Can your employees answer these 14 questions about their jobs?

We all like to think that our companies are functioning at a high level, but are there hidden inefficiencies lurking within your organization? There is a simple way to get an accurate response to that question.

Ask your employees to answer the 14 questions below, and you will quickly see how efficient your company is, and also learn whether or not your organization has been put together in a way that will ensure smooth sailing in the future.

1. What is the purpose of my job? There are things that you do on the job, but there is also a greater purpose behind the job being performed and why it is necessary to your team, department, and to the organization as a whole. The purpose of a job informs its performance, and employees who understand their purpose will be far more efficient in executing their jobs than employees that don’t.
2. What positions do I fill as part of my job, and what is the purpose of each position? Although a job is meant to fulfill a specific purpose, that job is often split into different positions, and each position has its own purpose. Employees that can identify the purpose of each position they fill will more readily grasp the significance of each of their responsibilities within their organizations.
3. Who do I report to? Simply stated, employees need to know who is responsible for ensuring that their responsibilities are satisfactorily carried out.
4. Who is my mentor? A mentor is not always a boss; it is a person that you can turn to for advice and direction about your career or path within the organization you work for. Employees without mentors often lack a clear sense of how their careers should progress within their workplaces.
5. Who do I turn to for coaching in each of my positions? Your employees should be able to identify an assigned person they interact with regularly who can help them improve their level of performance in every position they fill. Although it would be nice to assume coaching will happen automatically, this is seldom the case.
6. What are my objectives? Objectives are the big-picture results that are being aimed for within each position, and your employees should know what their objectives are. They can be organized into bigger and smaller objectives, but there should be clear targets people are trying to achieve.
7. What are my key results? Key results are numeric performance measurements that your employees are responsible for achieving. It can be very difficult to track the efficiency with which most positions are being performed if there aren’t some numeric performance measurements in place to monitor them.
8. What teams am I part of? Your employees may perform many of their tasks and functions in collaboration with members of a team, and making employees answerable to teams is also a proven way to raise the performance level of several positions within an organization.
9. What meetings will I attend? Employees should attend certain meetings based on the positions they fill, not necessarily because of the titles they hold. Certainly, your employees must be able to identify all of the meetings they should attend based on their positions, and the information they should be privy to as a result of those positions.
10. What workflows do I participate in? Workflow is the process of passing tasks or information from one individual contributor to another or from one system to another. Your employees must know who they need to pass their work along to once it is completed in order to make sure efficiency remains high within your organization.
11. What processes will I follow? A process dictates the steps that your employees must follow in order to successfully perform a task that they’ve been assigned. Without processes in place, there is generally no established structure for how duties are to be effectively carried out.
12. What systems do I interface with and need to master? Systems refer to any element in which an individual contributor to an organization inputs work or data, in order for additional work to be done to it, or in order for the information to be tracked. Your employees must be able to identify what systems they are expected to interact with in order to successfully accomplish their tasks.
13. What entities (clients, projects, contracts, etc.) will I interact with? An entity is an element outside of the organization that your employees interact with regularly, including clients, projects, contracts and a host of other potential entities. Your employees should be aware of all of the entities they are expected to engage with in order to perform their positions well.
14. What skills or competencies do I need now and in the future? Obviously, your employees must possess certain skills in order to satisfactorily fulfill their responsibilities to your organization. If they acknowledge that they need skills they don’t yet have, they can work with others within your organization to help them acquire those skills.

Review their responses

If your employees are able to provide appropriate, honest answers to all of these questions, then that’s a great thing. However, if your employees’ answers show some clear confusion about how responsibilities, workflows, and development are structured within your company, an Org Graph is a tremendous tool for you to utilize to reshape your organization into a self-sustaining and efficient center of productivity.