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.

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.

LEADERSHIP IN A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

A Learning Organization can be defined as an organization where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together (Senge, 1990).

Learning organizations use shared leadership principles to maximize their resources and develop leadership capacity within individuals. The organization can be described as one that learns continuously and transforms itself. Current literature on leadership development characterizes the leader as a coach, facilitator and guide. Images of leadership have shifted from expert, director, and controller to catalyst, information sharer, and coordinator.

Leadership in learning organizations is based on cooperative and collaborative partnership approaches.

Individuals and their actions are the basis of a learning organization. The culture of the organization, including its history, vision and mission, and both official and informal policies and procedures, forms the

context for individual activities and their impacts.

Senge described five disciplines:

1.) Systems Thinking;

2.) Personal Mastery;

3.) Mental Models;

4.) Building Shared Vision; and

5.) Team Learning as the foundation of a learning organization.

EMPLOYEE LOYALTY

What do we mean by ‘‘employee loyalty?’’

We’re talking about employee commitment tied to an organization, one made from the first day of employment in return for guaranteed employment, with a career ladder for promotion, for those employees who show up on time and give more than a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. During the economic boom, the impact of the past economic downturn, with downsizing after downsizing, likely contributed to the job-hopping that companies experienced among their most talented employees. Past experience had given employees little reason to stay with one employer if a prospective employer had a better offer.

HR managers found themselves occupied with filling one vacancy after another. It was hard to keep employees because many chose to ‘‘go solo;’’ that is, become independent and work on a contractual or freelance basis. Called ‘‘contingent workers,’’ these individuals were used to fill workforce gaps. During boom years, many IT experts chose to become consultants and work on contract. During our economic downturn, contingent workers can save employers money, working only during peak job periods or otherwise doing short-term assignments. In the beginning, one thought only about contingent work in relationship to clerical tasks. Temp agencies provided administrative assistance when an assistant was out sick, on maternity leave, or on vacation. But today, contingent work is that and much more.

Assignments vary. Attorneys, business executives, HR professionals, software engineers, accountants, hotel workers, nurses and other medical professionals, and technical support staff – all can be contingentworkers.

The boom period also prompted companies to study their existing personnel to determine if they could take on more responsibility. It was felt an effective way to fill a vacancy, particularly since experienced workers would bring some loyalty to the company, along with past experience in the company, with them to the job. This led to creation of employee skills inventories.

Source : Recruiting & Retaining People .Florence Stone. 2002

HR Roles, The Ulrich Model

Source : Transforming HR.Ian Hunter & Jane Saunders.2005

HR Operating Model

“Companies now are finding that the HR issues are, in fact, center stage to business competitiveness. The intellectual capital, core competencies and organizational capabilities are all the pieces that are central to success.”
ULRICH – ‘HUMAN RESOURCE CHAMPIONS’, HARVARD PRESS, 1997.

There is a real and frequently voiced view within HR and the broader business community, that HR has not always had the tools to deal with these issues. Where in the past HR has possessed in some part the skills to engage, it has not always given itself the opportunity to do so. Clearly there have been barriers to HR’s effectiveness in the way it was organized and this chapter seeks to examine some of the issues and solutions proposed to tackle these.
Traditionally HR has often held very direct and ‘open door’ relationships with employees. In doing so it has fulfilled an essential gap in the business – the voice or advocate of the employee. It has also filled the role of facilitator and executor of all people related processes, regardless of whether these were necessary or HR was the most appropriate method of delivery. There is now a set of pressures that are emerging that demand that HR is able to respond in a different way to meet them. The pressures come from differing directions:
From the CEO
• Focus on ‘core competencies’
• Companies retrench to focus on core activities
• Creates pressure on HR to ‘prove its worth’
From the CFO
• Pressure for cost reduction
• Benchmarking against sector high performers
• Requirement to demonstrate the ROI for HR activities
From line manager
• Support for them to have the autonomy to manage their teams
• Tools to improve the performance of their teams
• Less labour intensive interaction with HR
From employees
• Improving service to employees
• Modern employees act as ‘volunteers’ and demand high standards of service from HR
• Employees have a new one-to-one relationship with companies

To meet these pressures the HR profession has begun to articulate new ways of creating value through the function. A new model has emerged in recent years that aims to provide HR with the platform on which to deliver its promise. The new model requires HR to position itself to engage with the business at the right levels, in the right ways.
We shall examine the organizational structures that allow HR to tackle the challenges it faces today and the approaches HR leaders have used to deploy these.

The new roles
The above pressures are broadly driven by four themes:
1. Strategic – drive the business strategy forward.
2. Financial – demonstrate functional cost reduction and value.
3. Change – work with and lead the business through change.
4. Performance – improving the performance of individual employees and teams.

HR must organize itself to meet these and demonstrate that it is achieving them. Delivering this clearly has two key components that HR must develop; the skills to achieve and the organizational design to allow it to engage. Prior to this we will consider the new roles and structure that allow HR to take on these challenges.

Source : Transforming HR. Ian Hunter & Jane Saunders.2005

Human Resource Management Defined

Human resource management is defined as a strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organization’s most valued assets – the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of its objectives.

John Storey (1989) believes that HRM can be regarded as a ‘set of interrelated policies with an ideological and philosophical underpinning’. He suggests four aspects that constitute the meaningful version of HRM:
* a particular constellation of beliefs and assumptions;
* a strategic thrust informing decisions about people management
* the central involvement of line managers;
* reliance upon a set of ‘levers’ to shape the employment relationship.

Source : Strategic HRM. Michael Amstrong.2006

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