Case Story: From Job Descriptions to a Performance System, One Role at a Time

The problem

A plant we work with builds machines to order. It was growing, and a few key people were carrying most of the load.

One supervisor planned material, manpower and machines. He also raised material requests, screened operator candidates, checked measuring instruments, followed up job work, briefed the night shift and kept the daily lists on the computer. He was busy from morning to night. A design engineer was designing, checking his own drawings and allotting work to others. A buyer carried the status of every order in his memory.

Nothing of this was written. So the owner could not say what good performance looked like for each role. A junior could not be hired, because nobody could say what he would do. And any talk about performance became a talk about impressions.

What we built

We built the people system in the order the work demands: structure first, then the work, then the targets.

1. Organisation chart. We drew the chart with management, with every reporting line agreed.
2. Process flow chart. We mapped the flow from inquiry to dispatch with the department leads. Every JD activity is taken from this map. Its gaps showed where a department existed only on paper, and where skills were missing.
3. JR sittings, one person at a time. We sat with each role holder several times. We asked him to walk us through one real project from start to end, and then through his day, hour by hour. We read the role back to him in plain words and asked if we had understood. Between sittings he had small homework: list the sub-activities you would have to teach.
4. The hand-over test. To draw out the detail, we asked each person: if you had to hand this whole job to a junior tomorrow, what would you teach him, step by step? One line such as "enter daily production" became several: collect the data, discuss it with planning and production, enter it machine-wise and job-wise. Checking was written as an activity too, because a junior must also learn how to check.
5. Level tags. Managers listed everything they did daily, weekly, monthly and yearly, including work that belonged to others. We added a tag to each line afterwards (top, middle or lower level), so nobody felt graded. Filtering by tag showed how much lower-level work a senior was doing.
6. From JR to JD and KRAs. The detailed list of responsibilities (the JR) became the base. The short JD was cut from it. Work was sorted into primary work, follow-up work and office work, and grouped into KRAs.
7. The list goes to HR. The same activity list tells HR which junior to hire and what to ask in the technical interview.

The chain we follow from here is the same in every plant: JD → KRA → KPI → monthly review → yearly PMS score → increment. KPIs come only after the work and the roles are clear. Managers propose their own targets, and we check them. In the monthly review the head and the employee both rate the month, and a big gap between the two ratings starts a coaching talk.

A JD written from the real working day is the first page of every review that follows.

What changed

• The key roles now have their activities written down, step by step, in the role holders' own words.
• The overloaded roles became visible, with clear lines that can move to a junior or to their real owner.
• HR has a real activity list for each new hire and for the interview.

What other plants can take from this

• Draw the organisation chart and the process flow before writing any JD.
• Write the JD with the role holder, over several short sittings, from one real job.
• Use the hand-over test to get the detail a junior would need.
• Tag each activity by level, so seniors can see the work they should pass down.
• Set KRAs and KPIs only after the work is written, and let managers propose their own targets.