Job Organization

Schema

• each role is a discrete unit of related tasks (or job duties) that need to be performed
• put together, all the roles describe all the work that needs to be done at Free Geek
• roles may supervise or report to other roles as needed
• each role will usually have associated:
  • needed experiences (for example from a past job)
  • needed certificates (such as a drivers license)
  • needed technical knowledge (computer literacy, etc.)
  • job duties (accountabilities)
  • competencies (skills and abilities)
• a role must be filled in one of three ways, depending on what we need and what we can afford:
  1. assigned to a single job description (single responsible person)
  2. assigned to a team more than one job description, usually two (co-responsible persons)
  3. assigned to a committee (when greater shared responsibility is desired, or when we can't afford to hire for an important job)
• each job description has one or more worker assigned to it
• each role must also be assigned to a committee
  • as a general rule workers are connected to committees through the roles they have in their job descriptions

How does this work?

To create a full job description, we would select the roles that go into it, and compile all the accountabilities (job duties), competencies, and "needed" stuff associated with each role. This would tell us what would go in a full job description.

To create a job advertisement we could summarize the full job description as desired, and ad any introductory text and benefits language we like.

If we are unable to hire for a role due to financial constraints, we would need to decide if we could "disable" the role -- that is not do it. Much of the time this will not be an option, and we would need to assign the role to someone's job description, or at least a committee for oversight. For example, we could want to hire an HR person, but due to financial constraints we are forced to assign this role to a committee (HR).

There will be some roles that are designed to apply to many people, for example all staff or all workers in a particular category. These would simply be included in the appropriate job descriptions. Such roles would be named things like "area coordinator" or "all workers", etc.

Divisions or Departments

Committees could be grouped into departments (or divisions), which are mostly conceptual at this point. But it's an important concept that could help clarify what a committee is designed to do. There are at least two divisions:

1. administrative services -- the things we need to do to be a functioning organization, but don't say what we are actually doing, for example:
   • HR
   • Internal Tech Support
   • Facilities Maintenance
2. program activities -- the things that explain what the organization does, its main activities and reason for existence, for example:
   • all the reuse (production) related work
   • education program
   • thrift store

The program activities division could be subdivided if desired, for example:

• reuse related
• education related
• sales related
• warehouse related