Job Description Template
Job descriptions are, alongside accounting, the most important process you can put in place for your company. They have all kinds of benefits from empowering your team to reducing toxic culture problems to keeping you in compliance with the workforce commission to facilitating effective feedback conversations. The list of benefits is long. You can read more about why these are so important here.
If you’re sold on why you should have them, here is a template for you to employ to create a clear, concise, one page job description for your team. I have used a real job description I wrote for a client, with a few adjustments to make it more general for various trades.
Delivery and Install Manager
Primary Responsibility: Ensure smooth, efficient and timely delivery and installation of <product>.
This role reports to ______________________.
Scheduling
Ensure <products> are delivered and installed according to agreed schedules.
Coordinate delivery to ensure timely delivery of materials
Coordinate field employees for proper staffing for installation
Ensure materials are available when needed for installation to reduce completion delays
Managing Costs
Reduce overages due to rework and ensure all costs are properly accounted for.
Manage your team and department to reduce rework and limit additional site visits
Ensure all field invoices are entered in <software> in a timely manner
Quality
Ensure the final product is of excellent quality with strict adherence to plans and specifications.
Ensure your team is familiar with <product> designs and details
Ensure the proper materials are delivered to sites
Ensure field team is familiar with design details to ensure <products> are installed with strict adherence to plans and specifications
Oversee field punch and ensure the final product meets quality standards
Managing team
Empower your team to work in ways that support the smooth, efficient and timely delivery and installation of cabinets.
Manage your team through weekly meetings, 1-1s and performance improvement plans
Remove obstacles to success and provide training and resources
Advise ownership on staffing for your department (hiring, termination, role adjustments).
Here are the basic parts of this job description.
Title: What is this role called? This should be in simple language, and clearly communicate internally and externally what this person does.
Primary Responsibility: What does this person need to be doing well for the company to be successful? This should be one sentence. If you can’t articulate this in one sentence, you aren’t clear enough yourself on what you need from this person.
Reporting structure: Who does this role report to? Who has authority to approve or deny time off, give constructive feedback, assign tasks, oversee work on a regular basis, adjust priorities when the person is overbooked and take disciplinary actions? If your organization is not structured in a way that you can easily answer this question, that’s a whole other operational conversation. I feel strongly that hierarchy is healthy in an organization and that matrix organizational charts or fluid reporting structures do not work in construction.
Categories: I aim for 5 categories (this particular example has 4, but 5 is typical). In the construction world, I find that Scheduling, Costs/Budgeting and Quality are almost always 3 of the 5. The other two depend on the role. Other common categories include:
Risk Management and Compliance (typically more office side employees)
Managing Your Team (for any role managing people)
Managing Trades (for field roles like superintendents)
Drawings and Specifications
Preconstruction
Subtext to the category: For each category, I like to include one sentence in plain English laying out what I mean. So for example, with Scheduling, I mean in this case “Ensure products are delivered and installed according to agreed schedule.” That subtext will vary with each role. So while everyone in the organization may have some responsibility for scheduling, they will each have a different role to play. For example, a different role in the same organization, someone overseeing the shop, might have the directive to “Ensure products are produced according to agreed schedules.” (As an aside, products here might be cabinets, decorative or structural steel, specialty stone, countertops etc. Any trade that has a shop/production arm in their business.) While both the field manager and the shop manager both have scheduling responsibilities, the shop manager controls whether products are made on time and the field manager controls whether those products are sent to the field and installed in a timely manner.
Bullet points for each category: The bullet points further break down the expectations for this category. It gives specific steps and benchmarks the employee can hit to be successful, and clearly articulates your expectations.
Why does this all matter? Let’s imagine a scenario. Let’s say your Delivery and Install team is struggling. The first person you should be talking to is the Manager. You have tasked this person with ensuring this department runs smoothly, and it isn’t. You are not consistently seeing smooth, efficient and timely delivery and install of your products. Good thing you have this job description. This tough conversation just got easier.
After you determine that the primary responsibility is not being met, the next question is: in which category is the problem happening? Is the scheduling off? Are installs taking too long? Or is it costs? Are installs always over budget? Or, are they happening on schedule and on budget, but the quality is a problem? If any of these categories is off, it’s likely that this manager is not managing their team effectively. Are they having team meetings, giving feedback, empowering their team? You can go through and rate each category with a 1-5 (1 being very bad, 5 being excellent) and quickly see what problems you need to tackle.
You can also keep track of these rankings over time, facilitating kind and direct feedback conversations and tracking improvement. Good job descriptions are an excellent way to remove some of the emotion from managing people, and to manage them more fairly.
When business owners don’t implement real job descriptions, the biggest objections I see are:
My brain doesn’t work that way/I don’t know where to begin.
I don’t have time.
That’s not my style/it’s not our culture/The idea of having a conversation like this makes me uncomfortable.
The first two are simple. They’re tactical issues, and you can pay someone like me, whose brain does work that way and who does have time, to do this for you.
The third is trickier. This is a mindset issue and requires some hard emotional work on your side. What I can say from experience is that you’re probably a nice person, and you like being friendly with your employees. You have some hang ups about being a “mean boss.” I have something really tough to say here, and it might sting. You’re being nice, but you’re not being kind. Leaving your employees unsure about whether they’re succeeding is not kind. Letting your top performers stew about the low performers in your organization who are hiding in the chaos is not kind. Stealing quality time from yourself and family to fight the same fires every week because your employees aren’t owning their roles isn’t kind. My best advice is to take one of two pathways:
1. Do the hard work to reframe your thoughts on this. Decide to be kind instead of nice when you can’t be both. Learn to respect yourself and your role as a leader. Consider where this people-pleasing tendency may have come from, and do some work on it. Have hard conversations early and often. Hold people accountable. Respect them enough to expect they are able to handle it.
2. Recognize that you have a weakness here (everyone has weaknesses) and that this isn’t one you feel the need to conquer. Let someone else who has the disposition be the tough love king (or queen) in the organization. But a word of caution here. This is a pathway of less personal, emotional work for you, but it’s not zero. You MUST back this person up clearly, firmly, repeatedly and enthusiastically and this will probably be uncomfortable for you. If you send someone into your organization to fix your issues, there will be organizational resistance. If your employees come to you to complain about a performance review or tough feedback or task they were assigned, and they find a sympathetic ear, you have undermined this person’s ability to perform their role and encouraged your employees to actively resist them and this is toxic for your culture.
But trust me when I say, it’s worth it. Change is never easy, but this is the pathway to a well-functioning, thriving, predictable organization where everyone, including you, loves to be.
You can do it. I can help. Book a call here.
