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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
High-value talent management must be relevant to today's workplace Misplaced Talent takes a hard look at the cluttered field of Talent Management, and offers a clear guide to making better people decisions in any organization. Deliberately challenging practitioners to do more, this insightful discussion sorts through the tools and techniques developed over the last century to examine their true relevance to the modern workplace. You'll learn which activities show the greatest potential to improve the lives of employees and the organizations they work for, and identify which of your existing practices don't really add enough value to be worth the expenditure of time, money, and potentially lost talent. The author asks you to make up your own mind about which approaches work best for your own specific talent decisions, but provides the best theory and practice available today as a foundation upon which to formulate a more relevant strategy. In a world of big data, the potential to understand employees and react appropriately has never been greater. So why is Talent Management as an industry relying on outdated theory and practices? This book is a guide to bringing HR up to date, giving you the tools, techniques, and perspective you need to demonstrate more value to your organization. * Adopt the tools and techniques most effective in today's workplace * Identify and discard methods that don't add value to the organization * Implement critical changes that can transform the HR function * Make better people decisions based on psychology and research Fundamentally, not much has changed in what constitutes good people practice. Practitioners must demonstrate the value of Talent Management, but the solutions implemented often fall short of the rigor and discipline they deserve. Misplaced Talent provides the insight you need to refocus attention and engage your organization about the value of better people decisions.
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Misplaced Talent
A GUIDE TO MAKING BETTER PEOPLE DECISIONS
JOE UNGEMAH
Cover design: Michael J. Freeland
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2015 by Joe Ungemah. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Ungemah, Joe.
Misplaced talent : a guide to making better people decisions / Joe Ungemah. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-119-03094-2 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-119-03097-3 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-119-03090-4 (epub) 1. Decision making. 2. Personnel management. I. Title. HD30.23.U54 2015 658.3′128—dc23
2015008302
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1 Frameworks
Origins of Job Analysis
The Art and Science of Job Analysis
Behavioral Simplicity
The Tradeoffs
The Good and Bad of Frameworks
Chapter 2 Talent Acquisition
More Than a Single Brand
Let’s Be Realistic
Compelling Themes
From Message to Market
How It’s Done
Chapter 3 Capability Assessment
Evaluating Value and Risk
Legal Requirements
Assessment by Interview
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
Work Simulations
Where to from Here?
Chapter 4 Psychometric Assessment
But First, an Experiment
Employee Needs
Personality Traits
Shared Values
Motivated Employees Are Engaged Employees
Changes in Motivation with Age and Generations
Restoring the Balance with Person-Environment Fit
Chapter 5 Employee Development
Psychological Contract
Assessment for Development
Developmental Challenges
Support Through Coaching and Mentoring
Moving Together or Apart
Chapter 6 Change
Breaking the Psychological Contract
Succession Planning
High Potentials and the Learning Agile
Driving Performance
Big Data and Monitoring Change
From a Balanced to a Transactional Contract
Conclusion
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Resources
Index
EULA
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Image from Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s 1918 Ball Brothers Mason Jar Study That Targeted How to Improve Worker Efficiency by Reducing Motion
Figure 1.2
Image of U.S. Army Air Corps Cadets in 1942 Taking a Group Test to Help Determine Their Proficiency as Pilots, Navigators, or Bombardiers
Figure 1.3
Summary of Job Analysis Techniques by Source of Information
Figure 1.4
Example of a Blended Competency Framework
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Three Lists of the Top Twenty-Five Companies
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Summary of Types of Reliability and Validity
Figure 3.2
Example of a Competency-Based Interview for Customer Service
Figure 3.3
Image of Calipers Used for Craniometry
Figure 3.4
Image of a Comparison Between Two Men, One Sane and the Other Insane, in the Cranial Shapes of Their Skulls
Figure 3.5
Image of Seventeen Known Criminals
Figure 3.6
Comparison Among Embryos to Illustrate Recapitulation
Figure 3.7
Simple Example of an Assessment Matrix
Figure 3.8
Simple Example of an Assessment Center Timetable
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Image of Phrenological Organs
Figure 4.2
Image of a Servants’ Employment Agency Where Heads Are Examined to Determine Suitability
Figure 4.3
Image of a Sample Inkblot Used in Projective Techniques
Figure 4.4
Example of Dimensions from a Personality Profile
Figure 4.5
Summary of Age and Generation Trends for Motivation
Figure 4.6
Key Characteristics of Person-Environment Fit
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Four Different Types of Psychological Contracts
Figure 5.2
Sample Output from a 360-Degree Feedback Report
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Example of a Talent Board Broken Down by Level and Department
Figure 6.2
Example of a Nine-Box Grid of Performance and Potential
Conclusion
Figure 7.1
Summary of How to Assess, Develop, and Support Staff
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
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Foreword
When Joe asked me to write a foreword for his book, Misplaced Talent, the request arrived on the very same day that I completed an article I was working on with a colleague from another university looking at the relationship between science and practice (“the science-practice gap”). We reported on some research we had been doing on the ways in which practitioners bring scientific evidence to bear in their practice within the field of “occupational psychology,” as we Brits call it, or, for those with a more European or North American background, work or industrial-organizational psychology.
Despite differences in name, what comes through from the wealth of international experience upon which this book is based is that there are many more commonalities than differences when we look at how psychology has been applied to the world of work across the globe, but yet practitioners can sometimes struggle in their attempts to translate and apply to their own practice the very rich body of scientific research and theory upon which the profession is based. This is why Misplaced Talent is such a useful book.
Recognizing that the fundamental drivers of performance in the workplace stem directly from the most basic and deeply held set of motivations and desires that we all share in common as members of the human race, Joe’s ability to see beyond the surface details, through to the very heart of what drives human beings in a work context, and then to use the insights thus gained to see the bigger organizational picture is what characterizes both his own work as a practitioner and this book.
I recall a time over a decade ago when I invited Joe to make a presentation at the university research centre I was running at the time. Duly armed with enough data to satisfy the hardest-nosed of empiricists, along with a PowerPoint presentation of accompanying statistical analyses that would leave even the most eager of statisticians similarly sated, he scrolled effortlessly through his slides, pointing out the key findings to the varied audience of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and other assorted disciplinary specialists that are to be found in most university-based business schools.
After the presentation, the usual round of questions and answers began, whereupon, of course, I expected the conventional criticisms to emerge—the sociologists taking one point of view, the economists another, and so forth. Instead, I was surprised that, although each group had a range of challenging and probing questions, they all seemed to agree on the main points that he had managed to distill from the data.
In Misplaced Talent, Joe achieves a similar effect—firmly evidence-based and drawing from well-established research findings while at the same time highlighting the key points that are most useful for practitioners when considering how to apply these ideas to the particular talent management issues they are facing. His book is very clearly a product of his own personal embodiment of the scientist-practitioner model to which all work and organizational psychologists aspire.
The scientist-practitioner model, which emphasizes both methodological rigor and also relevance to the reality of work organizations, on the other, reflects what has been termed the “rigor-relevance debate. According to this debate, the research-practice gap arises through academics engaging too often in what has been termed “pedantic science” (obsessed with meticulous theoretical and methodological precision, but of little practical value or relevance to those working in organizations) and practitioners sometimes resorting to popularist science, based more on commercial interests and client acceptability than sound scientific research.
A similar debate on the relationship between science and practice has taken place within the field of management more widely. Denise Rousseau, in her presidential address to the Academy of Management, called for practitioners to adopt an evidence-based approach, defining evidence-based management as “translating principles based on best evidence into organizational practices” and positioning the approach as a response to the research-practice gap that was bemoaned by both scholars and practitioners. Both seemed to acknowledge that management practice was often, if not usually, based on something other than the best available scientific evidence—a suspicion supported by research indicating that less 1 percent of HR managers regularly read the academic literature. It is for this reason that Misplaced Talent is such a timely and useful book.
Based on sound evidence, but at the same time questioning the suitability of some tried-and-tested approaches within their contexts of application, the book advances practice-based knowledge by drawing key lessons from the academic literature and scrutinizing the ways in which they have been applied or, on occasion, misapplied in practice. A key feature is how these have been summarized into practical, useful pointers for practitioners, illustrating relevant issues and dilemmas through copious examples from the author’s own practice that bring to life the challenges facing practitioners in the contemporary, fast-changing workplace.
The picture emerging from our work at the Centre for Progressive Leadership of the role that business leaders and top talent of the future will play in this changing landscape is very different from the one played out in organizations today. We live in exciting times, and the increasingly networked context in which organizations find themselves means that their scope will only become wider as complex networks of suppliers, partners, customers, and other stakeholders emerge and interact in increasingly sophisticated and unpredictable ways.
Those at the top of the organization will, as I have argued elsewhere, need to become both “business model innovators” and “social facilitators,” while the way in which roles are continually reconfigured will present a challenge to those lower down in the hierarchy, even as those hierarchies themselves shift their shapes.
Those charged with matching people to these new roles must align a more diverse set of people through networks of “open innovation” and, while we cannot predict exactly how the story will unfold, the only certainty is that the organizations of tomorrow will be radically different from those of today in ways that we have yet to imagine. Misplaced Talent provides a valuable resource for any practitioners faced with the immense challenge of responding to these trends as they negotiate their way through this rapidly changing backdrop to develop the dynamic capabilities upon which the organizations of the future will depend.
One of the central themes of the book is person-environment fit (P-E fit), which is often misunderstood as being concerned simply with the degree of match (or mismatch) between a person and his or her environment. This is structural and static, whereas a more transactional framework has the potential to be process-oriented, taking account of the dynamic nature of the relationship between the person and the environment as the individual engages in “commerce” with that environment.
Such a conceptualization engenders a systems view of people at work, with each component of the system being dependent upon the others. The adoption of a P-E fit perspective presents a challenge to both the practitioner and researcher. Compromises will have to be made in the short term, as currently available tools and techniques account for only a static perspective. While the profession of occupational psychology may be some way off from realizing the full potential of P-E fit, it does at least now have somewhere to begin in Misplaced Talent.
The book represents both a valuable resource for the practitioner and a forward-thinking contribution to the profession as a whole as it begins rising to the challenge of a greater understanding of how an individual’s personal values, goals, and commitments express what is important to him or her in particular transactions with the work environment and what this, in turn, means for him or her personally, in terms of their significance for the values and beliefs that are held dear.
In this sense, then, Joe offers the reader a chance to consider how people’s personal characteristics and belief systems act as a “perceptual lens” that enables them to create meaning out of their work lives. This focus on individual subjectivity and personal meaning goes some way toward providing a foundation for a fuller understanding of how people perform at their best at work, based on a genuinely cognitive-phenomenological account of human functioning.
The book provides readers with an opportunity to consider how well they understand the drives and desires of those around them, and also invites a critical evaluation of how work is designed and how they select and develop those who do it.
Professor Dean Bartlett, Ph.D., C.Psychol., FHEA, AFBPsS, HCPC, Registered Occupational Psychologist
London, April 2015
Preface
I spend the better part of my day helping organizations make better people decisions. From redesigning a recruitment process, to running focus groups with leaders to define what good talent looks like or facilitating individual and group development, I am on the front line, working directly with leaders and professional talent managers to improve how their organizations are attracting and retaining the best workers.
What has spurred me to write this book is a feeling that the tools and processes that I help set in motion swim against the tide of how organizations naturally operate. Tendencies like hiring the candidate who feels right or arguing that a department really is not like any other in the company (and, therefore, common job definitions don’t apply) undermine the architecture that I put in place.
This had led me to question the work that I do. Are the tools and techniques that I promote really cut out for the job? Are there better ways to manage talent than what is accepted as common practice? Is the support that I typically offer inadequate to ensure long-term change?
I have concluded that there is plenty of scope to improve how organizations make people decisions. I believe we are in a state of misplaced talent. At times, we park our best and brightest staff in the wrong places, where they are either not maximizing what they can do or become at risk of drifting away due to lack of interest in the job. At other times, we can forget what really matters to the organization, placing too much emphasis on jobs and functions that have minimal impact on what a company is tasked to do. And still other times, we bet on the wrong talent to lead and grow our businesses, overlooking employees or applicants who are more deserving and capable.
By taking a step back, questioning what works, and becoming better advocates, we can make headway against bad practice. This book will help us do that. It is intended for anyone responsible for making people decisions in the workplace. Whether you work in an advisory capacity or as a people leader with full responsibility for your staffing decisions, the topics discussed in this book will have relevance for you. I use the term “practitioner” liberally, to designate any individual who is involved in advising or making people decisions.
If, like me, you work in an advisory capacity, we have an obligation to promote the benefit of tools and techniques that are known to improve people decisions in the organizations we are servicing. Our job is to steer organizational leaders toward proven techniques and away from pseudo-science, while balancing needs for cost-effectiveness and efficiency.
Leaders, too, have an obligation to ensure that they are valuing people decisions as highly as the other decisions they make. If leaders uniformly spent the same amount of time and energy on people decisions as they do on strategy or finance, I believe that organizations would look and feel very different than they do today.
When it comes to the techniques that constitute good people practice, not much has changed in recent history. Competency design, assessment to inform hiring, and psychometric-led development are used as much today as they were five decades ago. Online technology may have increased tool accessibility and speed, but fundamentally, the job of a practitioner still involves conducting job analysis, recruiting talent, assessing capability and motivation, developing staff, and implementing change programs.
What has changed is the desire and ability for organizations to question the return on investment that their people practices have on improved business efficiency, staff engagement, and performance. Like never before, organizations have at their disposal vast amounts of data on employees, customers, and financial indicators that can and are being used to validate whether people practices are adding value to the business. Coupled with a continuing need to save cost following the recent recession, only those programs that are able to prove their value are spared.
A storm is brewing. On one hand, organizations are expecting more from us as practitioners, to demonstrate the value of what we bring to the business. Yet on the other hand, people decisions are routinely made without the rigor and discipline they deserve. I believe that now is the time to take a hard look at the tools and techniques we employ and determine which ones have the right to be widely adopted in our organizations. Only then can we engage businesses about the value we bring them through improved people decisions.
In this book, I will take us on a tour of current people practices. This book diverges from an academic discourse on talent management by focusing on what those of us on the front line witness and advise our clients to adopt. I will lay on the line the potential benefits and drawbacks of various approaches, sometimes arguing that specific tools and techniques do more harm than good and should therefore be abandoned. More often, I will demonstrate that the tools and techniques are sound, but the ways in which they are applied are in drastic need of improvement. I passionately believe that there is an incredible amount of potential to improve the lives of employees and the organizations they work for, if we can focus our efforts on the right set of practices.
We will know that we have succeeded as practitioners when the employment relationship leaders share with their employees has improved. Like any other social relationship, both parties need to feel fulfilled and trust that they are moving in a common direction. The decisions leaders make about recruitment, assignment of work responsibilities, staff recognition, and discipline (among others) act either toward or against a strong employment relationship. We as practitioners can ensure that the best decisions are made by putting in place structures and techniques that heighten the quality and transparency of the information guiding their judgment.
The term person-environment fit has been coined to express the quality of the employment relationship. The fit between an employee and his or her workplace is said to be high when three conditions are met. First, organizations effectively apply the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees to accomplish job tasks. Second, organizations fulfill the tangible and intangible needs of their staff. Third, employees feel that their efforts are coordinated and contributing toward a common purpose. A fuller account of the person-environment model is presented later in the book. For now, these three tenets provide an underlying structure to the book that will aid us in evaluating the contribution different techniques make.
In Chapter 1, we will look at how organizations identify and structure their expectations of staff performance and the type of workplace they cultivate. The discussion begins by reviewing the origins of job analysis, as characterized by Taylorism and the Human Relations Movement, followed by the arrival of competencies as the primary vehicle organizations use to set a benchmark for people decisions. I will argue that frameworks often fall short in delivering useful guidance, with content that is heavily slanted toward behaviors (ignoring skills or experience) and too generic in terminology (glossing over functional differences), resulting in employees focusing energy in the wrong places.
With the criteria set for what type of talent organizations are looking for, attention turns toward finding the talent that will meet these needs. Chapter 2 explores what companies are doing to promote an appealing “employer brand,” how they define an “employer value proposition,” and source the best possible talent available. Although some companies have a clear and effective strategy about how to attain top talent, more common are haphazard campaigns based on limited insight about what an employer can bring its staff. Offering the wrong type of incentives or over-promising on commitments makes for an unstable employment relationship.
Chapter 3 unpacks the first tenet of person-environment fit, specifically that organizations effectively apply the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their employees. We will look at the tools and techniques practitioners employ to identify the capabilities of staff, including ability tests, interviews, and job simulations. By using the criteria of reliability and validity as our guide, I will argue that more can be done to correctly identify the best candidate for the job.
Focus turns to the fulfillment of employee needs (the second tenet of person-environment fit) in Chapter 4. Practitioners today use a variety of psychometrics to identify the personality characteristics, motivators, and values of current and future employees. However, the quality and relevance of these tools vary greatly and, therefore, have the potential to misrepresent what an employee desires from his or her workplace. Without validation and exploration of what could be reasonably accommodated, too much is assumed about what drives and engages talent.
The last tenet of person-environment fit, where both parties feel that they are moving in the same direction, will be discussed in Chapter 5. The chapter introduces the term psychological contract, which represents the glue that binds employees to their workplace. We will investigate the various ways practitioners attempt to invest in the psychological contract, including raising self-awareness, coaching and mentoring, skills training and certification, and job rotations. I will argue that so-called development programs are often assessments in disguise, whereby the information gained about employees’ weaknesses can be used against them in future promotion decisions or job reassignments. Moreover, development has a tendency to focus on a narrow set of organizational priorities, which effectively build skills, but do little to improve the psychological contract and keep employees engaged in the long term.
In Chapter 6, we will look at what practitioners do to repair a broken psychological contract. There are many causes for a breakdown. For example, economic challenges can make for a more stressful workplace environment. Alternatively, the favoritism shown to employees engaged in high potential programs can cause a rift with those not selected for the program. Employees, too, can be at fault in breaking the psychological contract by failing to perform well in their jobs. Practitioners attempt to remedy breakdowns in the psychological contract by redeploying staff, preparing for change through succession planning, and introducing performance management systems. Yet, many of these initiatives fundamentally change the psychological contract from a relational to a transactional type, which can snowball into further breakdown and only works to prolong the inevitable loss of talent from the organization.
Each of the chapters is written in a way that allows you to dip in and out of the book, depending on what types of people decisions are of most relevance and interest to you. A table of contents by topic is presented for quick reference. I hope that this book challenges you to consider for yourself which practices will make for better people decisions in your own workplace. With a little luck and diligence, we might be able to declare that we have successfully found the best talent for our organizations, deployed them in the right places, and kept them very happy and productive. At least, this should be our ambition.
Chapter 1Frameworks
Without having job criteria in place, there is simply no way of predicting with any degree of confidence whether your people decisions are fair and rational. Practitioners rely on job descriptions and talent management frameworks to combat the risks of poor people decisions, because when you start racking up all the direct and indirect costs of an unfilled vacancy or a poorly placed new hire, the costs are striking, especially for roles that are core to the business.
One of my clients put its business analytics team to the task of figuring out how much it costs to replace a front-line employee. These are not high level positions, but rather staff working in retail branches and call centers. By the time the analyst calculated the cost of advertisement, the time spent by the recruitment team to screen and interview candidates, the loss of productivity because the role was vacant, and the cost to induct a new employee, the total figure was a staggering $57,000 per vacancy.
You might be skeptical and think this sounds too high, but even if you accept that the cost is only half as high, the damage of hiring the wrong people or failing to address engagement issues are substantial. When you consider that an annual turnover rate of 30 percent is the norm for certain industries, a modest improvement in retention (i.e., people staying on for a few extra months on average) can save a large organization millions of dollars and potentially gain a few customers along the way, through a more positive customer experience with an engaged company representative.
Before employees can be hired or money spent on development, practitioners must establish criteria about what they are trying to accomplish. For recruitment, identifying critical skills and experiences ensure that they hire the candidate most likely to perform well on the job. For development, understanding what needs to be improved and for what reason can ensure that training budgets are invested wisely.
This chapter is devoted to exploring the frameworks put in place by practitioners to help guide people decisions throughout their organization. By defining what the employee and organization, respectively, bring to the table, as well as the glue that holds them together, it is hoped that decisions can be made by their collective ability to strengthen the employment relationship.
The chapter begins by charting the origins of job analysis and the subsequent change in emphasis from the division of labor to the drivers of employee performance, followed by the rise of behavioral competencies as the language practitioners use to define the workplace. We will then look at the complexities of defining a structure that works effectively across levels, functions, and jobs, as well as two of the common applications for talent management frameworks in recruitment and development.
I aim to demonstrate that there exists an inherent tradeoff between defining a framework that accounts for the intricacies between jobs and its usefulness for making sound talent management decisions. The role of the practitioner is to use his or her best judgment in weighing the pros and cons of each alternative, settling on the framework that will have maximum utility for the organization at this specific point in time. Right now, I believe that the pendulum has swung too far, with frameworks accounting for only a fraction of the employment relationship (focusing excessively on behaviors) and applying generic language across highly divergent roles. Together, these trends provide practitioners with the greatest opportunity to help their organizations reframe what top talent looks like.
Origins of Job Analysis
Modern day practitioners are not the first to be interested in the content and structure of jobs. The origins of job analysis are evident with the development of more complex and interdependent civilizations. For example, Imperial China had a long-standing tradition of regularly testing the worthiness of government officials. In 1115 BCE, six skill sets were defined as part of this testing regime, specifically writing, arithmetic, music, archery, horsemanship, and ceremonies and rites. As a second example from the other side of the world, Socrates in the 5th century BCE mused about the allocation of work in his description of the ideal state.
The first major work that can be considered a precursor to job analysis was completed in 1747. Diderot, busily writing his encyclopedia, was so disturbed by the lack of clarity around how jobs were defined in the trades, arts, and crafts that he took it upon himself to create a job classification system. Diderot kicked off a trend that would continue in France for nearly a century. Between 1780 and 1830, France defined an encyclopedia of occupations and the basic qualifications required for civil service, implementing bureau examinations to select the most suitable candidates. The British Empire was quick to follow, similarly focused on the civil service and the challenge of effectively managing colonies located around the world.
The late 19th century witnessed reform in the United States, initiated by Lincoln voicing his displeasure at the “inefficient and wasteful results of political appointments.” A firm tradition of assessing abilities and skills was thus established. The full potential of job analysis was not realized until it was applied beyond the civil service, coinciding with the establishment of Industrial Psychology as something different than other psychological disciplines. Early pioneers include Frederick Taylor, who relied on job analysis to fuel his principles of Scientific Management; Hugo Munsterberg and his quest to identify worker characteristics that would result in greater job fit; and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth with their development of time and motion studies (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Image from Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s 1918 Ball Brothers Mason Jar Study That Targeted How to Improve Worker Efficiency by Reducing Motion
A huge amount of momentum for job analysis was gained as an outcome of the First World War. The U.S. Army was keen to improve how soldiers were selected and placed into service (Figure 1.2). When the Great Depression hit, attention turned to utilizing worker abilities and getting the great masses of civilians back to work. The Social Science Research Council and the National Research Council sought to utilize job analysis to identify the core characteristics of jobs and how they differ by vocation. This work led the U.S. Employment Service to establish the Occupational Research Program in 1934, which sought to draft a Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and create a taxonomy of worker characteristics that could be used to select candidates. The program resulted in a taxonomy of forty-five characteristics used by states to hire and relocate staff, with the DOT itself published in 1939.
Figure 1.2 Image of U.S. Army Air Corps Cadets in 1942 Taking a Group Test to Help Determine Their Proficiency as Pilots, Navigators, or Bombardiers
Although interest in job analysis has remained steady, especially in light of Equal Employment Opportunity legislation, a major overhaul of the DOT did not occur until 1995, with the creation of O*Net. A consortium of prominent psychologists was hired by the U.S. Department of Labor to replace the DOT with a new classification of jobs that were representative of the U.S. economy. In addition to basic labor market information, O*Net provides a breakdown of each job by four categories.
Worker Characteristics:
Abilities
,
Interests
,
Values
, and
Styles
held by the employee that are considered enduring and likely to influence their performance and acquisition of skills.
Worker Requirements:
Skills
,
Knowledge
, and
Education
that are gained by the employee by either doing their jobs or in preparing for a career.
Occupational Requirements:
Tasks
required by the employee and the
Tools and Technology
that he or she will likely utilize on the job.
Occupation-Specific Information:
Work Activities
describing the behaviors expected from employees and the
Work Context
(aka environment) that they are likely to experience.
O*Net was an ambitious project and the final product contains 571 job elements across 821 detailed occupations. Such an array of job elements provides a mindboggling number of potential combinations, and practitioners are well aware of the value O*Net brings to their toolbox.
I have had the pleasure of working alongside one of the creators of O*Net. Wally Borman is an expert practitioner, having a résumé that would make anybody deeply envious. Wally is the “chief scientist” at PDRI, as well as a professor of IO psychology at the University of South Florida. He has penned over 350 publications, served as president for the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, edited four professional journals, and above all, is one of the most genuine and supportive people I have worked with.
When writing this chapter, I arranged some time to speak with Wally about the creation of O*Net and what it strove to achieve. According to Wally, the motivation for O*Net was to get beyond the DOT, which had a clumsy underlying framework that failed to provide a true comparison between jobs and did little beyond providing generic job descriptions. True comparison between jobs, with rich and thorough taxonomy, was beyond the DOT and required a major rework.
To create the content used across worker characteristics, worker requirements, occupational requirements, and occupation-specific information, the O*Net designers relied on a combination of existing theory, logic, and their extensive practical experience working in the field performing job analysis. For example, O*Net’s taxonomy for work styles is based on the Big 5 personality model, which is the most highly researched and validated personality structure available today. Moreover, Wally was keen to point out that O*Net has a hierarchical structure that extends beyond the categorization of jobs. The hierarchy applies at a lower level to the work activities that drive these distinctions, accomplished by looking at differences among task complexity, importance, and frequency.
According to Wally, the greatest challenge in creating O*Net was not in drafting the content, but in gaining enough data to validate what was written. Realizing how enormous the task was of surveying job incumbents from each of the 821 jobs included in O*Net, the designers decided instead to opt for a practical approach. The designers targeted eighty jobs, which, surprisingly, made up 80 to 90 percent of people employed in the U.S. economy at the time. The design team went out to organizations with significant populations of employees working in these occupations and was warmly welcomed.
But the designers hit a roadblock. Despite a resounding initial interest from employers to participate, the response rate was shockingly poor, and solid data was captured for only thirty-five of the jobs. The design team went to Plan C and used other industrial psychologists to validate O*Net’s content. This is a lesson for any practitioner working on a large scale job analysis project. Gaining commitment from job incumbents or subject matter experts is usually not a problem until they see the full extent of what is asked of them.
With the content validated to the highest practical degree, O*Net provides a solid foundation for a range of talent management activities. Wally points out its usefulness in providing criteria for recruitment or reward decisions, identifying training requirements, guiding the redeployment of staff, and informing career guidance. As an area of future application, Wally believes that O*Net could be used to inform what types of reasonable accommodation could be made for people with disabilities. But for this to occur, he believes that O*Net requires even more granular content and extensive validation with job incumbents.
Unless your day job looks like mine, you are probably wondering why anyone would ever need to do job analysis again. It appears that O*Net has done it all. O*Net has a robust content model, applies to every conceivable role in the U.S. economy (which translates well to an international context), has been validated, and, best of all, is free to use courtesy of the U.S. Department of Labor (a link is provided in the notes section of this book).
Yet, for all these advantages, O*Net does not provide a total solution. The language used in O*Net is necessarily generic and therefore cannot account for how a given occupation is interpreted by each organization. One of the popular statistics HR professionals quote is a finding that it takes six to eight months for the average employee to become fully competent in his or her role. Assuming that a suitably qualified candidate was chosen (having the skills and experiences that would be listed on O*Net), then it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the six to eight months a new employee requires is due to the way job roles are interpreted and connected to work within a specific organization.
Bottom line, job analysis is required to capture all the idiosyncrasies that fall between the cracks of the generic job descriptions. What makes Microsoft different from Apple or Coca-Cola different from Pepsi has a lot to do with the mix of talent they have working in their organizations and the processes that they have defined for how individuals work together. Competitive advantage from a people perspective is having insight into what makes your culture, processes, and roles different from those of your rivals and then finding and nurturing the talent according to what you find. It all depends on job analysis.
The Art and Science of Job Analysis
To conduct a job analysis, practitioners are tasked with defining the essence of a job, accomplished through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, observation, or existing knowledge. This information is bundled together into a snapshot of a job that represents what employees are doing at that particular moment in time. As a job adapts and changes to new ways of working or different end products, the onus is on the practitioner to revise the job description. The reality is far from ideal, and I will talk more about this in a few minutes.
Below, I will present eight popular ways of conducting a job analysis. Each employs a slightly different way at gaining relevant information and, as a result, yields different information about tasks, behaviors, or personal attributes. No matter which combination of techniques is chosen, a successful job analysis is systematic (having a predefined objective and structure), comprehensive (gaining multiple, relevant viewpoints that represent the job), and timely (before any major staffing decisions are made). When done right, job analysis forms the basis for selection, appraisal, compensation, and development activities, as well as compliance with fairness legislation. Here are the main techniques trained practitioners utilize.
WORK LOGS
Job incumbents are asked to keep a written record of the work they accomplish, either after a specified period of time (e.g., hourly or daily) or when they switch between tasks. Individual accounts of the workday are compiled across job incumbents to discover the key activities that make up a particular job.
STRUCTURED OBSERVATION
A trained observer watches job incumbents fulfill their work throughout the day, using a checklist of tasks as a reference. The observer keeps track of the frequency of tasks, duration, and accuracy of the items included in the checklist. The observer will often ask questions of the job incumbent about what he or she is doing, how he or she is doing it, and why it has to be done in order to fully capture key activities and necessary behaviors.
JOB SAMPLE
Trained observers take on the job for a set period of time. Through their experience, they take note of how they use their time, the tasks they are asked to accomplish, the approach they take in fulfilling tasks, and the required skills they should have to effectively accomplish their work. This technique is more appropriate for jobs that can be learned quickly or that take advantage of transferrable skills.
