first three. 

Effective Executive Teams 

The key question to ask about the first critical role—effective executive teams—is: Are our executive teams more effective this year than last year? The executive teams may include the corporate top team, business unit teams, region/country-level teams, and functional leadership teams. Without a high-performing executive team at the top, little will happen below. Executive teams set the end-state vision and business strategies, and invest time and money to ensure that aspirations turn to business results. 

Setting the Human Capital Vision (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The human capital vision is founded on the human capital theory and attempts to turn the theory into a concrete statement of success. Figure 2-2 presents an example.

Several assumptions lie beneath the vision statement:


• Leading measures are defined by performance, not competencies. Competencies are an important means to an end and should be measured and managed as such; but success is industry-best performance, not industry-best people.

• Success is measured against industry benchmarks or primary competitors. Being world-class is ideal, but it is not required to deliver business results. Burger King’s performance in site selection must be better than McDonald’s; it does not need to be better than Marriott’s.

The Human Capital Vision (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The important question to answer here is: What does success look like?

In the mid-1990s, Taco Bell, then a PepsiCo company, was one of the hottest companies on earth. In the middle of its success, John Martin, Taco Bell’s CEO, assigned seven of his highest-potential middle managers to a two-year, full-time, multidisciplinary team to rein- vent Taco Bell’s business model. Martin’s vision was “250,000 points of access by the year 2000.” He defined a point of access as “wherever someone can buy a Taco Bell product.” Taco Bell’s new vision was clear, memorable, and measurable.

Given that Taco Bell had about 4,000 stores at the time, 250,000 seemed to be an unrealistic goal. However, the team energetically be- gan work and within a few short months had created a new process that increased store openings from 700 each year to more than 1,200. Martin thanked the team but told them that while that was very good news, the goal was still 250,000 points of access.

The team decided that it needed to think more creatively. At the time, cafeterias were the only place to eat in airports. “What if we put Taco Bells in airports?” the team members wondered. “Let’s call them SPODs” (special points of distribution). Soon, Taco Bell SPODs were popping up in airports, stadiums, and strip malls. SPODs quickly added more than 1,000 points of access each year. Again, Martin was grateful but unmoved. The vision was still 250,000.

The Human Capital Theory (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

The first question to answer is: How does HR create business value? 

Several years ago, while involved in a project with a large retail company’s HR department, I noticed that the labor law team was the largest corporate HR department. The company employed eight to ten times the number of labor lawyers per employee as its competitors, and four of its six corporate HR executives had been promoted from the legal department. Attorney telephone numbers were on the speed dial of every HR generalist, and daily decisions were routinely screened for legal exposure. HR generalists complained incessantly about the legal team obstructing their work, but the checking and approval process remained intact. What would you say was HR’s theory on how it added value to the business? 

A second company I supported had been a lead company in a regulated industry for many years. In this company, the focus of HR staff meetings was policy and policy enforcement. Before meetings and on breaks, HR generalists playfully sparred with one another on policy details. “. . . That’s right, but she only gets 30 days if she has more than two years of tenure at a company merged before 2001.” Peers looked on and cheered as one bested the other. How might you describe the human capital theory at this company?