The first time I heard of job description and job evaluation was way back in 1980s during my Industrial Engineering program. During my early days in Bosch, as a manufacturing engineer, I had to describe and evaluate the jobs for deciding the job grade for workmen. My work would then be checked, approved, and released by the corporate Industrial Engineering department.
Later in Germany I got trained in the nationwide standardized Agreement Framework for Wages (ERA: Entgelt-Rahmenabkommen) and had to describe the jobs, evaluate, and fit my team members in one of the tariff groups covering workmen to junior management. Finally, back in India I got trained in the Mercer International Position Evaluation methodology to describe and fit mainly mid and senior management roles.
Recently I got acquainted with the Qualification Pack – National Occupational Standards (QP-NOS) of National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), an outstanding detailed Job Description of most of the occupations in all the industry sectors, similar to the ERA in Germany. This is a solid foundation for bridging the skill gap, so much being discussed. We still have a long way to go for the companies to reskill/upskill their employees based on QP-NOS, as is the case with ERA in Germany.
Along with these, I was also exposed many times with multiple assessments, like Theory X-Y, Insights Discovery, Enneagram, Mayer Briggs Type Indicator, (D)ominance, (I)nfluence, (S)teadiness and (C)onscientiousness Profiling, Caliper Profiling, Swayam Profile (based on Vata, Pitha, Kapha, an Indian Psychometric Assessment) and Assessment Centers. These assessments were just another source for arriving at the job fit or determining the potential based a subjective gut feel decision.
While there is always an intrinsic desire to describe the job as precisely as possible to provide full clarity to the individual performing the respective job, there is also another school of thought to totally abandon such precise individual descriptions and replace them with trust and the expected team outcomes, for these self-managed teams, selected based on assessments, to decide the roles themselves and deliver the outcomes with least external intervention.
I am of the opinion that such a diametrically opposite stand is excellent for outcomes obvious to everyone and when these self-managed teams are sufficiently skilled to execute the tasks, a condition that may be a natural evolution after executing the roles consistently over many years and internalizing the role expectations by everyone, based again on the primary job description.
I believe the job description is, therefore, the primary foundation for performance excellence, even for the self-managed teams. The psychometric assessments can provide hints on an individual’s personality, but are not foolproof, due to various human factors. I have seen experienced leaders provide a more accurate and reliable assessment of an individual, even after a short discussion/interview.
The doHow® Role Attributes Target and Assessment modules that I have developed is more comprehensive, yet simple, and guides one to look at the key aspects for enhancing performance, the main outcome of any team.
Collaboration, Purpose, Accountability, Supervision, Guidance, Decision and Qualification together define the context and the Samuthána 3P Leadership Model and Samuthána Business Chakra Model cover the competencies. The specific competency that needs to be acquired, is then left to the individual to research and discover driven by the desire to progress to the next higher maturity level, in accordance to the doHow® principle of creating the desire to excel, instead of spoon feeding.
You may want to check out the doHow® Role Attributes Target and Assessment modules by visiting https://app.businessdohow.com/.
Happy reading!