The Position Role Sheet is a management tool that organizes the work through Positions, Roles, and Types of Work. It is a fundamental way to accomplish the goal of first organizing the work before organizing the people doing the work. As a building block for departments of all sizes, Position Role Sheets break down the roles and responsibilities of each position within a department.
The Position Role Sheet is also helpful to employees, as it provides greater structure and clarity to their positions. It also helps employees receive recognition when fulfilling work in multiple positions.
Position Role Sheets vs. Job Descriptions
When people first hear about the Position Role Sheet, they may initially think it is the same as a job description. However, there are some fundamental differences between job descriptions and Position Role Sheets.
In practice, job descriptions are generally static documents created for recruiting and tend to be used most by Human Resources. By contrast, Position Role Sheets are an important management tool that creates dynamic, enduring structures within the organization. Position Role Sheets are actively used within teams and departments to create clarity regarding who is responsible for the work that needs to be performed. Some examples of how this tool is used in an ongoing manner include:
Referenced in One-to-One meetings to confirm how time is being spent.
Considered when assigning new types of work being performed in a department.
Used in onboarding new staff.
It’s critical to keep in mind that the Position Role Sheet is intended to organize the work; it is not a job description for a specific person in a department. When designing a Position Role Sheet, consider the work that needs to be accomplished and identify the fundamental roles that are required. Only after all the work has been organized is it time to go back and organize the people doing the work by assigning people to positions.
A Functional Org Chart should be in place before creating Position Role Sheets because it serves as a starting place for identifying the Positions in each Department. However, the process is iterative—both tools will inform and refine one another along the way. It’s very common for a company to identify new Positions to be added to the Functional Org Chart as it makes progress on the Position Role Sheets, and vice versa. This is another example of how the Position Role Sheets differ from standard job descriptions.
The Four Levels of the Position Role Sheet
The Position Role Sheet recognizes four levels in which work can be organized. These form a hierarchy that allows the Position Role Sheet to provide enough detail to make it useful, but not too much to make it overwhelming. The four hierarchical levels of how work is organized are:
Position
A Position is the title of a recognized job within the organization. When you think about your job or an employee’s job, you are typically thinking of their Position. Use the Positions identified in the Functional Org Chart as a starting place for creating Position Role Sheets.Role
The second level is called Role. A Role is a specific area of responsibility within a position and is critical to organizing the work, especially across positions.Type of Work
The third level is called Type of Work. A Type of Work is a category of tasks that falls within a Role. This level helps group the details that occur at the Task level into a shorter list of manageable categories, or buckets.Task
Finally, there is the Task level. These are the units of work that are associated with getting the work done. Tasks should not include every step needed to complete the work—those details would be documented in standard operating procedures and other instructional guides. While Tasks should be identified to understand the work performed by a position, this level is not captured in the Position Role Sheet.
This graphic illustrates the four levels of organizing the work. There are three Roles that comprise this Position. Each Role includes a few Types of Work, which in turn are made up of various Tasks.
To illustrate further, we’ll look at the position of Project Manager for a construction company. The main Roles for this Position are Client Management, Project Management, and Sub-Contactor Management.
The Types of Work under Client Management include Client Communication and Client Issue Resolution.
The Tasks for Client Communication include Project Start-Up, Weekly Status Emails, and Project Wrap-Up.
Project Managers can now visualize the structure of their position. This structure is not dependent on any specific person; rather, all Project Managers will have the same structure for their position. Having clarified this position provides an effective way to onboard new Project Managers.
The concepts from this article were taken from Organizational Structure: Organizing the work independent of the people. Available through The ReWild Group and Amazon, the book explores in-depth this and other concepts while providing illustrations to help business leaders incorporate the ideas into their organizations. Get your copy today, and don’t forget to download the free workbook that serves as a companion guide to the book.