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?
