Help Wanted: The Curse of Job Descriptions
The funny thing about people who seek out RiverNorth is they are rarely content in monotony: the kind of monotony that comes from doing the same thing over and over. The days of staying at one company long enough to collect the gold watch are gone as American workers seek purpose, growth, and stimulation from their jobs. Ironically, traditional corporate paradigms are ill-prepared to handle such yearnings from their employees.
The reason? Job Descriptions.
The night before my friend started her first post-college job, she called her father in a panic. “How do you know what you’re supposed to do all day at work?” After chuckling, he replied, “that’s what my job description is for. I do what they hired me to do: I have a set of responsibilities that I must perform.” At the time, her father was a procurement executive. But he was also an amazingly talented writer, a natural-born public speaker, a genius business strategy mind, and a math whiz who got a perfect score on his SATs. Do you know how many times he used these skills while fulfilling his job description? Zero.
The trouble with job descriptions is they force us into neat little boxes, organized into departments that operate in silos. These boxes make it easy for companies to see employees as single-faceted “resources,” instead of complex organisms with multiple abilities. If you’re a data analyst, no one ever considers that you may also have skills (and passions) in, say, DevOps.
For individuals, being forced to stay in your box suppresses all of the other skills and knowledge you could bring to bear. It requires you seek permission from someone else (like your boss) to pursue your passions, to explore new things. You become beholden to someone else to grow. Any training you do receive feels like a bone thrown to placate you.
But doing away with job titles and job descriptions altogether can seem scary, or even crazy. If everyone showed up at your company tomorrow and no one had a job title, what would you all do?
The answer is in creating a new paradigm: role-based work instead of title-based work. And it’s shockingly intuitive.
Inspired by Brian Robertson’s Holacracy and following the suit of companies like Zappos and Morning Star, RiverNorth does not have job descriptions (beyond what is necessary to post on recruiting sites). We are not interested in titles, rank, or boxing you into a predefined set of responsibilities. Rather, individuals fill multiple roles.
Roles, unlike job descriptions, cross traditional job boundaries, are self-directed, and constantly evolve. It is not uncommon to see a talented computer science major also getting involved with preparing financial statements; or a business analyst with a love of meeting new people fill additional roles in recruitment.
Roles are granular tasks that need to get done: whether it’s recruiting someone for a project, preparing annual corporate filings, leading a proposal, or finding a vendor to supply our coffee. Every role is posted openly within the company and individuals elect to fill the roles that both suit their talents and provide them with growth opportunities. Employees are free to swap roles at will, accountable only to each other -- not an executive or department lead who decides.
By coupling several smaller roles together, we fill our days with only that which fulfills and feeds us. This can manifest in two primary ways:
Within project teams
Beyond client work
As Federal Contractors, we must form project teams that work together on a specific statement of work. But the same principles of roles apply. We see contractual requirements simply as roles to be filled: someone must prepare the invoices, someone must be accountable to the client for project status, someone must ensure background checks are completed, and so on. But unlike traditional contractors, we do not assign those roles to specific job descriptions. You will not find “account managers” or “lead project managers” on our work (beyond what is required by the contract to be named as key personnel). Instead, you find every person on the project contributing in ways that interest them. Teams are accountable only to each other and the client and have absolute autonomy to divvy up the roles as they collectively see fit.
Beyond client work, there are tasks to be done to run the business: finance, IT, HR, recruiting, marketing, proposals, sales, and so on. Once again, we define each task as a role and solicit Voluntary Task Forces instead of hiring non-billable internal headcount. We are striving toward reduced billable targets to allow several hours per week to work on additional roles beyond billable work. RiverNorth sees it as a win-win: we return the cost-savings of not hiring internal talent to employees in the form of profit-share, while each employee enjoys a chance to learn new skills and grow.
The prospect of owning your own role and defining your own value at work can be startling and scary. But I assure you, it’s anything but monotonous.