... and then a Lunatic Invented Full-Time Employment.

Tom ''Bald Dog'' Varjan

Full-time employment is about making people busy. Full result employment is about expecting results.
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 in our premises and do perform tasks. 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. Just be busy.”

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

As a sensible alternative, I propose Full-result employment, in which employees are told to achieve certain results, instead of merely performing certain tasks.

Have you ever noticed that the businest managers are the least effective ones. They are up to their eyebrows with mobile phones, pages, Palm pilots and other fiendish gadgets, but are almost always lafe for meetings and late with employee assessments.

Her are the 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, promoting busy-ness while neglecting performance.

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 of new business - 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 former clients who changed their job specs, talent turnover can be reduced significantly, which in turn improves client loyalty and decreases operating overhead costs.

About the Author

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan helps service businesses to improve personal and organisational performance. Requests his FREE fee-setting guide "Why Most Service Firms Grossly Undercharge for Their Services?" by sending an email to booklet@di-squad.com with "booklet" in the subjectline.