Position management plays a critical role in aligning organizational structure with mission objectives. It guides how managers design jobs, allocate responsibilities, and optimize workforce composition to ensure operational efficiency.
Key Insights
- Position management involves structuring jobs and organizational entities to support mission accomplishment, emphasizing the integration of duties, responsibilities, and reporting relationships.
- Key principles include minimizing the number of positions, eliminating job redundancy, optimizing spans of control, and hiring at developmental levels to support workforce sustainability.
- Best practices focus on avoiding excessive organizational layering, ensuring effective job design, and implementing continuous strategies to improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary roles.
This lesson is a preview from our Federal Position Management Course and Certified Federal HR Business Partner (cFHRBP) Level III Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
We're going to discuss how position management affects organizational design, and we're going to identify key position management practices relative to designing an organization. And so, position management is essentially a responsibility of line management and manifests itself in a way in which management combines duties and responsibilities, assigns work, and establishes organizations. Remember, all of this is to ensure that the mission of the organization is being accomplished.
And so, position management is reflected in the manner in which management elects to formulate jobs and to structure organizational entities. And so, position management encompasses position classification and provides the framework upon which position classification is based. And so, the general principle for position management can be used as a guidepost for managers when making position management decisions.
And so, there's a position management decision checklist in your participant guide. And so, it talks about establish, it lists, establish the fewest number of positions essential to accomplishing the mission. Concentrate higher-graded work into the fewest number of positions.
Structure positions clearly to avoid overlapping of duties, unnecessary positions, or fragmentation of work processes. Abolish vacant positions if the duties can be redistributed or eliminated. Optimize supervisor-employee relations, optimize supervisor-employee ratios, which again is the span of control.
Limit the number of deputy or assistant chief positions. Minimize the number of organizational levels with emphasis on decentralization and delegation to the lowest possible level. Hire at entry level or lower levels of a career ladder whenever possible to ensure balance between employees who perform the full performance level duties and the development of employees who perform more routine and lower-level tasks.
And so, let's talk about best practices. Best practices in position management. And so, good position management ensures economy and effectiveness in an organization.
Sound position management helps to avoid excessive layering, improper job design, narrow spans of control, and eliminates unnecessary positions, among others. Management should make every effort to develop and implement practices, processes, and strategies that facilitate good position management. And so, in this context, management should continually develop and implement practices, processes, and strategies that will enhance and facilitate good position management.
And I reiterated that because that is very important in our organizations.
