"Invisible employees" are the positions that constitute your organizational structure.  They are the company's manpower needs which are subsequently matched to the organization's personnel pool.  How many of you have a current, written copy of your position statement?  How many business owners amongst you have taken time to develop and review these documents?  For many of you, a no-notice audit of your organization's position statements may produce disheartening results. 

Every manpower position has a "persona".  Every position has duties, responsibilities, qualifications, educational requirements, etc.  Every position has skills and attributes that need to be present in order for the incumbent to be successful.  Every position has to fit the company culture.  These "invisible employees" are really an organization's perfect employees.  They describe the ideal individual, hand crafted to assure maximum productivity and success.  So how do you identify these "perfect employees"?

If you are fortunate enough to have job descriptions, you are off to a good start.  Take the job descriptions (things that someone in the position does) and identify the results that these activities should produce.  Quantify, quantify, quantify!!  For example, "Calling prospective new customers" might translate into "Developing new business opportunities by making at least 100 prospecting calls weekly".  "Greet individuals who enter the building" might translate into "Make eye contact with every visitor and verbally welcome them to ABC Corporation by saying ‘Good Morning/Afternoon.  How may I assist you today?'" It is important to note that every position in a company has quantifiable goals.  Sales people are often singled out for quantification because of the highly quantifiable nature of sales (i.e., quotas).  Remember, everyone should be accountable for their own job performance.  Everyone is responsible for producing results.

During the position statement refinement process, there is a tool that can help you better define your "invisible employees" and help you match them with your personnel pool.  This tool is position assessment.  Several instruments are available to create the personality factors that exist for a given position statement: as I mentioned earlier, the position's "persona".  Factors like degrees of warmth, social boldness, and self-reliance can be established for any position.  Benchmarking these personality factors through assessment of current employees in a given position can help establish ranges in these personality factors.  This benchmarking will enable you to objectively measure how an individual matches with the "invisible employee".  So, one might ask: How easy is this to implement?

This is not a fifteen minute exercise.  Begin with the commitment to create position statements for the entire organization.  Get everyone involved by asking them to chronicle what they do in their position and what percent of their time is spent doing each activity.  Have supervisors define what they think the positions that report to them do.  What someone is actually doing versus what you think they are doing or what they should be doing may surprise you.  Benchmark your top and marginal performers.  Collect and refine your data.  Quantify, quantify, quantify!!

With a coherent strategy and a genuine commitment to improve your organization's human capital development efforts, you will be on your way to building an organization that is successful, prosperous, and populated with happy employees who understand what is expected of them and how they can achieve personal and company goals.

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Eric Lee is an IPAT Certified Talent Consultant with specialty training in Personality Testing for e-Recruitment, Selection, and Placement.  He provides assessments and career coaching to individuals and human capital development initiative analysis, recruitment, leadership coaching, and soft skills/ sales training to organizations.  He can be reached at 610-563-8579 or ericmcc@comcast.net.  The website is www.mycareerconnector.com.