As a small business owner, you are probably well familiar with the consolidation of jobs, tasks, and responsibilities required to keep the business growing. You probably wear many hats, such as business owner, human resource professional, bookkeeper, marketing assistant, and, of course, sales person.
For a business with less than five employees that makes good sense. However, as your business begins to grow and duties become more defined by the needs of the organization, you will want to consider writing some formal definitions for different roles.
Each area of a business comes with its own challenges, such as knowing the latest rules and regulations, determining the most beneficial social media tools for marketing, and improving selling tactics. One person can not do it all forever and do it well!
How do you separate the tasks that are critical to your business? Now is the time to sit down and start thinking about the things that need to get done and who will do them today and who you will need to get them done in the future.
Job descriptions are important tools for not only communicating what needs to be done when recruiting, but also communicating what your expectations are as the employer to your employee(s). Job descriptions also provide a great tool for evaluating performance and determining where employees are doing well and where they need to improve.
In some smaller organizations, you may have employees filling more than one role and performing multiple jobs. However, as you begin to grow the company, those individuals will eventually be responsible for one job. The glory of writing out job descriptions now is that when your company hits a growth spurt and you don’t have time to think, you won’t need to since you have already mapped out the key roles/responsibilities that will be critical to your organization’s success!!