In recent times, I have been observing an interesting emerging trend in contract or work descriptions. I wonder whether this is a consequence of our present economic climate, or whether it is a natural consequence of a widening communications gap between management and the implementing workforce.

My father once remarked that one of the challenges he saw facing him was the task of finding measures to protect a company from its own management – in particular, from the tendency of management to become self-serving. With the increase in inter-temporal liquidity, that is, the availability of complex (and damning) financial instruments, and the laxity of accounting and regulatory standards, it has become quite easy for management to engage in exploitative ‘creaming’ practices, while securing their own ‘backs’ through human resources ‘checklists.’

The astute reader will have already picked up on where I am going… Coming back to our job descriptions. The pattern that has been emerging is one of reversals. In particular, the least significant part of a job gets paraded as the most significant part, while the most significant aspect of the job becomes relegated to the least significant position.

For example, looking at a Design role knowledge of CS4 becomes more important than creative skill. I once knew a designer who used Photoshop 3 while everybody else was using CS. Photoshop 3 has only one level of undo! Yet his designs were top notch. Imagine him looking for work now…

Alternatively, for a developer’s role, knowledge of ‘Drupal’ may be touted as absolutely essential, while systems analysis or problem solving skills go unmentioned…

The benefit of using a ‘checklist’ approach, of course, is that it gets management off the hook – whether a company performs of not becomes irrelevant – the record will always indicate a satisfactory checklist.

Do all companies act like this? Of course not, there are still a few companies left, that rather than relying on static checklists, are willing to assess quality and potential. These are the companies that are genuinely interested in their employees. And, I dare say, these are the companies, that are in touch with the nature of their own business.

When everything gets reduced to the stock market and investment returns, there is the risk of forgetting, or even not caring, about what a company does – the services it provides, or the goods it produces. In other words, there is the risk of forgetting how those investment returns are being generated in the first place.

Granted, with the present lax accounting standards, it is quite easy to cook the books, and overvalue a company – but still, even then, sooner or later, the piper will come and want to see the real goods. So perhaps it is time to get back to providing real goods and services…