Don’t Check Your Brain at the Door

As long as an environment is stable, bureaucracy is an efficient organizational design. When people perform routine, assembly line work, bureaucracy is appropriate. Increasingly, though, environments are unstable and work does not take place on an assembly line. That means organizations need to change more frequently. Workers must be able to adapt, and position descriptions become outdated quickly. The network society demands network behavior.

In a network organization, you are your knowledge and skills. You join task forces or self-managed teams to deal with short-term problems, moving on to new teams when the problems are solved or when your expertise is no longer required. Your duties and responsibilities change depending on the task at hand; your position changes depending on the knowledge and skills you bring to the team. You could be a task force leader one month, an ordinary team member the next.

In the human resources world, recognition that work in the network age requires flexibility, independent thinking and "soft" skills such as teamwork, leadership and even friendliness has prompted workforce analysts to start thinking about new ways of defining jobs. The new definitions focus more on the kinds of people needed by the organization than on the duties and responsibilities that they need to perform.

Such competency-based job classification systems are in their infancy, says Doris Hausser, assistant director for performance and compensation design at the Office of Personnel Management. Federal law mandates a task-oriented classification system. Duties and responsibilities must be clearly defined so that a position can be placed on the General Schedule, the government's white-collar pay scale. "We ignore the person in determining what the value of the work should be," Hausser says. OPM specialists are beginning to work on ways to change that, but, as an employer, the government must tread carefully, lest it develop an employment system that cannot be defended as objective in the legal system. Figuring out how to quantify traits such as commitment to an organization's mission or kindness to customers is tough.

Several Defense Department organizations are experimenting with competency-based systems and some reformers are talking about shifting away from a task-based system of defining military occupational specialties. OPM is experimenting with competency-based systems for information technology workers and accountants. "The whole HR world is going down this road," Hausser says. "But there's more talk than actual action."