JOB PLACEMENT

In some businesses, everyone does a little bit of everything. In these situations, there’s a tendency for the “dirty” jobs (the ones nobody wants to do) to get pushed off and not get done because they weren’t specifically assigned to someone, or worse, senior employees waste time by getting bogged down doing the jobs that could have been assigned to their support staff. Getting the right people to do the right jobs starts with a definition of the jobs’ requirements. It’s important to discover whether the business has defined and staffed each position properly. Are some people doing jobs that could be accomplished by other people in lower pay grades?

I worked with a business that didn’t use (or budget) administrative support. As a result there were many administrative tasks that just didn’t get done efficiently, including such things as ordering team lunches, booking travel, and ordering office supplies. Management decided that the best way to get these tasks done was for the managers to divide up the tasks and do them themselves rather than leaving them to their staff members to do. When you add up the time and the salaries of the managers to do these tasks each week, they probably could have afforded to hire two administrators for the same amount. Nevertheless, the near-term benefit of this was tremendous. The employees recognized that the managers were willing to take on any tasks t....Is management engaged to help solve staff problems?