Using the functionality for roles and responsibilities you can clearly communicate and manage
Roles are intended to function as living, up-to-date job descriptions which gradually evolve as the role holder and organization in general learns more about what the responsibilities should entail and how to operationalize them.
By making proactive use of the role functionality, roles and responsibilities are easily redistributable as the organization grows and adapts.
Here's an example of how a role might appear:
Roles are created in the context of a team. To create a role, click the plus icon in the upper, right corner and select "Role", or use the keyboard shortcut "r".
You can assign a role to a person by navigating to that Person > Roles and adding the role.
You can also assign a person to a role by navigating to the role in question and add the person as a role holder. The effect of assigning a role to a person and a person to a role is the same.
The remainder of this documentation is focused on assigning roles to a person.
When assigning roles to a person, you can either select from the list of pre-existing roles, or have a new role created.
If you type in the name of a role which does not already exist, the role is created for you. If your organization consists of multiple teams, you will be prompted to select the team which is expected to maintain the role.
In order to select a pre-existing role, start typing into the role name field in order to get an autocomplete list of existing roles matching your query within your organization.
To see all roles, click the "Browse all" link in the right corner to expand the available role options. This expands not only the list of roles within your own organization, but also the roles that publicly available within the Wecomplish Library.
The following states are available for the role assignment:
You can see all your own roles and their current state by selecting the view of you role, or see all the roles of a coworker by searching for that user which will bring you to their role page.
If the role assumes certains skillsets in order to comply with quality expectations and regulations, you can add skillset expectations to the role.
To add a skillset expected of a role, navigate either to the role in question and add the skillset expected:
...or navigate to the skillset in question and add the role which expects it:
When adding a skillset expectation, you are asked to select the minimum level of proficiency expected. Hover over the question marks to get a detailed explanation of how each proficiency level is defined.
Once you are done specificing which skillset you expect of which roles, and at which level, use Skillsets with insufficient proficiency to collect information about how well someone masters a skillset and identify where people need to improve.
Responsibilities are primarly managed in the context of a role. If you're not sure who holds (or should hold) the responsibility, you can create an unmanaged responsibility directly on the team.
Each responsibility has a given frequency (or alternatively "ongoing") explaining the expectation of how often the responsibility should be adressed.
The responsibilities are grouped by category when displayed. Here's an excerpt of the list of responsibilities from the team leader role:
Assigning someone to a role does not automatically ensure that the associated responsibilities are adhered to. People are busier than ever, so unless a responsibility has been properly automated as default behaviour, it can quickly be forgotten.
Use recurring allocations to make sure that a given individual has reserved time for a given responsibility.
The avatars in the list of responsibilities indicate which users (if any) that have recurring allocations for a given responsibility.
Click into the responsibility to see details of the associated recurring allocations.
For organizations expected to grow into new markets and countries, it makes sense to reuse roles and responsibilities across different markets/countries.
In order to be able to do this, you should aim to maintain market/country neutral roles, and rather indicate country/market as a part of the team in which the role is assigned.
Here is an example of a role that is market/country specific:
And here is that same role, reorganized to be market/country neutral:
This example applies specifically to roles and responsibilities, but the same goes for skillsets, processes and other types of structural capital that might be relevant to reuse in different markets/geographical locations.
As roles and their associated responsibilities grow in size, the amount of responsibilities can make it more difficult to gain an overview of the role and, as a result, maintain role clarity.
To preserve role clarity of a growing role you can categorize the responsibilities that naturally fit togheter. Categorizing a responsibility is done by clicking the name of the responsibility and managing the categories in the right column.
The result of categorizing responsibilities with the same category is that the appear together in the list of responsibilities.
In the context of role familiarity, categorizing responsibilities has the added value of accumulating familiarity pr category. By selecting "Familiarity" in the dropdown and clicking "Collapse categories", you can more easily analyze which categories of responsibilities a role holder is more and less comfortable with.