Restructuring is a time of upheaval and change, and often one in which many old roles will be removed. At the same time, it’s a period of growth, a time for new things, and an opportunity to introduce new roles, merge old ones, and create new opportunities. Doing so during a period of restructuring can be difficult, especially if those roles are completely new, with no existing grounds to base them on. Taking these 5 steps will help you to classify your roles in a way that makes sense, even during a tumultuous restructure, so that you can begin hiring.
Assess Likely Role Responsibilities and Duties
While you may not have the resources to assess likely role responsibilities in-house most assessment centers will have the resources to conduct external analysis for you. Most will also have existing job profiles and classification frameworks, that will help you recognize and identify the needs of new roles, which you can then tweak to meet the specific needs of your organization.
Creating a profile of what the role will likely include should also mean examining tooling and processes that will be used. This can be difficult during a restructure, where these things are often tumultuous.
Assess Relevant Teams or Departments
Most roles are designed to fit into specific teams or departments, although you will likely have several cross-functional roles. It’s important to recognize where people have to fit, so that you can better define the needs of a role. A cross-functional person must be significantly more communicative and outgoing than a person working on a single team. Similarly, they may be required to have more technical competencies.
Recognizing where and how teams and departments are changing during the restructure will help you to build your new role around those new teams, so that they fit, fill gaps, and add to what you have.
Consider Competency and Behavior Requirements
Competency and behavior frameworks should play an important part in role classification, simply because they often add as much to the role as technical skills. Reviewing competency frameworks means using an assessment center to create performance profiles, develop likely desired competencies, and design your roles accordingly.
While these competency requirements may change over time, you will build a good idea of what actually adds value in terms of personality, behavior, and decision-making. This will, in turn, allow you to make better hires for the new role so that they can better fit into the new organization.
Develop Performance Models
Developing performance models will allow you to insert a new role into a changing organization, while holding people in that role to standards of quality or performance. This is important because new roles will need a strong sense of structure and definition to avoid being pushed into responsibilities outside their role. Creating performance models will also allow you to see what good performance looks like, even with no existing benchmarked performance to compare it to. Again, this will likely require a partnership with an external organization, but will provide value in the long-term.
Finalize Your Role and Qualify It
Qualifying a new role is an important step in ensuring you find the right hires for the role. Here, you can involve external validation in combination with internal validation against existing roles, expressed needs for the role, and the needs of specific technology, teams, or even key players the role is designed to support.
Creating new roles can be an essential part of restructuring, especially when technology, teams, and even business direction change. Doing so in a way that allows immediate validation of the role, performance tracking, and fitting individuals to the needs of their teams and departments will be essential to the success of your initial hires.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
