Robert (Bob) Lewis, APT Inc: Why job descriptions matter and how to make them meaningful

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Bob Lewis, who is the Director of APT, which is a company that specializes in helping organizations really define what it is people need to do in their jobs, whether that's for career pathing succession management, getting very good at what would traditionally be called job analysis, and Bob shares some of the innovations in job analysis and some great best practices for saying, "Are we doing job analysis well?", and then discusses both the opportunities that you get from effective job analysis, which admittedly traditionally I think job analysis has been a kind of administrative process, but he says if it's done right it becomes a very dynamic tool to ensure people are doing the right things in organizations, and is also an increasingly important tool to make sure that companies comply with compensation acts and can avoid some very significant penalties if you're paying people wrong, and job analysis has a lot to do with legally defending how companies pay employees. So let's listen to Bob Lewis to APT this week on People Performance Radio.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. Today we're talking with Bob Lewis, who is the Director of APT, and actually I should say that's Dr Bob Lewis. Dr Lewis, welcome to the show.

Bob

Thank you Steve, I appreciate being here.

Steve

So can you tell us a little bit about what APT does and what you do within the organization specifically?

Bob

Oh, absolutely. APT is a HR consulting firm staffed primarily by industrial organizational psychologists, and we provide services to our clients to help them better handle the workload that their folks are doing in terms of managing the performance of those folks, identifying the key criteria for success, as well as the key capabilities people need to have in order to perform the job successfully, and to that end we provide 360 degree feedback, consulting, staffing and organizational change consulting as well as surveys and compensation management.

Steve

So what might a typical project that you're involved in look like?

Bob

We often engage our clients first and foremost to help them get a handle on the work people are doing. The world of work has changed quite a bit, as we all know, over the last 15 to 20 years, and so as companies have become more knowledge intensive, as they've delivered work that is service based rather than product based, and as talent has become more important than bricks and mortar to delivering services to their clients, companies have had a harder time figuring out what their workforce should be in terms of capabilities and how they should help folks manage their careers, so we often start with projects that help companies better get a sense of the work people are doing, and the capabilities they need to have to do it.

Steve

So I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things, Bob, you and I are both industrial organizational psychologists, and one thing that's pounded into our brain when we're in grad school is, the first step to get people to do what you want is to define what it is you want them to do, which is really good job analysis, job descriptions, really define that, yet when you get out into the world of work, most job descriptions, if they're defined at all, they're grossly outdated, they're inadequate, and in a lot of organizations, it seems like they really haven't defined exactly what they want people to do. It sounds like you're trying to address some of that issue—can you talk a little bit about how do you make this process of defining jobs more relevant to the business, so they don't just see it as a purely administrative task?

Bob

Oh, absolutely Steve, and you couldn't be more right, it is much more difficult to do the very classic types of job analysis that a lot of IO psychologists were taught in school. The first step in making job analysis relevant is to not focus on what people are doing on a micro basis, but instead what they should be doing on a macro basis, so the first step is understand the strategic goals of the organization, and to create some larger context within which the jobs should operate, and that's particularly important when people are, day by day, not producing widgets, but on the phone helping customers, when they're engaged in creating intellectual property, or when they're co-ordinating rather than stamping things out on a line, or engaging in easily observed behaviors, because it's under those conditions that people have the most discretion in how they do their job, and so it's very important for them to understand strategically what the organization needs to accomplish, and once that's laid out, then you can start to determine the key activities that people should engage in, and then the requirements that they need to bring to the table in order to do those well.

But you're absolutely right, if you miss that strategic context, if you don't help people get a clear line of sight to what the organization needs them to accomplish, then job descriptions pretty quickly become exercises in listing obsolete tasks.

Steve

So, with that in mind when you start with that strategic vision, and then go in and look at how the jobs support that strategy, have you had clients where the clients have had an "a-ha" moment, when they're saying, "You know the way we were thinking about this job was wrong—we've been assuming they need to do this and actually they need to do that", and really reframe their thoughts about what the job requires and the kind of person—can you give an example of maybe where a client's said, "Oh wow, we've been thinking about this the wrong way"?

Bob

We quite often run into that situation, and one is with respect to a client we worked with to create a corporate talent pool. One of the key things they were finding is they were having a great deal of difficulty staffing their high potential talent pool, not because they couldn't identify the individuals who should be in there, or who could be in there, but instead because the people who were in there didn't really want to be in there, and as we looked at the work people were doing and the way they were evaluated and how they were being identified for this high potential pool, we found that the organization was requiring very different things of people in different divisions, so that when divisions nominated folks for this corporate talent pool, and they were all brought in one setting to get their corporate talent development, they had very different expectations coming in, very different skill sets, and we did a very quick analysis of both the work and how people were appraised, how their performance was managed against their expectations, to find that different parts of the organization were reinforcing and encouraging people to engage in very different behaviors, such that they developed very unique skill sets that couldn't easily be put together in one group. So they really had to rethink how they were managing this high potential talent across the organization, and encourage divisions to give up a little bit, so to speak, what they wanted for their own narrow purposes in order to serve the larger corporate purpose.

Steve

I think that's a great example, and I think part of that gets into, as an organization you're encouraging employees to do something, whether you're doing it consciously or not, your behavior is encouraging certain kinds of behaviors, and if you don't really define what those behaviors are, you're likely to have different employees think they're supposed to be doing different things because they work for different managers, and the company's never defined a common definition of what "good" is, it sounds like.

Bob

Exactly Steve, and you see that operating on multiple levels, at the level of an individual manager with his or her set of direct reports, you see it because the employees, because the work is knowledge-based and often very highly skilled, have more understanding of what they're doing on a day to day basis than the manager, and if the manager isn't setting clear expectations, then folks tend to do what it is they think is best, justifiably so in many cases, because they have a strong professional background. It happens on the level of the organization as well, in the case that I just mentioned, simply because the corporate organization is encouraging the divisions to meet their business goals, and of course they then optimize what they need to do in terms of their talent to meet their divisional goals.

Steve

I think that's interesting, because your point was, I think, for the danger, sometimes people say, "We want a highly entrepreneurial pro-active company where people have a lot of independence", but if you do that you lose the very nature of, there's a reason we call it an "organization"—if you're not organized, it's just a bunch of people doing stuff.

Bob

And unfortunately, you also increase the risk of somebody in that situation saying, "Well, you told me one thing, and now you're telling me I have to do another", and they see that as a violation of their "employment contract", or at least the implicit contract, and they bring legal action, so to the extent that the organization can communicate a consistent set of expectations, back that up with the processes and procedures they use to manage people to those expectations, they have a better chance of not only creating better organizational outcomes for themselves, but also minimizing their legal exposure.

Steve

Can you talk a little more about that legal exposure, because there's a lot of talk now with the new administration, a lot of people saying, some stuff's getting passed that really is raising the legal risk to companies, and there was some pretty massive class action suits where people said, "Hey, you called me an exempt employee, but actually had me doing hourly work", and there's some pretty substantial financial pain has been created for organizations—it sounds like you're probably in the forefront of that—what do you think is the legal climate now?—how concerned do companies need to be about making sure they're paying people according do the Fair Wage Act?

Bob

They need to be concerned about it, and they should have always been concerned about it. The nature of the law suits as we're seeing them, in our litigation support practices, is starting to change—they traditionally had been targeted to what's called the management exemption, that is, in retail organizations, particularly store managers who are classified as exempt, tend to do a lot of non-exempt level work, so a store manager will help out running the cash register when staff are short; they'll help by stocking the shelves, or maybe even sweeping the floor when it's needed, because they do what's needed to make the store run well. What the question that's introduced then is, are they really management employees, or are they glorified floor sweepers and shelf stockers?—and what we're seeing now, a change in that those very questions are being asked of professional workers, people with college degrees who ordinarily would not have sued under the Wage Hour Act, but the question becomes, if an organization, say in the finance industry now, where there's much more attention paid to following rules and procedures, removes the discretion from the job, am I then truly a professional? If I'm an accounting analyst, or a financial analyst of some sort, and there's no gray areas for me to make decisions about, then do I have any discretion and am I simply now a rule follower?

So we're starting to find that organizations are facing law suits from the top section of their population that they hadn't in the past. So companies have always had to be concerned about this, we think they need to be a little more concerned now in a way that's consistent with how work has changed, it's much more service-oriented, much more knowledge-based, and those workers are now questioning how much discretion they can actually employ on the job.

Steve

It just sounds like it's so confusing, I think there's a little word for some of our listeners who may not be familiar with this exempt/non-exempt classification—in a nutshell, if you pay somebody hourly versus paying them a salary, there's all sorts of legal implications about whether or not somebody should be paid hourly or salary, based on whether or not their job gives them a lot of autonomy, how much decision-making authority do they have if they manage people, and what I'm hearing you say is increasingly we're expecting hourly workers to have a lot more latitude in how they make decisions around services and customer service, but on the flipside a lot of salaried jobs, especially in regulated industries, were really clamping down on people's autonomy, so we're kind of pushing some traditional salaried type jobs towards a more hourly model, and we're pushing hourly type jobs towards a more salaried model, and it's creating confusion in the middle about how should we pay these people—is that correct?

Bob

That's exactly correct, and it's particularly creating a risk for organizations because there's a financial penalty that's associated with classifying people the wrong way, and the key distinction between what you're calling hourly and salaried is that hourly folks are eligible for overtime, if they work in excess of 40 hours a week, and salaried people are not, so if you have someone misclassified, as an organization you're at risk of a pretty severe financial penalty, not only back pay but damages, if a salaried person who's been working 50 hours a week for the past few years is really doing hourly level work.

Steve

So I think there's one thing to emphasize too, as you probably know, although there's this legal risk, this thread of not appropriately defining and classifying jobs. There's all sorts of benefits in terms of setting clear expectations about what good looks like. And so if I'm in an organization, and I'm wondering, "Gee—do we have a good definition of jobs?—have we classified jobs appropriately?"—are there some questions, some self diagnostic things that you would suggest organizations could look at that would help them sort of say, "Are we doing a good job when it comes to job descriptions?" and defining what jobs should be?

Bob

I think there's a thoroughly simple audit that most organizations can do themselves, and the first is, as you suggest, to pull the job descriptions, and so the first question is, "Do we have them?", and many organizations unfortunately don't. If you've pulled the ones you have, the second question is, do people agree with what's in them, particularly the job holders and the managers of the job holders. I'm often surprised that we can pull a job description, give it to a person who's supposed to be doing that job, only to have them say, "I don't do that", or, "I did that three or four years ago, but I don't do it today", so you can do a very quick self-audit simply by pulling those job descriptions and having a conversation with a few well placed incumbents and their managers to determine if indeed those job descriptions are up to date, and if they're not, then you can engage in a process of interviewing some of those job holders, particularly the ones who do the job well, to get a sense of what's required in the job—what do they do every day, and what are the key things they have to deliver, and if you add a minimum, then get a good handle on what people are doing and how they're measured, you have the basis for a minimally good job description.

Steve

What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when they're trying to define jobs?—are there some common errors that you see done again and again in organizations that lead them to not adequately describing jobs or describing jobs incorrectly?

Bob

The biggest mistake we find clients make is that they assume they know too much, that the job descriptions principally can be written by HR folks who don't really do the job and haven't really observed the job, or by managers who on a one by one basis write their own job descriptions, even for jobs that exist across the organization, so they may only manage 1% of the job holders, but they're writing a job description for their two or three folks and some other managers writing them for another two or three, and I think that sort of opinion, that I can look at this job and write a job description, is facilitated by the easy availability of card sorting techniques and what not that encourage folks to just sit down at their desk and decide what a job is, and how it should be done. So the key mistake is not collecting enough information, not going to the incumbents who actually do the job to get their input, and not really creating a solid basis to say, this is indeed the job. When it's the opinion of one person, you can pretty much guarantee it's not a good job description.

Steve

That's a good by-line. I'm just curious—do you have any examples of times where you've gone and seen companies do that, where they've just really missed the boat in describing a job?

Bob

It happens on a fairly frequent basis, and unfortunately they get challenged by it, either because people in the job say, "This isn't me", and the companies learn about it that way, or they get challenged in a legal context, but it happens quite a bit. I'm currently working with a client who went through a great deal of effort to try to define jobs in the organization, but again unfortunately took the tactic of primarily housing that effort in HR, controlled by HR, all the job descriptions were written by HR, and as a result people felt that the job descriptions not only didn't describe what they do, but closed off career possibilities for them. We were able to come in and deliver a survey that analyzed each one of the key jobs, those surveys were developed by going to the incumbent groups and having a set of focus groups and interviews to determine what those jobs were, and as a result people were able to write statements that made sense to them, that they could say, "Yes, I do this", and "No, I don't", and we built a series of job descriptions that now not only describe what people do, but help them see what other jobs they could potentially bid for in the organization.

Steve

So it sort of comes back again, job descriptions—we tend to think of them as an administrative tool, and they do play an important administrative function, but it's like, if you do them right and you use them appropriately, and you link them to other things, they become tools for communication, career development, performance improvement—it's not just about having these in a file cabinet in case the lawyers come. It sounds like actually, if that's how you treat your job descriptions, your job descriptions are probably outdated, if you're not using them dynamically.

Bob

That's exactly right, Steve, and particularly with clients who have now electronic performance management systems, it's so important for them to have a strong basis for the performance dimensions and the goals that they manage through those systems, and now that you can collect tons of data very easily electronically, it's so much more important for them to manage those job descriptions better than they've done in the past.

Steve

Well, as we're coming up to the end of the interview, I just want to summarize, I think, a couple of points that you've made, Bob, and then get your final thoughts. It sounds like you're saying, look—basically this is about being very clear on what it is you expect people to do, which has big implications for how you pay them, and they key is, if you want to know if you're doing it well, just simply say, do we have job descriptions at all?—if we do, show them to the people doing the job, and say, "Does this describe what you're doing?"; if it doesn't, build those job descriptions, and there's different techniques, but the most important is, you have to work with a cross section of people that are actually doing the job, it's not something you can kind of sit in a room and write up some job descriptions and assume you can guess what somebody's doing.

When you look at this, what do you see is, the final question is, what do you see is the future of the stuff that APT's doing in this area, how do you see it evolving, and where do you see it going maybe as we become more sophisticated in this field?

Bob

I see us doing much more work to help people get a good sense of where their career might take them, so as companies become more sophisticated with job analysis and creating job descriptions, and we love working with sophisticated clients, because that gives us the opportunity to do broader things; the work then tends to move to answering questions like, "Well, given that I have this skill set, where can I go next?", or "What will it take me to develop the next set of skills?", or, because many organizations, as you know, have flattened, and there's less opportunity to move up, people will ask, "Well, how can I move laterally?", so the strong foundation that's developed by understanding the work your folks are doing and the skills they're building and the capabilities they have and need to have to go to other jobs helps you do a much better job managing people's careers over the long term, and I think that's where the really exciting next step is.

Steve

It's really getting into better career pathing and showing people what we need, and defining that. Well that's cool, I look forward to seeing next, I hear that theme a lot, as we're looking at this labor shortage, increasingly companies are going to have to build their own talent, if they have good talent, they're going to have to actively nurture it, because it's becoming scarcer, despite the recession there's still a shortage of really skilled people.

Well Bob, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio—any last comments or thoughts before we sign off?

Bob

Only that we've discussed the legal aspects as well as the organization effectiveness aspects of doing this work, and I do want to emphasize that there's no contradiction between those two, they're not mutually exclusive. If you do the right things to manage your organization well, you are probably protecting yourself legally, minimizing your risk in that regard as well. You shouldn't do this to simply manage the legal risk, there are really good business reasons to undertake this sort of work.

Steve

That's heartening, so every so often good practice does reflect what the law requires?

Bob

It does.

Steve

How refreshing! Well, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio, Bob.

Bob

Thanks so much Steve, it's been wonderful.

Speaker

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