t is not uncommon to hear the following responses from owners of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana when you ask whether their staff have job descriptions:

‘Staff already know what they should do on the job. Most of them have been doing this work for years’.

‘This work is not complex. I don’t think they need job descriptions to understand what is required of them’.

‘We have job descriptions for our staff. Although we have not written them down yet, staff have been informed about their roles and responsibilities’.

We at CDC Consult have observed, as a result of working with a large number of SMEs in various sectors of the Ghanaian economy, that Ghanaian SMEs disregard job descriptions and treat the whole concept like a complete waste of time.

Because of their size and limited scope of operations, SME owners question whether they really need written job descriptions for their staff. They believe it is too formal and involves too much paperwork. Therefore, SME owners virtually reduce job descriptions to verbal instructions given to new employees within their first few weeks on the job. Once the staff find their feet and appear to be doing fairly well, it is assumed that they know what is expected of them or that the job is so simple that they do not need job descriptions. In the rare cases where job descriptions exist, they are often outdated.

Overlooking this simple document can however lead to gradual disintegration of business processes and even affect the growth and profitability of the business.

How? 

Job descriptions define the general tasks or functions and responsibilities of a position, or the position specification. They also indicate the position the jobholder directly reports to and specify the qualifications needed by the person occupying the job, or the person specification. Job descriptions also provide performance indicators for the position. In other words, indicator which must be in place to demonstrate that the jobholder has indeed performed his responsibilities.

When a job description is not written or is ambiguous, it may create a situation where employees focus only on the mundane or recurrent aspects of the job. In other words, the tasks they are familiar with and undertake regularly. This is because there is no guiding document or set of ideas to help them look beyond the mundane. They therefore neglect to identify other tasks they can execute to make their jobs more beneficial to the business or more interesting for themselves.

Job descriptions are required for recruitment so that the person undertaking the recruitment is guided by the person specification in the job description to identify the ideal candidate who fits the description. It also enables the applicants understand the role they are applying for as well as clarify the employer’s expectations of them right from the beginning.

A job description defines the job holder’s role and accountability. Thus it provides indicators by which a person’s work can be measured. Without a job description it may be difficult for a person to be held accountable for the role or for the employer to objectively measure the job performance of the employee since there is no reference document.

Having a written job description also ensures that all necessary business activities, duties and responsibilities are covered by one job or another thus no responsibility is left to nobody in particular. It also ensures that there is no duplication of functions. In other words, a situation where two or more staff perform the same task thus creating confusion.

Job descriptions also enable employees to quickly formulate or demonstrate the skill and behaviour set required for their roles. Thus ensuring that new employees settle in quickly or ‘hit the ground running’. They also make it easy to determine the training and development needs of the jobholder since it is easy to compare the current skills of the jobholder to the skills he/she is supposed to have and demonstrate as per the job description.

In brief, job descriptions enable the business to structure and manage roles in a uniform way, thus increasing efficiency and effectiveness in terms of recruitment, training and development, organisational structure, work flow and activities among others.

In spite of the importance of this document, SME owners believe that it is such a simple document which can be overlooked without any consequences to the business or its employees, how wrong! Job descriptions form the foundation for many important business processes as already indicated and such SME owners ignore this document to the disadvantage of their own businesses.

It’s about time SMEs put in place best practice in managing their businesses if they really want to grow from SMEs into large and sustainable businesses.

People Management Challenges

Of Rural Banks in Ghana

he rural financial system in Ghana and indeed in any developing country, acts as a medium for financial intermediation and therefore provides for the needs of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). The system also plays a key role in reducing poverty by providing funds to cater for the needs of the rural poor, more especially rural small-scale operators.

Given the number of rural banks in Ghana (129 as at April 2008[1]) and the important role they play in the growth of MSMEs and poverty reduction, rural banks need to be well equipped to deliver on their mandate. CDC Consult Limited has worked extensively with rural banks in Ghana and has identified some people management challenges characteristic of Ghanaian rural banks, which affect their level of effectiveness.  Key challenges are in the following areas:

Policies & Procedures

In most cases, rural banks CDC has interacted with have no written policies and procedures to guide their operations particularly in the area of people management. Managers, by virtue of their long service with the banks, know most of these policies and procedures ‘in their heads’. Once the Manager resigns or goes on retirement, s/he carries with them the institutional memory of the bank. A new Manager then needs to start from scratch to build their store of institutional policies and procedures.

The fact that only one person or a few people are the custodians of the institutional memory, means that it becomes easy to manipulate policies depending on the situation at hand. This leads to a feeling of discrimination among employees and other ripple effects such as low employee morale, ‘we versus them’ syndrome, lack of employee commitment and loyalty and many more.

Rural banks in Ghana need to clearly document their people management policies and procedures with respect to recruitment, training and development, performance management, reward management, promotion and grievance handling among others. This will provide an equitable basis for relating with employees and safeguard the bank’s institutional memory.

Orientation for New Employees

Our experience with rural banks in Ghana has shown that they do not give new employees adequate orientation to prepare them for their work. This crucial task is usually done as part of a ten (10) minute briefing session or delegated to a lower level employee.

The new employee is taken to their department to meet their immediate Manager after which, if lucky, s/he may get the opportunity to work briefly in the various departments of the bank. This brings the orientation process to an end. Although this process is not entirely wrong, it is highly insufficient to adequately prepare the employee to fit well into his new environment and hit the ground running.

How does the new employee get to know the soft issues which, though seemingly insignificant, can get him off to a wrong start at the bank? Such as the corporate culture, the values, the policies, procedures and practices of the bank, the mission and philosophy of bank and how employees are expected to go about the business of the bank? The result is often a confused new employee who is unproductive and is likely to spend valuable time learning by mistake.

Orientation should comprise a well organized programme providing relevant information and conducted in a systematic manner which will ensure that the new employee is equipped with all the information they need to succeed in the bank. The employee should also be made to prepare a post orientation report to provide management with feedback on the entire programme.

Documented Job Descriptions

Based on our extensive work with Ghanaian rural banks, we have identified that some of these banks take it for granted that employees know what they should be doing on the job. Managers assume that new employees probably have been briefed as part of orientation or by their immediate Managers. Thus the banks do not have written job descriptions for staff.

This situation has led to problems such as task overlaps and duplication of efforts. Some employees do not know their official job titles or have two or more job titles which are used interchangeably, creating confusion, while some employees do not know where their responsibilities end and some one else’s begins therefore there is sometimes a ‘gray area’ which appears to be no one’s responsibility in particular. People are not sure of what tasks they are required to execute except, of course, the routine ones. Employee performance appraisals are affected since the basis for the appraisal – job description – is non existent (technically).

These are challenges that can be resolved by simply documenting each employee’s job description and ensuring that they all have copies and understand what is expected of them. Job descriptions must clearly outline performance indicators by which employee performance will be appraised.

Performance Management System (PMS)

Performance management systems of rural banks we have interacted with usually comprise only an end of year appraisal which is even, in some cases, not conducted consistently each year. When conducted, records of appraisals are not kept on employees’ files making it difficult to track employee performance over the years. In some institutions, the same appraisal instrument is used for both managerial and non managerial staff, totally ignoring the fact that different skill sets are required at the two levels and therefore the need to reflect this in the appraisal instrument.

In view of these challenges, the PMS is unable to provide accurate information on employee development needs or support consistent performance monitoring and improvement throughout the year. Employees are unable to appreciate the need for appraisals because they do not see tangible outcomes. It is therefore reduced to a ‘form filling’ event each year.

It is important that rural banks put in place a continuous performance monitoring and review system which provides feedback and support to employees to enable them improve their performance. This support could be in the form of formal training, on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring etc. Appraisers or Managers should also receive some training on how to implement a performance management system to ensure that it yields the expected benefits.

Succession Planning

Our experience with rural banks has shown that there is usually no clear succession planning mechanism in place. The moment an employee in a key position exits the bank without adequate notice or is absent for one reason or the other, management is under pressure to urgently recruit a new person or identify an employee within the bank who can take over the duties of the absent employee. 

As a result of the hurried nature of the process, the successor is not adequately prepared to deliver on the job. The end result? On-the-job mistakes, low productivity, lack of initiative, inadequate technical skills to undertake tasks.

Rural banks need to have a succession plan which will guide the selection and development or grooming of successors to assume key positions.  This will ensure that work is not unduly disrupted by the unannounced absence of any employee as well as constantly provide a core team of well trained employees who can assume managerial positions.