Trust over documentation

Are job descriptions worth the paper they’re written on? The modern workplace changes rapidly. Keeping these documents up to date for every employee is a full time job and my experience is that most companies don’t. But is it a viable basis for structuring and managing an organisation anyway?

But that’s what Human Resource (HR) departments are paid to do. If you think about it though, you can’t honestly expect them to have a clue what most of these jobs entail; especially for technical roles.

If the job description is inaccurate how do you know if the employee in question is actually doing what you’re paying them to do? Perhaps more importantly, how do employees, including you, know what’s expected?

Taking a managerial stance, without supporting documentation you can’t prove a thing in the case of a dispute. So you just have to hope that employees do whatever needs doing to make your business a success: scary stuff for a control freak like me.

Until you realise that it requires trust; your trust in them, and their’s that you value their contribution and that they’ll be fairly treated and rewarded for their efforts. But there’s a catch. Trust becomes much harder to build and maintain as the number of people grows: why do you think no one trusts Politicians.

This makes large companies unruly and essentially unmanageable places, so it’s not a big surprise that most managers give up. If you want progress choose smaller self-determining groups where trust has a chance.

Everyone needs to know each other and believe, really believe that each has something to offer and will do their best. Self-determination is important so that everyone knows the team rules and believes they’ll be dealt with fairly: effort will be rewarded, slacking punished.

Large companies are a focus for funding and fulfil the a necessary role as legislation machines. You can’t take a product to mass market without wading through a morass of quality and safety documentation. Only large organisations can carry the kind of overhead this demands, and this is where their future lies.

Innovation is the province of small agile—with a little ‘A’—organisations. This is a strategy that can be realised by outsourcing, or by thinking differently about corporate structure. Loose alliances of small groups provides the manpower and range of skills to tackle large projects. There’s no reason a company can’t be formed this way.

The future is small, local and agile… choose trust over documentation.