Role Profiling – Does It Have Any Value?

I have set myself a little challenge this week. It follows on from some discussions last week within a management meeting. And here is the question:

• Does a role profile really make a difference to an organisation?

The background behind the question is this.

I work in an organisation that has on numerous occasions done role profiling exercises and generally failed in it. These exercises normally have numerous purposes and numerous customers. Even as an employee you want a role profile for more than one purpose; you want it to position you within a grading structure, but you also want it to tell you what you need to develop and you also want it to tell you were you are in the salary band for the role that you are doing. Each of these issues is fraught with danger. The company I work for wants to be able to position people in roles so that it can understand it’s skills base, but it doesn’t want to link that to salary because that would lead to all sorts of issues.

The company has recently undertaken it’s latest exercise and communicated a structure (badly) to each of the staff. As far as my team is concerned more than 70% of the team is sat within two bands within a single role.

So does all of this stuff actually make a difference? Do companies with a strict role profiling mechanism achieve a higher level of staff satisfaction (for instance) than do companies who have absolutely no structure at all. Do companies that point both ways have more problems than companies that are at one extreme or the other? Is the role more important the more junior you are?

From a personal perspective, I don’t think I care. But why don’t I care? In what situation would I care? I am only thinking about it at the moment because I have been told what my role profile is (I have worked for over 10 years not knowing what it was), and because I have been asked to be part of management team that looks at the issue.

So what is the value of a role profile. It definitely has a cost, but does it have a value. To be perfectly honest – I don’t know.

Suppose that means that it is time for some research. Great, I love learning something new!!!