Traditionally, January/February are the months when people start looking for new opportunities. Are your Role Profiles accurate, up-to-date, complete and ready for any queries in the new year?
Specialising in IT/Digital/Agile work environments, we have, over the past 14 years, had the privilege of working with a number of organisations, large and small, in South Africa and other African countries, to produce Role Profiles that add strategic value to the organisation and its employees.
Roles today are not what “jobs” were yesterday. Not only are “jobs” changing, but work itself is changing to accommodate new technologies, and people can play more than one Role in modern agile organisations. In the New Way of Working and Lean, Agile Organisations, Role Profiles need to be flexible and adaptable to enable the organisation and its structure to flex and change as necessary to adapt to client needs and market demands.
Role profiles today, need to be simplified, “at-a-glance” dashboards that put the most important responsibilities, outcomes and deliverables, tasks, competencies, and challenges of a role on a single page. They replace the previous complex, long-winded job descriptions with a simple document that is far more useful for employees, managers, and hiring teams – and far easier to incorporate into modern Human Capital Information systems.
At TalentAlign, we have innovated the design of Role Profiles to address the common inadequacies and complexities of old-style job descriptions and standalone competency models. For all their “wordiness”, old-style job descriptions often lacked essential context, and offered little guidance for management in optimising performance, and even less guidance to assist employees to chart a development path to achieve career goals.
Today’s Role Profiles are a far better tool for more effective manager-employee performance and development discussions and provide employees with a clearer view to future career opportunities. If done correctly, Role Profiles become the fundamental tool for all aspects of organisational talent management, instead of just a Recruiting tool.
Role Profiles in modern organisations are a fundamental building block of organisation design and redesign. Organisations themselves need to be able to flex when necessary, and carefully crafted and designed Role Profiles enable the organisation to achieve that.
Modern Role Profiles, or Role Expectation Sheets should:
- Be determined by organisational strategy and clearly connected to overall organisational capabilities
- Be drafted collaboratively, based on input and insights from incumbents, their managers and specialists in the field
- Enable employees to clearly understand their purpose in the team and their value-add for the organisation
- Communicate an accurate, realistic, current picture of what the role is expected to deliver
- Be part of a coherent, yet unstructured array of career opportunities that enable employees to determine and follow a career journey of their choice
- Ensure that role expectations are clear and unambiguous, and that the boundaries between roles are clear
- Be understood and interpreted similarly by new entrants, existing incumbents and managers
- Describe the role, not the person, balance accountability and authority, and enable fair remuneration.
Ultimately, roles exist to achieve the organisation’s strategy and goals. Being mindful of how they are designed, communicated and used means that each person understands their role in achieving organisational success.
To find out how we, at TalentAlign, can help you to build Role Profiles that are appropriate, flexible, accurate, and can be used for all other aspects of Agile Talent Management, give us a call.