More than JD

The Job Description is quite a common tool in today's corporate world. It's good, indeed. It gives the associate a detailed description of their accountabilities.
HR experts and managers use this tool for many purposes: recruiting and selecting job candidates, setting performance goals, and handling performance reviews and evaluations.

The best Job Description is strongly linked to a competency model and can reflect overall business strategies and changes in the current environment. It sounds like a perfect tool, doesn’t it?

JD alone is not enough.

As a tool for directing associates' attention, the JD can only help them understand what they must do. It doesn't really tell them why? In other words, it doesn't motivate them to pursue better performance. In fact, many associates perceive the JD as an agreement between money and effort. This is why most associates will come to their immediate boss and ask for a raise just because they have fulfilled the minimum requirements which described in a JD. But the only real justification for a raise should be a positive answer to the following question: “Are you creating value for the organization?”

If JD is not everything, what else do we need?

To answer that question, we have to answer the following three questions by what you can discover some insights:

1. Why must an associate do the jobs listed on the JD?
2. What are the immediate, short-term, and long-term results of getting those jobs done?
3. Why does this individual have to achieve these results?

As a performance consulting company, Visionary Consulting always helps our clients broaden their perspectives by asking questions and providing straightforward ideas or solutions. By answering the above questions, we believe you will find your answers as follows:

The JD is necessary, but it's not sufficient. We also need to create an OD (Output Description) and a VD (Value Description). By doing this, we are able to help transform an organization into a genuine value-creation system.

Let's take a close look at those 3Ds:

       focus                          expression
JD   job/task/HOW              action verbs
OD  output/result/WHAT     desired outcome
VD  target/goal/WHAT        ultimate result

Example

JD:
recruit the best performers from a list of potential job candidates

OD:
Immediate: teams have more qualified experts
Short-term: teams can accomplish more
Long-term: a more competent workforce

VD:
increased capacity and human capital; increased revenue

It's quite obvious to see how important it is to explicitly communicate OD and VD with associates. It is simply because all associates are responsible for creating value for the organization. How can they create value without deeply and thorough understanding their individual VD (which of course is a result of their individual OD)?

The discussion of the 3Ds will be developed further.

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