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The following article was published in the Charleston Post & Courier's Business Major, a featured monthly column in the Business Review Section on July 3, 2000. Don't overlook job analysisBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to The Post and Courier Job analysis is at the heart of a firm's performance but it is often overlooked because managers and owners get bogged down with day-to-day business problems and forget to make time to analyze exactly what is needed to gain the competitive edge. When entrepreneurs first open their businesses or managers first take over an administrative unit, they usually carefully analyze the jobs that need doing, develop job specifications and descriptions and use these to hire, train, promote or fire. They probably do not go through this process because it is required in the uniform guidelines for employee selection procedures but because it makes good business sense. Unless the analyses are regularly updated, organizational systems can become static, especially as the business grows and people fall into routines. Out-of-date job analyses may be impacting the company bottom line. A sense of employee ownership of their jobs as they were originally analyzed can be another inhibiting factor. A "this is the way I have always done it" mentality on the part of employees means the organization is focusing on itself, not its customers, partners, and competitors. The combination of employee job ownership and outdated job analyses produces a quandary when recruiting and promoting people because the organizational frame of reference has become outdated. Whether one is operating a small, medium sized or mega business, the structure that employees gain from understanding what their jobs fully entail and how they fit together will ultimately determine the level of profitability and successful longevity of the firm. Job analysis provides the procedure for determining the duties and the knowledge, abilities, skills and other necessary characteristics needed to carry out the work. The analysis should begin with the entrepreneur or manager. The owner of a company that started small but is now growing may still be trying to do all the tasks he or she started out doing. A careful examination may suggest better alternatives. Perhaps routine management duties, while important, should be turned over to someone else so the entrepreneur can do even more important things. At a recent focus session, the owner of a greeting card and book business said she had reanalyzed all the jobs and discovered that while she had talented people, no one could replace her artistic talent. I decided "I want to be the character, the owner of the whimsical character," she said. "Someone else can take care of the accounting, the word processing, legal aspects, and marketing." A job analysis performed by an entrepreneur here in Charleston led to a completely different decision. Originally, she wanted to be the creative mover and shaker. But her company's finances had become tangled because she had left the financial and accounting functions to someone else. Vowing to never let that happen again, she made time to control the books. There are a number of methods that can be used to accomplish an effective job analysis. It is important to select a system that leaves one in good stead with performance law. While a job analysis alone does not provide insurance against litigation, it is a key element in designing human performance management and development systems that can stand up to legal challenges. The key term in hiring and promotion and other selection decisions is "validity." This means there must be a clear and provable (valid) relationship between the selection procedure and the job for which the individuals are being selected. The job analysis should include an analysis of the important work behaviors and their relative importance. Some work behaviors can be observed. The tasks performed by a fast food cook or an assembly line worker are examples. Analysis for these jobs should focus on the work behaviors and the tasks associated with them. Some work behaviors are not observable. The activities of a creative chef or a research scientist are examples. Analyses for these jobs should concentrate on the products of the work. Most jobs, retail sales or an advertising copywriter for instance, entail a combination of observable tasks and work products. The aspects of these jobs that are selected for measurement should be both the critical tasks and most important work products. Organizations with 15 or more employees need to be careful that their selection procedures accord with the uniform guidelines which have been reinforced in a series of important court decisions and also with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The courts have held that a selection device should measure the person for the job, not the person in the abstract. This means that a job analysis must be performed before jobs are advertised and people are hired. Among the systems commercially available are the Common Metric Questionnaire, field tested and with a reasonably high reliability, the Fleishman (F-JAS) Survey, which has strong research support, and the Functional Job Analysis (FJA), which has been around longer than any of the other systems and has consistently been used to classify jobs in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. In some states, it has recently been converted to ONet for high tech jobs. The steadfast instrument with a high reliability is a revision of the Position Analysis Questionnaire, developed by McCormick, Jeanneret and Mecham in 1972, which is structured to analyze work in relation to human characteristics in five areas: Information input (where and how information is acquired), mental processes (reasoning and other processes), work output (physical activities and tools used on the job), relationships with other persons, and job context (the physical and social contexts of work). In smaller firms an administrator usually performs job analysis. This person should have experience and training in observations and also first-hand knowledge and information about the job being analyzed. Administrative analysis is most suitable for those jobs with observable behaviors with tasks that are short in duration so that many trials can be measured. The method is not appropriate for jobs that require analytical and mental reasoning skills or where much of the behavior cannot be observed. To stand the scrutiny of court cases, it will be necessary for a company to have trained evaluators and keep careful records, as this method is not as defendable as other methods of job analysis. Job interviews, a common method of selecting people, should be carefully structured by using a definite format of carefully tailored questions that analyze the sequence of performance activities required in the position. For Questions/Comments about this site, contact dot.moore@comcast.net. Site designed by Jackye Cocoros. |