The Job: Still Relevant?

Today, the notion of a job serves as the cornerstone of most HR programs and practices - from compensation to recruiting. But will the job remain relevant going into the future or will it go the way of the dinosaur, replaced by programs and practices that emphasize the person, rather than the role they fill?

Pat Zingheim and Jay Schuster - authors, partners in Schuster-Zingheim & Associatesand WorldatWork Keystone Award winners - recently conducted a study of 20 organizations that successfully made the trip from jobs to personal competencies as the foundation for their HR functions.  They discuss the study in a guest post at the Compensation Conundrum and in a recent WorldatWork Journal article.

In the journal article, Zingheim and Schuster summarize the reasons executive leaders give for the transition away from jobs.  These include:

People do work; jobs do not. With all the talk about the importance of people to organizational success, these leaders had realized that their HR programs were designed to focus on jobs, not the people who do work.

Jobs may create bureaucracy. “Jobs pile up like fire logs, and you only take logs off the top,” said one executive, meaning that the people in his organization were getting lost in the structure and bureaucracy of a formalized job structure.

Maximize performance per individual.  During times of cost pressures, organizations want fewer jobs and stronger performance from each individual.

Job descriptions are often rigid/obsolete.  Agility and flexibility are important to the executives interviewed for this study. They want people to learn, grow and acquire contemporary competencies and skills throughout their careers so they are not saddled with a potentially obsolete workforce from a capabilities standpoint.

Competencies relate better to business commitments.  Effective business strategies that people understand and respond to are commonly built upon concepts and commitments such as customer, quality, results, collaboration, teamwork, work knowledge and technology applications. These are workforce competencies and skills.

Could this trend, the authors ask, hold the key to an exciting new way to ground HR on a solid business foundation?

I admit to some skepticism.  On the one hand, I think that a more flexible and agile workforce will be increasingly critical to business success.  Perhaps the shift from a focus on jobs to a focus on people and their competencies is an avenue, even the avenue, for getting there.  On the other hand, I don't see the notion of a job as the key barrier to putting reward plans - and HR programs overall - on a more solid business footing.  I am, to some extent, swayed by my experience with and perception of broadbanding, a person-based pay approach that came into vogue in the 90's, but has come nowhere close to living up to its hype and promise.

Here's what I do think.  We are already seeing a shift away from the traditional idea of a job on many levels.  As work becomes more project and team based, dependent on relationships and influence both inside and outside an organization, jobs are becoming more fluid in nature.  In the area of rewards, specifically, we are witnessing a de-emphasis on base salaries, which tend to be job-based, and an increasing emphasis on variable pay and incentives.  The latter are often tied to project, work group and/or organizational results, rather than just job performance.

The thing is, I'm not sure that paying the job and paying the person are necessarily mutually exclusive concepts.  It may still make sense to do both, even if we find ourselves putting less emphasis on one and more on the other.  For the foreseeable future, I think that the notion of a job will still have a place in organizational life - an important element of structure, a helpful anchor as work becomes ever more fluid.  I think rewards should - and must - reflect both the core role a person holds in the organization and the manner in which they apply the skills and competencies critical to business success.

Or am I just stuck in an old paradigm?  What say you?

 

Comments

[Deb Exo]

Ann, thanks for this post and your questions/skepticism. Some random thoughts from my experience:

-Jobs as defined in formal HR structures (job descriptions [writing and administrating them], performance reviews, and total compensation reviews, etc.] most often have NOTHING to do with the work knowledge workers are engaged in on a day-to-day basis. As you indicate, work is fluid especially in the time of lean, downsizing, and the "jobless" recovery.
-Broadbanding handed organizations and particularly leadership, a prime example of HR bureaucracy gone bad.
-Competencies may or may not provide a platform for defining the work...I have seen a lot of competency bureaucracy in HR that appeared just as rigid/obsolete as job descriptions. On the other hand, I haven't given up the hope that outside of the HR bureaucracy of systems and processes, competencies could provide the key to "the real work" of knowledge workers.

Bottom line for me, I think we need to completely throw out what we [HR] have built for the 20th century organization and experiment, experiment, experiment with an emphasis on fluidity and non-standardization of work first. I wish I had a proven model to share...I don't but I know that what we are currently offering...the focus on the job and all the associated processes/systems/administration is NOT the answer.

[Felipe Villasenor]

Look at how the newspapers evolved because of the job boards, and now the job boards' sales are down by over 50% this year. What will happen with them? The "job" and the "resume" are changing in a big way. Great people don't join a company because of a "job," they join because of company culture or they see a bright future. Great companies don't hire based off "resumes" (historical information, not necessarily what the candidate is good at or wants to do), they hire because the person came thru as a referral and was qualified, the person has "passion" for what they do best, or the person has great "potential," etc.

I like where you are going with your thought process. You are absolutely right, there are paradigm shifts going on in the industry. Most HR programs will eventually embrace because of necessity.

[Klaus]

If jobs are accurately described, they do reflect the skills and abilities of the person holding them, so that if you are rewarding the job, you are rewarding skills and abilities of the person.

Competency-based pay plans are actually in decline according to Mercer surveys. According to a 2009 Mercer survey, only about 13 percent of 1,000 firms surveyed use some form of competency based pay, down from 19% in 2002.

In the study cited above, only about 25% of employees in each of the 20 companies were in a skill-based pay plan, which might indicate the level of commitment these companies have in the concept.

It would appear that there is no paradigm shift taking place.

[Ann Bares]

What a great discussion - thanks, Deb, Felipe and Klaus. It seems paradoxical (is that a word?): we see and feel the need for a shift, a new world of HR, yet few (based on the data Klaus has shared) or even fewer are taking the leap to alternate practices. One of the reasons may be that - to do this right - you must redefine the whole work and employment paradigm. That is a tall order. Too many organizations want to short-cut the process, just lay a new program on top of the same old paradigm. Astonishingly, it does not work. I wonder if that's why many companies are backing away from some of these practices, as Klaus's data suggests.

Thanks - all - for your comments here. I appreciate hearing your perspectives.

Others?

[Klaus]

Sorry, a few more comments, since people seem interested.

In the webinar by Zingheim and Schuster, they said that job descriptions were still necessary even though jobs were eliminated, that salarysurveys based on the jobs required much work to make them skill-based surveys, and the actual application was unclear---was just skill-based pay enough or was competency-based performance management also required or sufficient? Many practical matters seemed problematic.

Many successful companies can manage their employees using jobs but these 20 companies could not seem to do that and the necessity of moving to a skill-based system did not reflect well on the companies' management strength, although it was presented as though they were in the vanguard of some new great idea. Their identities were not revealed...who would want to admit that they couldn't make a job-based system work? I did not see the approach as a best practice but as a gimmick to conceal poor management.

[E James (Jim) Brennan]

Disagree with Klaus's misinterpretation of Jay & Pat's comments about the participants' desires to keep their identities secret: believe they clearly stated that they didn't want to tip off their competition about the great new methods that they had so enthusiastically embraced over time. It created a competitive advantage they were reluctant to abandon. THAT implies a much greater value from their success, rather than an embarrassed failure. Think they were all high-growth enterprises, as well, which speaks to their superior results.

You can BETTER manage your employees if you provide more focus on the person rather than merely their titles. To me, competencies and KSAs are the "human capital" specific to the performer; the Job is simply the current context in which the enterprise places that actor and supplies a leverage position for those competencies/KSAs. Experiences globally, especially in Europe, have proven that the overly-rigid hierarchical Job-dominated firm emphasizing boundaries and territories can be easily outmaneuvered and outperformed by the more agile outfit looking beyond the "current fixed role" (Job) to the flexible options that maximize both agendas by more easily matching incumbent talents with ever-changing organizational needs. Few may indeed follow this "best" (not "prevaling") practice, but they seem to be separating from the pack and increasing their lead as others fall far behind them.

But you still need Benchmark Jobs in order to advertise and compare to the external market, and to provide a common language about the work assignments.

[Kim Walter]

Yes, I was thinking what Jim said as I was reading the first comments - Job descriptions and "benchmark" jobs are really a way to compare jobs to the external market. And that's where the disconnect comes in when moving to the next trend - how do you compare your value system (i.e. jobs and grades) to a market that doesn't know your language?

The college I went to used to offer narrative evaluations in place of grades because they felt it allowed a better analysis of the person as a student. But as class sizes increased, professors started using a short-hand for the evals (i.e. average = C, above average = B, outstanding = A) and the result was ... no one could get into graduate school because other universities didn't/wouldn't understand the evaluations. Three years after I graduated they began offering grades.

So my point to this long story was that while many small to medium size organizations have already abandoned the job concept in many ways as being too inflexible and unwieldy, jobs will never be completely abandoned since it is the common language orgs use to do market comparisons. They will just become more complex for us compensation professionals. :) And we'll become the "translators" - which many of us already are!

[Ann Bares]

Great points, Jim and Kim. Kim, you did a particularly nice job - for me - of clearly articulating what is probably the biggest obstacle that those attempting to move away from jobs face. Market seems to be the predominant work value system out there, and jobs represent the language we use to complete and translate market comparisons.

Back when competencies were gaining in popularity back in the 90's, there was a lot of talk among some of the bigger consulting/survey firms about attempting new survey processes based on competencies rather than jobs. Apparently those initiatives never gained much steam - at least I'm not aware of anything going on in this realm. I would expect that one of the many challenges here is that so many companies attempt to define their competencies in a way unique to their business and strategy.

At any rate and again, great discussion all. I am learning from your perspectives ... and I'd guess others are as well.

[Wally Bock]

Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best independent business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs.

http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/11/25/112509-midweek-look-at-the-independent-business-blogs.aspx

Wally Bock

[Ann Bares]

Wally:

Thanks - always an honor to be included in the Midweek Review, especially in the company of such a great group of posts.