... and then a Lunatic Invented Full-Time Employment. Do You Know Why?

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

While full-time employment is perfectly all right for manufacturing, retail and other labouring jobs, it is utter lunacy for professional service firms.

Look at most job descriptions and what do you find?

The main message is that we expect you to waste 40 hours of your precious life every single week on our premises to fatten your arse sitting in front of our computers, performing pre-determined tasks regardless of what you accomplish. Well, it's not a secret the professional firms are notoriously negligent of measuring and improving internal effectiveness.

This is like some kind of circus monkey: “As long as you are moving around and jumping through loops, we do not care how effective you are, what you actually accomplish and how happy the audience is.”

Performance appraisals are full of activity assessments, not result assessments.

As a sensible alternative, I propose FULL-RESULT employment, in which employees are told what outcomes to achieve, instead of what tasks to perform.

There are three vital criteria of full-result employment:

Objectives: What exactly are employees expected to achieve? This is where many employers go wrong, or get mislead by human resources people. Instead of defining objectives and outcomes, they define tasks and activities.

Measures of success: How achievements will be measured and employees appraised? In most cases people have no idea about their performance assessment criteria, and that is highly demotivating.

The value: What approximate dollar figure are these people expected to produce? This factor will also define their salaries. If you hire marketing people, who are expected to bring in millions of dollars - use the lifetime value of a client here - worth of business, and pay them $10 per hour, you are kidding yourself. All you get from these people is resentment and they will utilise your office and resources for searching for their next jobs.

I do not say Full-Result employment will totally eliminate talent turnover, but seeing what I have seen with clients who changed their job specs, talent turnover can be reduced significantly, which in turn improves client loyalty and decreases operating overhead costs.

Copyright 1997-2008 Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan. All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in whole or in part. One favour though: Can I ask you to you include complete attribution, including a live website link. Also, can you please let me know where you plan to publish the article.

The attribution: This article was written by Organisational Provocateur, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a firm specialising in helping consulting firms to sell their expertise at the highest margins. Get Tom's free Practice Management Black Paper when you sign up for his monthly newsletter, Commando Consulting: Lessons And Practices From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm, The Military. Visit Tom's website at http://www.di-squad.com.

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