In my previous article on why businesses need roles, I mentioned that you use roles primarily as an HR tool. Specifically, I said:
This is the human resources half of roles—roles are a means to apportion and assign responsibility for different parts of an organization’s operations. Roles are formally declared in a job description and published in an organization chart in order to allow everyone in an organization to know who is responsible for what.
The “job description” capacity of roles is taken for granted by most managers: roles are used to give employees an encapsulated bubble of responsibility within the organization—and that’s it. Roles are traditionally defined as a tiny bubble, containing nothing but the relationship between the manager and the employee, and the canvas of activities required to complete the said work.
But that’s where most employers and managers stop—they stop defining the role and the manager-employee relationship at the level as it applies directly to the employee and the manager. What’s missing here?
The Organization / Communication Gap
What’s missing is everything outside of the manager/employee reporting structure. The role defines the relationship between the manager and the employee, but that’s it. The traditional org chart and job description does nothing to describe the roles of other people in the organization.
Most employees have to discover the responsibilities of other employees on a need-to-know basis. You don’t know whose job it is to fix your workstation until it breaks; you don’t know who to ask for stock art until you’re asked to make a newsletter; you don’t know who manages the website updates until you have to get a page modified; and so forth.
This is the organization / communication gap: managers drop the ball and leave almost all of the meaningful information about the organization’s other employees as it pertains to an employee’s specific role out of the conversation.
New hires are reduced to wandering around the office, looking for the person who’s supposed to help them. Every time a new employee has to teach themselves a lesson in your own company’s hierarchy, you lose productive person-hours; even worse, if the lesson they teach themselves is wrong, you can lose sales, data and uptime.
The Simple Lesson
The lesson is simple: publish the roles and responsibilities of everyone in your organization in a centralized knowledge system. Rather than have new hires wander around the office pestering other employees for answers, have them get the information straight from a current, central knowledge source. For smaller organizations, have a simple org chart with every role, the names of the people who fill those roles, and corresponding job descriptions for those roles.
In our next article, I intend to show you an example of how you can make more informative organizational charts which provide all of the information needed to plug the Organization / Communication gap.
