Getting Control of Job

Analysis Methodologies
Presented by David Creelman
CEO, Creelman Research
Guest Expert: Ross Coyles
Director, Hay Group

Our Presenters

David Creelman

Internationally known researcher

and writer on human capital
management

Ross Coyles

Director, Work Measurement

for the Hay Group

Ross Coyles is with the Hay Group in Toronto. Job analysis makes up the vast majority
of his work. Prior to coming to Hay Ross worked in a small boutique in Toronto, The
Assessment and Development Group, working primarily on the development of
recruitment and selection programs, performance measurements and management
programs. He also worked at Watson Wyatt looking at organizational design and job
analysis.

The Question


  


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DC: Job analysis is one of those things that has been a fundamental building block of
human resources for a long time. And if any of you have formally studied human
resources, either in internal training courses, through SHRM, or at university, job
analysis would have been one of those things that you would have touched on. And
then it just disappeared from whats talked about; you dont see articles about job
analysis in the business press. You dont go to a conference and hear speeches on job
analysis. So, here you have a fundamental building block of a profession that is now
lying low.

Agenda
1. Why are we still talking about job analysis?
2. What is the best approach?
3. How can practical HR manager implement these
ideas?

RC: Why are we still talking about job analysis? From my point of view the reason is
because jobs are still a fundamental building block of organizations, and if jobs go away
then we are not going to be talking about job analysis anymore, but I dont think jobs are
going away. They may be called different things. They maybe called roles, they may be
called perspectives, they may be called any number of things, as they have in the past,
being called positions and posts, etc. But as long as jobs are still around, we are going
to be doing some form of job analysis.

RC: One of the reasons I think that job analysis is fading into the back room as you to go
to conferences and in texts etc., is that at conferences or in texts you are focusing
primarily on an application such as a selection application or a compensation application
or a succession planning application, and really job analysis is just a means to an end.
You wouldnt do job analysis of course just for job analysis sake, it'
s going to have some
sort of end application. I think its only natural at meetings and conferences that you are
talking about the application, but your point being made is sometimes we do forget about
one of the fundamental things that may be less snazzy or less sexy than whats the state
of the art when it comes to talent management or succession planning, but its still a
component part of talent management or succession planning.
Poll Question: What do you use job analysis for?
Response:
Classification in compensation, compensation, finding salary grades, salary
planning, workforce planning, to create new jobs, pay ranges so the vast majority
of the broad points are around compensation.
DC: While the results reflect our particular audience, I think it also reflects what the most
essential thing that organizations need to do which is pay people and clearly job analysis
underlies most pay systems.

The Why of Job Analysis

Is job analysis a compliance tool or is it
an an organization effectiveness tool?

RC: I have been fortunate enough to be doing this sort of work for close to 25 years now
and it'
s certainly a compliance tool or a legislative tool but if its used solely for
compliance, say just to satisfy pay equity legislation in parts of Canada, then its going to
gather some dust. If its used more broadly as an organizational effectiveness tool then I
think this is going to be something that will become quite vital to HR management, but if
you are going in as a compliance tool I suspect once you satisfy the compliance or the
regulation then its going to sit on the back shelf.

Job Analysis Can Be Applied To

Many HR Functions.

Learning
Learning &
Development
Development

Staffing &
Selection
Staffing &
Selection

Different, but related functions

and activities can use related tools.

Job Evaluation &

Compensation
HUMAN
HUMAN
RESOURCES
CAPITAL
EFFECTIVENESS
EFFECTIVENESS

Performance
Measurement &
Management

Employee &
Organizational
Relations
&
Process
Design
Administration

Career &
Talent
Planning

Inter-Related
Functions
& Activities

Integrated
Applications
& Tools

An Effective
Solution Includes:

Methods
Processes
Supports

RC: The honeycomb or hexagon model is not unique. I developed it a number of years
ago to be applied in a couple of client settings where they really wanted to look at all
aspects of human resources management and they needed to rev-up human resources
management. So here we have a series of six different applications - staffing and
selection, learning and development, job evaluation, compensationwhich appears to
be the primary focus of todays sessionand performance measurement, career and
talent planning, and organizational and job design. Well, I think at a conceptual level the

two things that an organization has to come to grips with if they are go to look at any of
these applications and make them more effective or more efficient is what are the
accountabilities of the role.
This model could be applied to answering What does a human resource consultant
have as accountability? The answer could be very broadly based or it could be quite
position specific such as What does an HR administrator level 6 require? But the
reason for putting this honeycomb or hexagon model together was to say, Are you
interested in what are the underlying accountabilities of work? And what the underlying
competencies are? And the accountabilities could be primary type of responsibilities or
they could be responsibilities expressed in a partnership, they could be technical
competencies or they could be behavioral competencies, but any sort of solution that
you are going to develop for any of these interrelated functions and activities is going to
consist of three interdependencies and my saying is that those interdependencies really
make the effective solution. So it'
s whats the methodology? What are the factors?
What are the weights? How are we going to go about things? So the process that is
involved, whats the administrative process? Whats the implementation process? And
what sort of support material do you need? What sort of management support? What
sort of technology support? I think there is a large degree of interest in this integrated
approach. But in putting together the integrated approach the methodology; the process
and support are some of these things that are often lost in texts and in conferences.
DC: You talked about the integrated approach, what do you see as actually happening
now?
RC: I see that organizations have a tremendous appetite for these sorts of integrated
approaches but when it comes to actually implementing them, two things get in the way.
One, they aren'
t quite sure as to where they can start. Also one of the really unfortunate
things about this is within an organization, even within an HR organization, you may
have competing groups. A classic one that I run into is the compensation group and the
organizational effectiveness group or the compensation group and the career and talent
planning group. They may have different agendas, they may have different philosophies,
and it is unfortunate, but sometimes that right hand isnt speaking to the left hand and it
is one of the reasons why these broader integrated approaches dont make it off the
ground. That being said, there is an appetite for these things and may be taking it on
more than one piece at a time is certainly what organizations are interested in.
DC: If one takes job analysis out of the background where you dont think too much
about it and say wait a minute, this is one of the fundamental infrastructure tools, lets
spend some time thinking about how to use job analysis in this organization. You
probably know quite a bit about job analysis but what we havent done is spend any time
on thinking about how it might integrate between different functions within HR.
RC: Your compensation participants on this webcast have a firm grounding in skills,
efforts, responsibilities and working condition or accountabilities, whether they be
primary or contributory types of accountabilities, compensation professionals have a
tremendous vault of knowledge that all too often, I have found, isn'
t shared with other
parts of the organization. A classic example of that would be that the behavioral
scientists in an organization sometimes do not appreciate the '
what' side, the
accountability side, or the end objective side of things. They would go off and put
together a new ladder or a new approach towards workforce planning that is largely

behavioral based, but forget that there is a storehouse of information that resides in
compensation, that maybe with a little twigging and tweaking could be used in their
areas but sometimes it is just not done and it is extremely unfortunate.
DC: Tell me about this combination of accountability and competency.

Job Analysis Can Be Applied To Many HR Functions

(contd.)
The DNA of Job Analysis is the double helix of accountability &
competency:
Accountability
What is the work responsible for
(directly/indirectly) and what level of
authority does it have to get the job
done (e.gs., lead/contributor)

Competency
How is the work done
(behaviorally/technically) and
what level is expected (in the
work) and demonstrated (by the
employee)

RC: I was asked to put together a paper eight years ago on this thing called job analysis
and why we still do it, what the key component parts are. Having worked in all aspects
of HR management I see the DNA, if you will, of job analysis being this double helix of
accountability and competency. So the first question I ask any client is, why does this
job exist? What sort of product does it have to develop? What service does it have to
provide or what idea does it have to generate? What is the work all about? And then
simply how is that work done? And that can be answered behaviorally or technically. I
think these two component parts, they might be called responsibilities, and they might be
called behaviors, there are various and sundry ways of looking at them. If you don'
t
know the accountabilities and the competencies then any one of these applications is
not going to be fully sound and probably won'
t weather the test of time. Now test of time
of course is speeding up dramatically these days. What used to last for five to 10 years
probably has a shelf life of about three to five years now but accountability and
competency I think are the DNA of any kind of HR application.
DC: One of the things we talked about when we were preparing for this particular
webinar is what is the state of the art, but state of the art may include a lot of things that
are going to be tried and tested and provennot just things that are new. I think for the
all the tweaking that different people have done over time with different ways of job
analysis, these two factors seem to be the pillars that have proven to hold true over time
and if you go in without both of these angles on it then you are going to be missing
something. And also by the same token one can be pretty confident that if one has done
a good job of understanding the accountability and has done a good job of
understanding competency then we have probably done a pretty good job analysis.
RC: And the competency wasn'
t called competency back when I first started this, it was
called skill. But as jobs become enriched and organizations have to take a more broad

view, competencies, again behavioral or technical, if you like, have essentially become
far more prominent.

The Ands of Job Analysis

Documentation and understanding
Grasping what is and deciding what
should be.

DC: I want to move on to this issue of the '

ands'of job analysis, again, some of the
things we sometimes struggle with are: is job analysis something we do because we
need documentation for legal reasons or are we doing job analysis because we are
interested in job redesign or interested in improving the function or to help the manager
manage better? So is job analysis about documentation or understanding and of course
the answer is it is really about both. It is about grasping what is and deciding what
should be. It is what flows from your sense of having an integrated model where job
analysis is used for a whole variety of different things.
RC: You have alluded to this before when you were talking about governance and now
you talk about documentation. I dont know what the correlation is but I suspect it is
going to be somewhat on the higher side. If organizations were just using job analysis to
document jobs, I would think that they are almost providing their organization with a form
of handcuffs. Whereas if they are looking at both documenting jobs and understanding
the work that exists then they are probably providing more of a launch pad for somebody
to determine how they can work better or if you like, how they can provide more value.

Job Analysis is Still an Important Aspect of HR

Management
Effective solutions often include:
State of the Art
e.g., Online Portfolio

Tried and True

e.g., Job Description

An Effective
Solution Includes:
Methods
Processes
Supports
Methods e.gs., factors, scales
Processes e.gs., implementation, administration
Support e.gs., management, electronic

DC: Ross, one of the ways you break this down is by starting with time, method,
processes and support. I want you to talk a little bit about it.
RC: Lets say our competition consultants are asked what their job evaluation
methodology is and they say what the factors are and how the factors come together but
really the factors are secondary to how you use it. Its almost like the carpenter and the
tools analogy. The tools are one thing but if you are a good carpenter you can make a
not too good tool go a long way for you, conversely if you are not a very good carpenter
you are going to use crummy tools in a crummy fashion. If you are a good carpenter you
are going to use tools as they should be used, but you are going to jury rig as you go
along. So we need methodologies, we need processes, we need support and we need
things that are not state of the art. We need effective solutions that are specific to your
particular need and some of them may be very tried and true, like a job description, but
what is it that you are going to do with that job description? If you are just going to use it
as a quasi-legal document, fine. But if you are going to use it as a launch pad for what
sort of value can a high performing incumbent bring to a job versus what sort of value a
lower performer is going to bring to a job, that is a great thing. Or looking at state of the
art, if you are using an online portfolio that provides a pick list of accountabilities and a
pick list of competencies that go along with those accountabilities, thats great. It would
expedite things substantially, but it is a culmination of both state of the art and tried and
true that are going to intertwine to provide you with a methodology that is effective, a
process that is effective and supports who are effective. So I would say that anybody
who is going out zealously looking for state of the art is probably going in the wrong
direction. They should be combining both state of the art sorts of things with tried and
true. A classic example would be, lets find the a la carte support tool that will do all
forms of jobs analysis and it can be immediately applied in performance management
and in compensation. Yet what might be an interesting methodology, the process of
using, it is very cumbersome and needs a substantial amount of tailoring so, from my
point of view I am always a little reluctant to work with clients who are looking for state of
the art knowing there are some things that have been done in compensation for a long
time that still need to be done and can be used in a far broader application than just in
developing what a job grade is.

Job Analysis Must Relate To End-User Needs

While using an integrated approach has broad appeal, the actual

application must be taken into consideration, as example:

Job Evaluation &

Compensation

Skills, Efforts, Responsibilities, Working Conditions

e.gs., Job Description
Online Portfolio
specific job
job family ladder

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities

Learning & Development

e.gs., Skill Gap Analysis

Core Competency Scorecard
job/person
person/future role

DC: I have worked with Ross in the past and seen the use of different factors, scales
and a variety of methods of job analysis. You can get very excited about the use of new
methodology, or developing a new methodology; one consultant uses one methodology
and another consultant uses a different methodology and one can debate the pros and
cons with them, but my conclusion is that the differences are not that great. The big win
is not going to come from choosing one method over another method, although certainly
you want to choose something that is suitable for your particular situation. The big win is
going to come from learning to use those tools.
RC: I have this communications client that we have worked with for a number of years
and they are zealous about the use of the Hay plan. We see that some of the
compensation people that use the Hay plan day to day or some of the people they have
on project teams or quality assurance panels are very aware of the benefits of the Hay
plan. But also, they often get too caught up in the technical side of the plan. As soon as
they start talking to me about the coding of the plan, this job is a 528-point job or it is an
X-level know-how, all of the broader benefits of this plan can wither away. They do
wither away in this client because they have not gone the extra step to turn what could
readily be put into lay terms. This over emphasis on the technical side of job analysis
applies not only to some Hay clients but it applies to any organization that gets too
zealous about the particular methodology that they are using. If I go back to
compensation, and as we said the job analysis must relate to the end user need side,
the generic skills, efforts, responsibilities and maybe working conditions have been used
for job evaluation and compensation for a long time. These are the generic terms. If
you looked at a Watson Wyatt job evaluation methodology or a Mercer job evaluation
methodology or a Hay job evaluation methodology, they can all be put into the
framework of skills, efforts responsibility and working condition. The effective client is the
one that takes them out of the bundling the consultant wraps them it and creates a job
description to look at why does this work exist? What is the context in which it exists?
And they are using the outcome of that analysis for all of these and types of thing that
you referred to before, your documentation and understanding. The ands are
extremely important, job documentation is a very small bit of value added, job
understanding is a huge amount of value add.

DC: This may be an appropriate time to respond to an audience question. We have

talked about skills; we have talked about competencies, are they the same thing or is
there an important distinction there?
RC: I think that competencies can be broken down into both behavioral competencies
and technical competencies or skills, if you like. We have consultants elsewhere that
would say that competencies are solely behavioral and if they are zealous about that I
think they are missing the mark. I go back to some work I did many years ago with a
national hockey league team. We started talking about a resilience competency, that
these people could bounce back from injury or some road trips or any kind of things that
would make them less effective on the ice. We found that resiliency was an extremely
important behavioral competency but the coaches and the general managers of this
hockey team would also go back to, whats he like in the corners? Or what is his shot
like? And working with a major league baseball team, we saw the same sort of thing.
We can talk about behaviors, but we would still have to talk about the technical
competencies as well.
DC: So fundamentally you dont want to get so caught up with behavior that you forget
about skills. If one is looking to define the term you can define competency being
behavior and skill being technical things or skill being a kind of competency, but that is
just getting into semantics.
RC: Honestly, it is pretty much semantic. Some competencies can be used in scales to
in turn be used in compensation. Some behavioral competencies and obviously some
technical or skill-based competencies can as well, but there are some behavioral
competencies that cant, the one that comes immediately to mind is integrity. While you
can exhibit different levels of integrity, I dont think we can pay for different levels of
integrity. So I think a subset of this broad-based competencies would be behavioral and
at another side technical.

Job Analysis Is Still Important If Jobs Still Exist.

If positions, jobs, roles are part of an organization, job analysis is still

important, as example:

Designs and Cultures

"Functional
"Place for everything and
everything in its place"

"Process
"Integrated planning and
processing"

Network
"Fast, dynamic and
interchangeable""

RC: If I look at organizations, they in some ways have changed dramatically over the
years, but in other ways they havent changed one iota. Jobs still exists, but lets take
the former transportation and warehousing function that has now become an integrated
supply chain function. In the old days of transportation and warehousing, pardon the
pun, but there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Now we have
got more of an integrated planning and processing type of role thats played in the value
chain and the roles have changed. We see people who no longer have direct control
over some resources, based on people. Now they have to apply much more insightful
impact and influence types of skills. So, the organizations have changed, but you can
still use job analysis to get at what makes an effective supply chain manager versus
what made an effective transportation or a warehousing manager. The organization has
changed around these jobs; the jobs themselves have changed.
We have to be cognizant of that in the organization structures. If we looked at a network
model, as an example, a production house that was making films, they estimate flow in
terms of what the crew in the cast and all the support people are, job analysis is still
appropriate, but it might not be used as readily as it would be in a process culture or in a
functional hierarchy. The client that I worked with, I mentioned telecommunication
before, but also with the consumer package client you see tremendous movement away
from the functional hierarchy towards more of an integrated process type of structure.
Jobs still exist in those organizations. They may be more broadly described and
designed; they may have less control now than they used to, but this unit of work still
exists and I think in developing a new approach to job analysis people have to be very
cognizant of the design and not only of the design, the culture of the organization. Is it a
position-centered type of organization where we have to polish a job description and get
down to the minutia of what the job is all about, or is it just a brief statement of what it is
accountable for? And what sort of skills or competencies do you need to be able to do
the job effectively? Thats a different cultural mindset going from one job to another.
DC: Some organizations, as a result of job analysis, come up with a very detailed
description, for other organizations their approach to job analysis is much more cursory.

It is one right? I am there in HR, am I meant to come out with 10 pages or half a page
and whats the right thing to do or how do I decide?
RC: Well I dont think there is one right way, but secondly I am always amazed at
organizations that say some form of job evaluation leads to lengthy job descriptions. I
think the Hay methodology might take it on the chin perhaps more than other job
evaluation methodologies. Yet the job descriptions our compensation consultants use in
job evaluation never exceed two pages and the vast majority of whats in the two pages
is really about accountabilities. I am not sure why it would go beyond that except for a
cultural need to get into the nitty gritty detail. Yet its often those longer ones that
ultimately are left on the back shelf to collect dust. We may have developed a new job
description format or they may have used an online type of portfolio to do jobs, but
somewhere along the line there is an opportunity for an incumbent or whoever is writing
the job description to say what we have missed in the job. You get the addendum
stapled to the two-page job description, or the section of the online portfolio that is still is
about the nitty gritty detail. Because somewhere along the line the incumbent or the
organization has said if you dont get down to that fine degree of detail, how could you
possibly appreciate what the job is all about?
DC: The traditional functional layout also has a certain presumption of stability in it. You
get the sense that we can do job analysis and these roles are going to remain stable for
quite a while. When you look at the process model there is the feeling of a little bit more
dynamicism and those roles and accountabilities are going to be changing and in a
network model you expect a lot of change. How do I deal with the fact that as you move
to more dynamic organization, your job analysis may not stay relevant?
RC: Well its not just the type of organization or its culture; its also the application.
Again I go back to job evaluation and compensation. You have to take a point in time as
to where you are evaluating the job, typically that point in time is taken as today. So,
from a job evaluation application point of view I think you have to look at today, knowing
full well that this might change next year.
I go back to whats going to be most effective in your organization. If you are firepolishing a job description in an organization that changes every year, you better only be
looking at the basics of job analysis as opposed to getting down into the nitty gritty
details of what technical skill you require. Because if you get down to what level of C
development program you need and all of a sudden C+ and C++ have come along, you
know you have missed the mark. If youre a process organization or an affiliation
network type of model rather than the classic functional hierarchy, I would also be
looking at the application. If you are using job evaluation for today fine, if you are using
job analysis for tomorrow and you can make some solid assumptions around what
tomorrow is going to look like so much the better.
I am always concerned about clients who are afraid to make assumptions about what
tomorrow might look like. To bring some value added into HR, I think internal HR
consultants or managers are meant to provide some insight as to what might be done
down the road.
DC: And its funny, many times in HR, we are sent in to analyze a job, and we dont feel
that we have the mandate to think about the future. If you do it, somehow, its beyond
what you are supposed to think about.

RC: But a good HR consultant these days, they are not crystal balling, they are looking
at things in terms of what the probability of change would likely mean to a particular job
or role. A good HR consultant should be doing that.
DC: And should be asking questions of people such as whats going to be happening
with the distribution function a year hence.
RC: Well that goes back to your point about job understanding. If you are looking at the
distribution function and you are talking about the new cost analyst that exists in the
distribution function, you should always be making or looking at what the cost analyst is
doing today. You should be looking at what the cost analyst might be doing down the
road. Knowing that change is incremental, very seldom have we seen big bang types of
changes that totally change one position from one thing to the next.

What Approach Is the Right Approach?

What is the most
Effective (e.g., up-grade)
Efficient
Consistent

(e.g., less involved)

(e.g., culture-sensitive)

DC: I have been asking a lot of questions around what approach is the right approach.
How does one come up with the right approach to job analysis with the best practice?
RC: This mantra, if you like, came from our client base. When I returned to Hay 10 to 12
years ago, I was fortunate enough to go out to the client base and say, what is it that you
need? And what is it that we can provide more effectively? And the client base very
loudly and very strongly said we need to be more effective. Continuous improvement is
in the air. We need to upgrade our methodologies or we need to upgrade our systems.
We just have to make things better. So I asked them what do you mean by that? Well,
we need to make them more ours (the companys) and less yours (the consultants). Or
we need to make them more efficient. There are just not as many manpower analysts
around as there used to be or HR function that used to consist of 30 people may now
consist of six. So, the process has to be less involved. We have to go to the light tool.
The classic exampleagain I go back to things that I know wellwould be our job
evaluation tool. If its solely created just to say this is a grade six versus a grade seven,
then you don'
t need to go through all of the factors to get that, you can apply a Hay Light
Tool. You can apply the same sort of tools through a Towers model or through a Mercer

model. If you are using a job evaluation approach, turning a job evaluation committee
into a quality assurance panel where you are reviewing 40 jobs in half a day as opposed
to three or four. So, the clients said we just have to be more efficient and then also they
said we have to do things more consistently. We have to be culture sensitive, we have
to be cognizant of the fact that we are going to a new approach of production and our
basic sequential production approach isnt going to work any more. So our mantra
becomes, from an HR perspective how can we, HR, make you, our client, more
effective, more efficient, and more consistent? I think that that'
s really more important
than whats the right approach. Once you determine how we provide value in those
three areas and they are interdependent, then you can select what'
s the right approach.
Thats how we turned the Hay job evaluation model from something quite structured into
something that was more of a light tool. Similarly, thats how we have worked with
clients in moving into this double helix of accountability and competency as opposed to
one part of the organization looking at a competency and the other part of the
organization looking at responsibility.

Some Of The Basic Questions Are:

What, Why, How?
What?

is the need

e.g., staffing v. performance management

Why?
are we doing this
e.g., compliance v. organization effectiveness
How?
will we achieve our end result
e.g., employee involvement v.project expert

DC: What are the basic questions that guide how you approach job analysis?
RC: So again I go back to whats the application? It can be one of those I was talking
about before or they could be the entire honeycomb. If its the entire honeycomb, I
know, you are going to be served very well by asking what are the accountabilities and
what are the competencies? If we are looking at one who has a staffing need versus one
who has a performance management need, then your approach towards job analysis
may be different, given the different application. But I need to know what that application
is and then ask, why is it we are doing this? If it'
s just dotting the is and crossing the ts
of compliance or are we doing this as an organization effectiveness project? We really
have to come to grip with what jobs exist in our organization. What jobs should exist in
our organization? What levels exist and are each one of these levels a different level of
value added in our organization? If you are doing this for compliance issues then one
approach towards job analysis, if you are using it for broader organizational
effectiveness, you are probably using another form.

The HR Function Is Open To Consultantitise.

What do these methodologies have in
common?
Balanced Scorecard
Guide Charts
Link
People First-Profiler
Position Analysis Questionnaire
Stratified Systems Theory

DC: I am curious to know why you are saying the HR function is open to
consultantization.
RC: One of my former colleagues and somebody that you know, Elena Rogriguez, was
going into an organization and determining what consultants have been in before and
where the overlap was in what all of these consultants have done. So she would go in
and say lets look at your approach towards job evaluation and compensation, or your
approach towards performance measurement and management. We will look at say a
Balanced Scorecard or Hay Guide Chart or Link Approach towards Compensation or say
a People First-Profiler Methodology online or go back to the old Position Analysis
Questionnaire or look at Jacques Stratified Systems Theory. All of them have one
component part in common and it'
s all about accountability. And if you dont know what
the accountabilities are, direct or indirect, leaders followers, etc. then you are not going
to be able to apply any of these tools effectively. So consultantization has set in many
organizations and again Ill go back to if we look at the folks that are charged with talent
management or learning and development versus the folks that have the compensation
portfolio, people can become extremely zealous. One of the banks that we work with
uses Elliott Jacques Stratified Systems Theory and they are zealous about it. They also
use Hay Guide Charts and they are zealous about that but they look at these things as
being two different methodologies whereas I argue that Jacques is quite forthright in
saying if you dont know what the accountabilities are you cant get into what strata this
job should be at. At Hay we will say if you dont know what the accountabilities are than
you cant assign a point to a job or a grade to a job. It never ceases to amaze me that
accountability resides in all of these methodologies but they are all seen as competing
against one another because you have acolytes of one methodology in one camp who
wont talk to acolytes of other methodology and it'
s really the integrated approach that
you have to come to grips with. But the integrated approach, any one of them, has as its
basis what this job is accountable for or what this organization is accountable for and if
you cant answer the simple questions why does this role or this job or this level exist,
then it doesnt matter what sort of methodology you are going to use, you are not going
to use it very well.

DC: It may seem that some HR professionals are guilty of over emphasizing the
competency side of the double helix and they do not spend as much time on the
accountability side in recent years and thats perhaps gone a bit out of balance.
RC: Well I think in fact now they are coming around to that and I also argue that the
people who have worked solely with the accountability are coming around to how to
actually apply these accountabilities or succeed with these accountabilities.

Many Aspects of Job Analysis Have

Changed.
Culture can play a key role
A Question of Balance

Old
Boss accountabilities
Presumption of stability
Position-specific
Contractual

New
Partner accountabilities
Presumption of change
Role-oriented
Orientation

DC: I want to ask you about to summarize the differences such as they exist between
old and new approaches.
RC: The old culture was built on boss accountabilities, Im the boss and you are not.
Whereas in the new organization, we see far more partner accountabilities where you
and I mutually have to overcome a problem or create a new solution. The partner
accountabilities are far more delicate and difficult to get at than the boss subordinate
type of accountability where positional power played a substantial role. The person who
can really manage the matrix with an indirect reporting structure is really a person who is
to be a high-flying performer in the matrix organizations structure.
DC: Regarding your point from earlier on that there is a presumption of stasis or stability
in many job analysis approaches these day, what sort of shelf life or how long is that
stability going to exist in the new approach towards job analysis?
RC: If we have to do this, we have to take a point in time knowing full well that things
may change but they likely change through modification and adaptation as opposed to
full-scale change from one year to the next. The old organization was very position
specific. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. The old
organization likely had a manpower analyst that would do that analysis. In the new
organization there is probably a broader role-based approach and again to your point
from earlier the old culture would be contractual in nature. Its says this is the job
description, whereas the new culture would be the job description or the role profile or
whatever the documentation tends to provide you with an orientation as to how the job

should be done as opposed to the nitty-gritty detail of how each task should be
undertaken.

Summing up Best Practices

Working from a frame of reference
Integration
Job family approach

DC: Heres a question from the audience. I am working in a conservative organization

thats not apt to change or start to come around, and they believe the more descriptive
the job description is better whereas HR professionals would like to see them being
generic and used by the employee to develop strategic and personal goals that relate to
the overall business needs of the company. How do you convince the organization so a
conservative organization sees things in a new way?
RC: I dont think there is magic elixir here; I do think though that you can move from
being very position specific and highly detailed. Probably not directly to generic job
modeling, thats huge cultural change. That would mean that you have manager level 1,
2, 3 as opposed to functionally specific managers. I do think there is an interim which
says that rather than going to the whole list of tasks and activities you focus strictly on
accountabilities first and then what sort of competency come underneath that. I would
take people back, through how much time does it take to develop that very specific job
description and how much time are you really using the job description and it strikes me
in most of our clients that there is an inordinate amount of time in developing the job
description and than a very small amount of time in actual use.
DC: And I love this question because this is where our role changes from just the
technical expert who knows how to do something into a bit of sales rep who is trying to
sell ideas and in HR of course we have to be good at selling the ideas.
RC: But also you have to satisfy the end user needs first.
DC: It is wise to seek to understand before you seek to persuade and to have
conversations with the people to understand why it is they are doing things the way they
are. What they think it'
s accomplishing and giving them information again on the various
pros and corns as you see it. I think you will find, although it'
s certainly a long process,
that these persuasion skills are based on getting the good understanding of what your

client wants and how they see it, why it is that they want to do something that from your
point of view seems inappropriate, that is really where you need to start.

Frame of Reference
Jobs exist in a context, no formal
method of analysis will adequately
describe a job if the context is not
understood.

DC: We have a question about, What are success factors of completing a data-driven
job analysis process from focus group job analysis surveys across a large function in
which there are multiple jobs at multiple levels, so you have a lot of slightly different jobs
sometimes with just one incumbent at multiple levels? Do you group some of them
together or do you tackle them separately?
RC: I am not absolutely sure about what the heart of the question is but it sounds based
on your summary like we might be going into a job family approach that we really didnt
touch on yet. I think that if you are using multiple incumbent kinds of responses you do
have to go in and say, are we looking at a number of levels here. Are there different
levels of values, autonomy, knowledge and skill? The last approach that I took with a
client who was going through something similar to this was that lets say that there is one
job, is there a lower level job than that benchmark and is there a higher level job in that
benchmark? Can we create three levels, low, medium, and high out of any job category
and typically you can. I think that three plus or minus one in terms of job levels works
pretty well so junior, intermediate and high and maybe the need for one other level. But
once you get to about four levels of any one thing you are starting to slice the baloney so
fine that you cant really get the taste, but if I was doing a broad based data driven type
of approach I started by looking at three discreet levels.

Integration
Competencies, accountabilities, skills
and other descriptive approaches are
used together in an integrated
approach.

The Job Family Approach

Rather than tackle individual jobs it is
generally better to look at job families.
The method you use may not be the
same for different job families.

Barriers to Implementation
No time?
Limited expertise?
Lack of managerial support?

To Learn More
Ask Ross:
Ross_Coyles@haygroup.com

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