Forbes calls them obsolete. Your labor attorney probably calls them required. You have them somewhere…let’s see….maybe in this file drawer…no…maybe here…no…
When I first started out in practice management, my employer asked me to write job descriptions for the employees. Not knowing any better, I made a long list of everything that each team member had to do. It soon occurred to me that we all had the same job description: do whatever needs to get done!
Since then, I’ve learned a great deal about how to be an effective leader and a lot about the value of job descriptions. Let’s take a look at the history of job descriptions and then we’ll dig into how job descriptions can help you to lead, hire, train and coach more effectively.
The History Of Job Descriptions
We didn’t always have job descriptions. That’s because up until the 19th Century, 90% of us had the same job, it just wasn’t described on paper, probably because we couldn’t have read it anyhow. That job description was:
- Wake up
- Toil in field
- Eat gruel
- Sleep
- Repeat
All that changed with the industrial revolution. When factories gave us a chance to work jobs inside instead of out in the hot sun, we flocked to apply. Notices advertising for employees decided to start the screening process with a description of the job as a way to limit applicants. Here are a couple of actual job descriptions from the 1800s.
Servant: Single woman. Must cook and do Dairy work. Must be well acquainted with making good Butter, or need not apply. A steady Man would not be objected to, if he was capable of making good butter. A married couple would also do, without incumbrance (meaning no kids), but one of the two must know how to make butter.
Guilford Workhouse: Single women or widow without family. Must be able to read and write, be well acquainted with midwifery, and fully competent to take charge of the sick in the Infirmary. Thirty-five dollars per year with rations, washing and furnished accommodations in the Workhouse.
Since the 1800s, the benefits of job descriptions have been explored more deeply by business owners, human resource directors, and managers as each seeks to better understand the human capital they need, how that capital can be acquired, and how it can be best directed.
Legally Required?
No, but they are important documents to have when challenges to your business’s federal or state employment law compliance arise; documents, I should add, that can cut both ways if they evince that your practice engages in unlawful workplace activities like discrimination, hours and wages rules violations, and so forth.
Which may lead you to ask, if they can be used against me in a court of law, why have them? Well, I see your point, but I am of a mind that if you don’t know labor law well enough to stick to the rules when writing a job description, you’re probably already in stark violation of several labor laws in practice. Best to bone up on what you can and cannot say in a job description and consult with a labor attorney to make sure you’re understanding of the basics of how to stay in compliance with fundamental labor laws in writing and in action.
Anatomy of a Job Description
Core Responsibilities
Job descriptions should lead off with a brief list of core responsibilities. Articulating the core responsibilities helps you to see the forest for the trees when hiring; allows you to select for those individuals that match your culture and mission, and get to the heart of how individual employee classes help the company distinguish itself and shine. When formulating this short list, think of the qualities that you most admire in your best employees. Be careful if you identify ‘multitasking’ as a core responsibility. Multitasking is usually code for ‘when things get crazy, we work like crazy’. Multitasking usually results in mistakes, burnout, and may be a sign that your business is not organized or staffed as well as it should be.
Qualifications and Skills
Job descriptions should also enumerate the qualifications and skills you need in an employee for a particular job. Thoughtfully formulating this list allows you to build screening tools that save you time when hiring. Remember that the American Disability Act (ADA) “Requires employers with 15 or more employees to provide qualified individuals with disabilities an equal opportunity to benefit from the full range of employment-related opportunities available to others (A Guide To Disability Rights Law, ADA.gov), so be thoughtful of your list and make sure that you are not prejudicing your understanding of the job based on preconceived ideas that it must be done in a certain way, by a certain kind of individual.
Day-To-Day Tasks
Listing day-to-day tasks on paper helps the employer see the size of the position they are trying to fill, whether the expectations for the job are reasonable, how the job needs to be trained, and how much time it will take to do the job. All of this information helps you understand the specifics of what you are asking individuals to do for your business, how much money you should pay them for such work, and whether or not this is a full time or part time position.
The importance of understanding the specifics of the job as it plays out day-to-day can’t be overstated. Thinking about the size, complexity, and time requirements of day-to-day responsibilities provides all kinds of ways to improve on payroll costs and efficiency. Think about the role of a practice manager for example. Does that job really require 40 hours per week? Doing what? Payroll? Inventory? Conducting employee reviews? Making the schedule? In my experience managers need only 20 or so hours to do all the things we really think managers should be doing. The rest of the time is spent putting out fires: filling in here and there, handling oddball jobs like getting a piece of machinery fixed, doing some research into one particular thing or another… tasks that could just as easily be handled by an executive assistant working outside of the building for much less money and with much greater efficiency.
Getting Started With Job Descriptions
You can use the creation of job descriptions to reenergize your team’s appreciation for one another’s work. They can be used to build screening tools for applicants to decrease the amount of you spend sifting through applicants who were never right from the beginning and help you understand how doable your job is. Use this link to download some sample job descriptions for your practice team members, but please don’t just take ours and put them in place at your practice. Job descriptions are essentially an extension of your mission as it plays out in the hands of your various employee classes. In the absence of thinking about what this really means, job descriptions aren’t tools, they’re typing.
