Job description consists of 4 parts: job identification, job summary, task statements, and working conditions. In general, job description describes the specific details of a job, such as the title, the department, why the position existed the office environment of the position, and etc. (lecture 1-2, week 4). In addition, the job description will describe the relationship with others in the organization, the management requirements of the department head and the relationship with other colleagues. For newly hired employees, it can largely help them to reduce the confusion when they first join the company, promote them to better integrate into the company’s environment, and provide them with a more comfortable working environment. For the company, it can also help them to refine the responsibilities of each position, a good job description can help the organization in the future recruitment activities in a clear target, better screening of qualified candidates. At the same time, a detailed job description can also help the company to establish a more reasonable salary package for each employee on board, which can have a very positive impact on the company’s annual budget.

Generally, this maintenance and development work should be given to the employees of each specific department, but it will lead to the employees may spend too much time on writing job descriptions which will affect the work efficiency and thus the productivity of the company. Therefore, the company should balance the workload of each employee writing job descriptions to prevent it from affecting the productivity of the company. As Tyler said, “If you don’t keep it up-to-date and you have [an employment] claim against you, that non updated job description It can work to help in your defense or it can work to help the employee”(Kathryn Tyler, 2013). Therefore, keeping the job description up to date is also a very big challenge with regard to maintain job description.

There is no doubt that without a detailed job description or even no job description, it is difficult for employees to know what is expected of them by the company management. At the same time, it is also difficult for department managers to evaluate and reward employees effectively through their performance. And HR department can’t know the performance of each department through data analysis to evaluate how the company’s budget should be spent in the next period. Therefore, there is a great challenge when the company is not detailed the job description or even does not have a job description.

Reference:

Oregon State University. MGMT 453 – Week 4 lecture 1 and lecture 2

Kathryn Tyler. (2013, January 1st). Job Worth Doing: Update Descriptions. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/Pages/0113-job-descriptions.aspx