Culture Foundation #1: Good Job Descriptions
Role clarity and accountability are key foundational characteristics of a workplace culture that enables people to do their best work and provides a sense of inclusivity. In last week’s post, I shared five fundamentals that every organization needs in place to even begin to have good culture. This week’s deep dive will be on job descriptions.
People need job descriptions because, on a basic level, there needs to be an agreement between the organization and the employee on duties and expectations. It’s absolutely crazy to not have one, especially if you’re at a company with more than 10 people. Without a job description, how do you know what to work on? How do you know if you are doing your job? Or in more complicated situations, how do you know who you are accountable to? A good job description articulates what your role and title is, who your manager is, what success looks like in terms of goals and metrics, and what your responsibilities are. Having these elements solidified describes how your role fits into the organization which in turn can give you a feeling of inclusion — an absolute fundamental to culture!
- A title is what people should call you and a role describes what your responsibilities are. For example, a Director of Operations could mean many different things at different places, so it’s a poor way of describing your true responsibilities. A Director of Operations could run departments like Business Systems, IT, HR, and Facilities. That speaks to what your role or scope of your role actually is. At another company a Director of Operations could run Revenue Operations, Financial Planning and Analysis, and Strategic Planning. In this case, although the title is the same, the actual role is drastically different. Having a well defined role with an accurate job title is the first step to having a clear job description. This is also a first step to creating a culture of inclusion. Your title is part of your identity at work, and your role describes how you fit into the team at large. If you know this and your co-workers know this, it will lead to a sense of belonging.
- Managers typically have the power to hire you, fire you, promote you, conduct performance reviews, and have direct oversight into how you spend your time at work. In more complicated organization structures, you may even have a manager that you work with on a day to day basis, who directs your project work and knows the value you add to the company, while having a separate manager who has the authority to give raises and promotions. I’ve seen this in matrix structured organizations and also at many consulting firms. When you don’t know who has this specific power over your work life, it’s extremely difficult to get job clarity and have successful career development, which could lead to feelings of unfulfillment and alienation.
- My friend Jerry always tells me: if you ain’t keeping score, you ain’t playing the game. If your job description lists specific goals and metrics that you can either quantitatively (ideally) or qualitatively track, now you are able to measure whether or not you’re successful at your job. In an ideal world, you’re able to see how your goals fit within the larger team goals, and how the team goals fit within the organization wide strategic goals, and then how those strategic goals fit within the longer term company vision. Goals and metrics also allow you to articulate what accomplishments you’ve made, and enables you to think about what you want to accomplish next. It also helps describe your contributions to the organization, which add to your overall level of inclusivity. Of course, these are also great things to share on a resume or in an interview.
- Ever wonder where your job responsibilities start and where they stop or what you should or shouldn’t be involved in or when you really own a decision? Ever ask yourself why you’re even in this meeting? These things tend to happen when there isn’t clarity about who owns what. One super simple tool I like to use is the RACI matrix — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. There are many resources that dive deep into what a RACI is, so I’ll just describe it in short: The Responsible person actually does the job, The Accountable person is ultimately the decision maker or owner, Consulted parties usually give feedback or input and are typically the experts in a specific area, and Informed parties are stakeholders that should be kept in the loop. In your job description, you should absolutely have clarity for the things you are R-A-C-I for. This helps with relationship building across the organization, especially if you work on very cross functional projects. Good relationships = good culture!
- *Bonus* — job descriptions should also have a special clause about how every employee should adhere to company core values. No matter how good someone is at their job, no one likes assholes — they can kill your company culture, which will kill your business. If you aren’t upholding the values of the organization then you are failing in your job, and none of the other stuff really matters.
I strongly believe that the employee and company gain tremendous value out of having clear and comprehensive job descriptions, which are a fundamental part of good culture. Hopefully you found this post helpful, please join me next week where I’ll be covering fair compensation and titles.
