In the last week, I have come across two articles in such prestigious publications with HBR (Harvard Business Review) or Forbes with titles as suggestive as:
"How to Eliminate Traditional Job Descriptions" or "How to Eliminate Performance Assessment Interviews in your organization"
Something is changing in people management, of course. Personally, I celebrate these new winds with joy. I never had a job description that really described what I did - let alone what I was capable of doing - and I never had a really positive experience in annual performance appraisal interviews.
If we admit - and we have to admit it unless we have been living in a cave for years - that the world is going very, very fast and that everything changes and mutates at tremendous speed, it is logical to think that these continuous "waves of change" affect yes or yes to the economy, markets, government policies, organizational cultures, people management policies, organizational structures, professional roles and the decisions, behaviors and actions to be carried out in those roles.
What value then does a job description offer, when that job is continually changing in relation to objectives to be achieved, areas of responsibility, functions, tasks, actions to be carried out, and behaviors and skills to be developed?
The job description should be updated every 15 days!
In fact, the very expression "job" has ceased to make sense. Better we talk about professional roles in continuous evolution.
What about performance appraisal interviews?
The vast majority of the dictionaries and competency systems that I have seen in many organizations have become an outdated “Catalog” of standardized, leveled and very subjectively defined behaviors - without going down in the operational descriptions of each performance level to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or Key Performance Indicators, which make - in a vast majority of cases - uncomfortable and appropriate, both for the evaluator - who often feels that he is not sure of what he is really evaluating - and for the appraised - who often feels that they are unsure of the objectivity of the performance criteria used for their appraisal.
Both job descriptions and performance appraisal may continue to have their place in certain organizations that live in a stable environment and where change is not a constant: perhaps in certain industry and public sector organizations they still have a few years left of life, but outside of there, they do not really make sense: they are not useful or functional and contribute more to demotivate than to motivate.
At the time of writing this post (February 2014) many organizations continue to implement Human “Resources” Policies that were developed at the beginning of the 20th century, around the first decades of the 1900s.
These policies continue to focus on reinforcing norms, procedures, hierarchical and bureaucratic structures and centralizing the power and capacity for planning and decision-making in a small nucleus of positions without any contact with clients and with the day-to-day reality of the organization.
Customer-centric organizations and the agile people management model
The alternative? There are many, but in order not to re-invent the wheel, just take a look at what organizations as diverse as UPS, Facebook, Qualcomm, Toyota or IBM do: They are customer-centric organizations, where the basic organizational core is the self-managed team around the client, where all people are allowed and encouraged to make decisions, where a culture of continuous learning is invested and fostered, and where leaders are taught to coach and develop others.
Ultimately, it is about replacing the episodic nature of the internal Human “Resources” services (“Annual” Evaluation, Recruitment when a Vacancy occurs, “Annual” Training Program, “Annual” Salary Review) with people management processes ongoing in nature: ongoing feedback, ongoing evaluation, ongoing review of goals, strongly shared mission and culture, ongoing learning and development environment, ongoing talent acquisition, ongoing employer branding solutions, ongoing maintenance programs, and increased engagement of people, etc., etc., etc.
An organization that aspires to be a high-performance organization needs, in short, a truly agile version of people management, radically different from the standard Human “Resources” practice to use:
Managers and executives are not the ones in charge of the organization. Customers are.
Research shows that:
Organizations that review and change people's individual goals four times a year generate on average 20% more revenue than those that do so once a year.
Releasing drag on people management
If you feel that what you do in "Human Resources" is not really helping your organization to achieve and sustain high performance, perhaps the time has come to let go of the burden on the way of managing people and understand that psycho-sociological interventions in the organization they occupy a prominent place when it comes to achieving this, beyond purely administrative, organizational, legal and engineering interventions.
After all, if there is a science specialized in understanding, explaining and influencing human behavior (including, of course, human behavior in organizations), it is called Psychology, not Law, or Economics, or Business, or Engineering, or " Business Administration ”.
