When I talk to client groups about position control I am often reminded of the ancient tale, attributed variously to Sufis, Jainists, Buddhists or Hindus, of a group of blind men who encounter an elephant. The story varies according to the teller but the gist is that each of the blind men touches a part of the elephant and makes a conclusion about what it is they have touched, but none perceives that it is an elephant.

The same is true of each of the stakeholder groups in a position control implementation. In general, this is what I see from various interests:

• Accounting: We need to accurately track and report on costs.
• Budget: We need to forecast and control people costs.
• Talent Acquisition: We need to define position requirements.
• Managers: We want control over who we hire, and position control will keep us from hiring whomever and whatever we want.

Interestingly enough, Organizational Development and Succession Planning functions are too frequently left out of the initial planning. When those two constituencies are eventually included in the conversation, these are their perceptions:

• Organizational Development: We need employees to accurately see what competencies they need to develop for their career paths.
• Succession Planning: We need to see where our gaps are to identify and develop potential successors.

All of these are true, but none captures the whole elephant. Implemented properly, a position control system encompasses all of these interests and integrates them.

The problem with person-based systems

In the initial stages of process and technology maturity, most organizations make do with person-based processes. The kind of conversations that go on are something like, “We need a production engineer. How much can we afford to pay?” or “Janet is leaving. We need to find a replacement.”

The problems with person-based thinking include:

• Difficulty with budgeting for vacancies and job shares.
• Difficulty planning future workforce requirements and costs.
• Difficulty developing succession plans for vacant positions.
• Inability to plan for staffing requirements for functions that do not yet exist.
• No common denominator for integrating accounting, budget, hiring and other functions.

Position-based systems

Position-based systems enable a host of integrated activities. These activities add value to existing processes and ultimately make the organization more competitive. Among these activities are:

• Accurately forecasting costs
• Budgeting and analyzing positions regardless of vacancies and job shares
• Defining position profiles for purposes of talent acquisition, succession planning and career planning.
• Developing “what-if” scenarios for succession planning, reorganizations, acquisitions and workforce changes.
• Identifying vacancies and their impact.
• Comparing actual people expenses to budget
• Controlling budget execution

Nuts and Bolts of Position Control

A position is an entity that exists within an organizational function. Each position has several attributes and each attribute serves one or more organizational processes. The chart below illustrates some of these relationships.

Position Control System Relationships

While this diagram provides a basic overview of the relationships, one relationship in particular is most important. It is that Incumbent – the person in a position – is an attribute of the position. The person in a position is a separate entity from the position itself, and a position may or may not have a person in it.

In addition, a position funded by one part of the organization may – temporarily or permanently – function in another and for purposes of performance planning and management will report to a person outside the position structure. A person may serve in more than one position, and more than one person may share a position. It is precisely this that enables the flexibility and utility of integrated position management.

Depending on the level or organization and technological maturity of your organization, you may or may not need an automated position management system. But integrating the functions listed here by any means will improve organization efficiency, performance and competitiveness.

On the path to maturity

All too frequently, clients don’t see the need for a position control “system” until they implement succession planning provided by a talent management vendor. The conversation most frequently goes like this:

Vendor: “Do you have a position control system?”

Customer: “No, but we have thought about it.”

Vendor: “That’s OK. We can do this without it.”

Yikes! The result is that position control doesn’t ever get done or is a messy implementation.

Let’s put the cart behind the horse and talk about the organizational maturity path as it relates to position control. The functions of a well-oiled position control system already exist in your organization. Someone makes at least some attempt to forecast and control people costs. Someone defines positions for the purpose of talent acquisition. Someone at least makes at attempt to control hiring. Someone is tracking and reporting on costs. Employees and managers are having discussions about career paths. Executives are thinking about successors to key positions. These functions may not be integrated or automated, but they exist in some form.

As your technology and processes improve, the organization will acquire the ability to integrate these functions into a cohesive, well-managed system that will serve all constituent needs.

If we take technology challenges out of the equation, we find that crossing competencies and objectives leads to difficulties in conceptual thinking on the part of end users because the fundamental purpose and structure of each is different.  Standards of Performance refer to HOW you achieve your business results, focusing on the behaviors that drive superior performance.  Objectives define WHAT those results should be, with clearly defined metrics and targets.  Keeping those two functions distinct, and understanding how each contributes to overall business effectiveness, is key to successful performance management.

Structural Differences

Objectives

Objectives in their purest form entail identification of a specific task or set of tasks to be completed within a specified time frame. We are familiar with the S.M.A.R.T. approach to objectives:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

Nomenclature may differ in practice but the concepts are the same. Three of these concepts are unique to objectives:

1. Specific indicates a discrete task or set of tasks.
2. Measurable indicates that there is a measurable numerical standard.
3. Time-bound indicates that there is a specific time frame for completion or attainment.

Without these three attributes objectives become little more than vague “wishes” and their impact on the organization cannot be aligned with organizational objectives or effectively linked to organizational results.

Competencies

A competency is a behavioral expectation. The implication here is that that a competency is not a specific task or set of tasks but a behavioral standard applied to all relevant tasks.

As an example, let’s take a typical standard of performance developed for a well-known medical center:

I respect privacy and confidentiality .

A certain degree of specificity is defined by an accompanying list of behavioral statements:

• Only engage in conversations regarding patients according to hospital policies and regulatory requirements
• Discuss confidential matters in a private area
• Keep written/electronic information out of the view of others
• Knock prior to entering a patient’s room, identify myself, and ask permission to enter
• Utilize doors/curtains/blankets as appropriate to ensure privacy and explain to the patient why I am doing this, ask permission prior to removing garments or blanket

In contrast to an objective, achievement of this behavioral standard does not have a measurable outcome but is determined by somewhat subjective observations of an evaluator. In theory, these behaviors could be measured using behavioral checklists, but this confuses the distinction between specific tasks and behavioral standards.  The behavioral standard is not simply a series of tasks, but reflects a way of interacting with others in the achievement of tasks.

Donna Wright, a noted competency expert in the healthcare arena, recommends that we move away from our pre-occupation with competency checklists, and rely on other forms of competency validation where appropriate.  This can include behavioral examples or “exemplars” illustrating how the employee demonstrated the competency in a given situation.  Case studies using narrative / qualitative assessment data are more effective than strictly quantitative measures in these areas.  Peer reviews (multi-rater feedback) regarding key behaviors, with supporting narrative examples, are another key element in assessing competency proficiency.

Implementation in Talent Management Systems

Career development and succession planning are directly dependent on definitions of roles, with competencies specific to each role.  As a practical matter, the definition of “I respect privacy and confidentiality” will be different for discrete functional areas, possibly requiring “contextualization” of the competency.   Different behaviors may be appropriate for an HR person, versus those required of an employee in a clinical role.

In a talent management software environment, these competencies are or should be attached to the roles regardless of what person is in the role. The competencies define the knowledge, skills, abilities, or other attributes required to perform in the role.

Conversely, objectives are typically attached to a person rather than a role.  This presents a challenge for the design of succession plans and development plans,  where an employee preparing for a future role most likely does not have access to the objectives of a person in that role and therefore cannot fully determine what is required to be prepared for the role. The same barrier exists for a succession planner attempting to determine if a potential successor is ready for a particular role.

Recommendations

To make sure that your talent management systems support organizational results and effective performance management, career development and succession planning, we recommend the following:

• Be sure your implementation supports your business needs,  taking into consideration the full capabilities of the software vendor’s technology, not just what looks easy to do.
• Partner with your software vendor to best leverage and manage your competency library.  Consider such solutions as “contextualizing” competency definitions where this will lead to clearer performance standards and expectations within selected roles.
• Create a “high feedback culture” to support competency development and the achievement of individual objectives.  Effective performance management starts with the culture.  The technology can help enable many of the processes, but cannot make up for deficits in leadership or the culture.
• Make sure your objective management system supports alignment of objectives throughout the organization and the creation of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and time-bound objectives.
• Be diligent about understanding the implications of your implementation decisions on such longer term needs as career development and succession planning and not just the immediate needs (typically goal and performance management).
• Ensure that your competency and job description content is in shape to support your technology investments.  Make the investment to improve that content on the front end of your implementation projects, rather than waiting until after the technology has been implemented.  It will save you unnecessary  re-work down the line.

Some months ago I wrote about rating scales and stated rather unequivocally that a five point rating scale is preferred over a three point rating scale to differentiate among performers. I have done some further thinking and concluded that in some cases perpetuation of a currently used three point scale might be best. More about that later.

My thoughts were – and still are – that finer differentiation is required at the higher and lower ends of the scale:

• At the top end, an organization that wants to be competitive needs to differentiate between those who exceed their objectives and job requirements and those few top performers who individually have a big impact on the business. That might be sales several times greater than the average, customer service that has a measurable impact on return business, introduction and implementation of game-changing processes, or any other individual effort that makes a difference in competitive edge. The key word here is impact.
• At the bottom end, there is a need to differentiate between those who need coaching and development to become “keepers” and those who should be moved out of the current position or out of the organization. The key here is potential. By that I mean the potential to become a full contributor in the current role.

Here are examples of typical overall rating distributions. In the first example, we see a typical distribution using the three point rating scale. Notice that there is a disproportionate distribution of “Exceeds” ratings and no discrete differentiation at the top or bottom:

In the second example, using a five point scale, we see a differentiation between strong performers and impact players at the top and between “keepers” and “non-keepers” at the bottom.

Note that the median is shifted about 1 ½ standard deviations to the right. This is normal for many reasons, the most important of which are:

• The tendency of lower performers to move out of the organization.
• Rater error. We know that most people view themselves as “above average” and managers tend to go along with that bias.

Rock the boat, but don’t capsize it

Performance management tools affect organizational behavior, whether we want them to or not. Over time, using a three point scale will

• Reinforce the tendency among managers to be non-confrontive – to avoid the honesty in feedback that gives individuals the information they need to make hard choices about themselves and their performance. Non-performers will adopt an “invisibility cloak” to hang on to their current income as long as possible.
• Create and perpetuate hidden differentiation at the top and bottom. Conversations around high-potential difference makers will tend to be hidden and secret – often secret from the high-performing individuals themselves. This will translate to missed opportunities as the top performers seek the recognition and opportunity they need elsewhere. Confrontations about non-performance will often come as a “surprise” to the non-performers themselves and result it much more troublesome personnel decisions.

The judgment call for implementers to make is the degree of disruption that a rating scale change will bring and the organization’s readiness for that disruption. In my experience, the controlling factor will be the amount of time and effort required to prepare the organization for the change. With lightning-speed implementations now the norm, there is usually not sufficient time to make the changes in thinking required to adopt new organizational principles when implementing a new system.

My thinking now is that the ideal time to make the change from a three point to a five point rating scale is after current performance management initiatives have stabilized. This will enable boat-rockers to do their thing without making everyone seasick.

The exceptions, of course, are those change managers who have been in preparation mode for a long time prior to the technology implementation. I have seen a few cases of this level of readiness, and the results have been very positive.

In the healthcare industry, strict compliance requirements have driven complexity in job descriptions. While it is necessary that employees understand the precise requirements of their jobs, the result has been that in many organizations these job descriptions and related performance review forms become almost unreadable.   Statements of job responsibilities contain long paragraphs with multiple sub-statements separated by semicolons or enumerated lists of varying length. In a printed document, these long paragraphs are difficult enough to read and understand, but when we move them to web pages displayed on a computer monitor they become even more difficult to follow.

Take this real-life example of a single Job Responsibility from one healthcare organization:

Supervises staff performance of their daily work and ensures overall timeliness and accuracy of team functions. Recommends and implements procedure/process improvements to increase efficiency and effectiveness of shift operations, maximize productivity, and facilitate a high level of customer service. (1) Serves as facilitator to team process and scheduling to accommodate changes in workload.  Establishes work schedules to ensure adequate staffing as per established standards. Assists in the evaluation of equipment and staff needs. (2) Proactively mentors, coaches, develops/educates and trains staff and orients new employees to meet individual and departmental needs. (3) Responsible for ongoing evaluation of staff through observation, and regular feedback and timely performance evaluations. Consistently achieves high employee satisfaction ratings. (4) Assists in developing policies and procedures for the department and applies policies in a consistent, fair and equitable manner. Assists in the discussion/resolution of employee relations issues or other personnel actions in coordination with management and in accordance with established hospital policy. (5) Provides regular hospital/department updates to the employees.  Ensures that staff activities are in alignment with the goals of the hospital.  (6) Demonstrates problem solving skills and effectively collaborates with employees, other departments, management, visitors and others. Builds service-oriented team that supports other departments within the organization and the overall customer service philosophy.

This single job responsibility is difficult enough to read on paper.  Placed on a Web page it becomes even more difficult to follow.  Moreover, assessment of lengthy statement such as this becomes a challenge during performance review time.  Nursing managers may have as many as eighty or more reviews to form, and the job description content needs to be both complete and easy to read for them to manage an effective review process. 

Online tools to manage job descriptions and performance review forms are now widely adopted across healthcare.  These new technologies provide both the opportunity and the challenge of writing and displaying concise yet thorough job descriptions and performance evaluation criteria in easy to use formats.

The result is that healthcare organizations are being challenged to change these run-on paragraphcs to a format that can be presented as a series of very short statements that can easily be included in performance review forms. Taking the above example, the lengthy responsibility statement can be edited into groups of statements, each addressing a separate, measurable job responsibility and expected outcome.  Consider this re-statement:

Staff Performance

• Supervises staff performance of their daily work and ensures overall timeliness and accuracy of team functions
• Recommends and implements procedure/process improvements to increase efficiency and effectiveness of shift operations, maximize productivity, and facilitate a high level of customer service
• Serves as facilitator to team process and scheduling to accommodate changes in workload
• Establishes work schedules to ensure adequate staffing as per established standards; assists in the evaluation of equipment and staff needs

Staff Development

• Proactively mentors, coaches, develops/educates and trains staff and orients new employees to meet individual and departmental needs
• Responsible for ongoing evaluation of staff through observation, and regular feedback and timely performance evaluations; consistently achieves high employee satisfaction ratings
• Builds service-oriented team that supports other departments within the organization and the overall customer service philosophy

 Unit Performance

• Assists in developing policies and procedures for the department and applies policies in a consistent, fair and equitable manner
• Assists in the discussion/resolution of employee relations issues or other personnel actions in coordination with management and in accordance with established hospital policy
• Provides regular hospital/department updates to the employees
• Ensures that staff activities are in alignment with the goals of the hospital
• Demonstrates problem solving skills and effectively collaborates with employees, other departments, management, visitors and others

This format is easily translated into formats that work very well in best-of-breed software formats. Here is a representation of the resulting format for one top-tier vendor:

At first, this may seem like a huge task, but there are many tools available to your IT staff or available to you in Microsoft Excel that can make the task much easier. The HRIZONS consulting organization also specializes in helping healthcare organizations manage this challenging task.  In the end you will find the result well worth the effort. Your job descriptions that once were comprehensible only to a few will become tools used by all employees and managers to drive results and compliance.

This is the second in a series of blogs, focusing on some of the issues we at HRIZONS have identified in working with a group of our healthcare clients on how to better manage job descriptions.   We welcome your input, questions, suggestions, and responses.

Just what are job families? Many of our clients and partners have different interpretations.  Some clients define job families as broad functional areas like nursing or finance or information technology.  These clients are typically concerned about organizing their jobs into useful categories for job description maintenance, compensation planning, performance management, and competency modeling.  A leading talent management technology provider organizes its job families this way to effectively integrate job descriptions and performance management processes.

Other clients define job families more narrowly as a set of jobs that share a high degree of similarity but differ in terms of levels of expertise and expectations.   Job families in this sense are usually built around a core job title, with varying degrees of expertise or experience associated with the various positions in that job family.  Thus in IT you might find Network Engineers, Software Developers, Help Desk Support,  and Business Analysts as various job families within the broader functional area of information technology.  Each of these job families can include multiple jobs, reflecting progressively higher levels of expertise and responsibility. This approach is more granular, and focuses on a high degree of overlap and continuity among similar jobs in a single job family.

What approach is best to use?  That really depends on your purposes.  The broad based definition is useful if you want to build competency models that apply across a general functional area.  Thus all HR employees might receive a core set of HR competencies associated with the HR job family. This is often useful for creating alignment within a functional area.

More granular job families are particularly useful if you are creating “career ladders” within or across functional areas. One hospital we’ve worked with defines a “clerical ladder” as a sequence of administrative jobs with progressively higher levels of responsibility.  All the jobs in this sequence are part of the Clerical Job Family, cutting across functional areas but sharing a core set of competencies and responsibilities.  This is useful for structuring career development progressions for employees, increasing motivation, retention, and a sense of accomplishment.  Another common job family of this type among hospitals is the “clinical ladder” for nurses, reflecting progressively higher levels of proficiency and experience.

The key question is how do you want to structure your jobs and job families to best serve your talent management objectives?  We’d like to hear your thoughts on how you structure job families, and your rationale for how your structure supports your talent objectives.

Well-designed job profiles, which include well-designed competencies models, form the glue that connects the various components of your talent management system. HR proficiency in this area, among other things, can help you:

• Focus your talent management efforts on pivotal talent
• Focus your talent on what matters
• Assess the impact of talent on business results
• Provide feedback on key talent to recruiting to fine tune sourcing and selection to improve the talent pipeline

We have seen that in many cases certain HR functions have need for certain components of a complete job profile. Those traditional approaches have been

• Compensation using a description of duties and responsibilities, type of work, kind of work, FLSA status to benchmark and classify jobs for pay purposes.
• Recruiting using a frequently different description of duties and responsibilities and a list of requirements to identify job candidates.
• Performance managers using a set of normally generic competencies to set expectations and evaluate performance.
• Succession planners using competencies for development purposes to prepare potential successors for future assignments.

We advocate a complete job profile that serves as the integration point for all of these functions and more. This approach can have especially strong benefits in identifying and managing key positions and pivotal talent in your organization. Our recommendation is to start with a cross-functional team that will

• Identify key positions and their requirements. These key positions are not limited to executive functions but are those positions that make or break the organization’s success.
• Identify pivotal talent. Jim Newman, HRIZONS President, defines these as “those people whose ideas, actions and interactions create and maintain your competitive edge.” Define the competencies that make these individuals successful.
• Create a comprehensive job profile that includes these competencies.
• Use the resulting job profile as the basis for setting performance expectations, engaging and developing your talent, quantifying their impact on business results, and feeding this information to your recruiting staff to improve selection of talent that will drive your business results in the future.

What are your thoughts? Are you ready to get started to better define and leverage job profiles within your organization?

HRIZONS is creating a learning forum for hospitals and healthcare providers to discuss what’s working and what isn’t in the area of managing job descriptions.  We are investigating the full range of topics related to job descriptions (or JDs for short), from how to streamline and standardize your current JDs to how to integrate JD management with your full range of talent management applications – e.g. recruitment, performance management, compensation, development, and succession planning.

This is the first in a series of blogs,  focusing on some of the issues we at HRIZONS have identified in working with a group of our healthcare clients on how to better manage job descriptions.   We welcome you input, questions, suggestions, and responses.

Job Descriptions in Healthcare

Job descriptions in healthcare are critically important for ensuring that employees understand exactly what’s expected and meet required safety and quality standards.  One of the challenges we’ve seen with our clients is how to manage the complexity and detail of job-related requirements, while still making it relatively easy for managers to complete numerous performance reviews quickly and accurately.   Here are some of the strategies that we’ve found to be most helpful:

1. Identify core job groups or job families that share a core set of key responsibilities.  Build your core job description, and then add addendums to cover the job-specific responsibilities for the jobs in that group.  This saves time and makes it much easier to manage changes to job descriptions.

1. Define career ladders within each of these job families or core job groups.  This enables managers and staff to easily view promotion and career development opportunities.  It also serves to support retention of valued employees.
2. Separate the competency or skill checklists from the job description and formal performance appraisal process.  This reduces the complexity of the job descriptions, and makes it easier to manage job descriptions and performance reviews.  Manage the competency/skill checklists in a Learning Management System (LMS) or similar system.  Document completion of the checklist as part of the formal performance appraisal, but do not include the details within the review.
3. Identify exactly how your job description content will be used in relation to your recruiting  process. You want to make sure that your job descriptions will have the necessary information to be useful for making hiring decisions, informing candidates and new hires of what’s expected.  You also want to make sure that your performance review process is synchronized with your hiring criteria, so that you are assessing the same things on the job that you assessed during the hiring process.  This helps you refine your hiring criteria and track what factors differentiate your exceptional performers from the others.

We at HRIZONS have found that these and other tips have been helpful to our clients in streamlining their job descriptions and integrating them with their various talent management applications – particularly with performance management and recruitment.  We are  interested in stimulating discussion among our clients and other interested healthcare providers about the challenges your are experiencing in this area, and what solutions you have found that work.  Please give us your thoughts, ideas, questions, and answers to help support learning and process improvement in this critically important area of job description management.

Over the past few years we have seen a shift in job descriptions from specific skill-based descriptions with very detailed task lists to role descriptions using broad competencies. There are several factors driving this trend:

• Rapidly changing technology is quickly altering how work gets done.
• Dynamically changing workforces create frequent shifts in responsibilities.
• The need to be agile in the marketplace drives organizations to be able to quickly adapt to market changes.
• Keeping job descriptions current is a burdensome administrative task that can be eased somewhat by removing specifics that may change rapidly over time.

This trend does not mean that need for job descriptions and their structure has changed. The basic components of job descriptions still exist and for the same reasons they became standard practice in well-run organizations. Job descriptions must still be legally defensible and ADA compliant.

Let me use an example to illustrate the trend. A worker in supply chain management may need skill in using a specific software solution to track delivery status, but with the rapidly changing technology environment that same worker may need skill in a different software solution next week, next month or next year. Consequently, listing skill in using a specific software solution to track delivery status is no longer viable in a job description but the ability to use technology to track delivery status is relevant.

The key to defining specific tasks and methods then shifts to performance plans. A well-written, specific performance plan becomes a perfect companion to a functional role description, and satisfies the requirements of legal defensibility, union contracts and the employee/employer relationship.

The health care industry presents a different set of circumstances. Driven by Joint Commission certification standards, most health care organizations find themselves scrambling to capture both the broad role-based approach to job structures and the specificity required by Joint Commission requirements.

To get an understanding of what this means and how health care organizations are meeting the challenge, read Dr. Gordon Medlock’s series on health care talent management. Select the Healthcare category on the left.

My mind leads me to think of people in the same way, in that whenever I meet or even see someone interesting, I want to know that person’s story. When it comes to co-workers, colleagues, and employees the process of learning the story can take years, but once that threshold is passed and I know the “story,” (much abridged, of course) the connection becomes very strong. You and I could work together on a project and most likely be very successful, but what value would be added if I knew that you are a life-long fly fishing enthusiast? It goes far beyond our sharing a common interest. It would tell me something about your character: perseverance, attention to detail, problem-solving and many other attributes.

This leads me to further thoughts on the value of social networking within an organization. I am thinking that the more connections we have, the more we are willing to work cooperatively toward common goals.

What are your thoughts?

I understand the managerial tendency that would drive an organization to avoid a problem rather than manage it, but am thinking that it this type of organization would tend to manage activities rather than performance. Current literature and my own experience are conclusive – organizations that manage performance well outperform their competitors in the marketplace. Organizations that micromanage activities are destined for mediocrity at best.

This brings to mind some questions:

• If your productive employees are using social networking, why would you care?
• If you have unproductive employees, are you addressing the performance issues instead of trying to manage by rule?
• If your IT security folks have concerns about attacks through social networking sites, can they use commonly available tools to prevent malicious redirects and executables instead of cutting off access? Is there something I don’t understand here?
• Should talent acquisition have privileges that others don’t?

I welcome your comments.