You don't have to give up your position to work in roles

Organizations today are navigating a delicate balance: preserving the structure and stability of established job positions while adapting to the flexibility demanded by modern work. One way to adapt is to work in roles instead of positions. In a previous article, we explained the advantages of replacing job positions with granular roles. Yet, for many traditional organizations, throwing away job titles, reporting lines, and positions isn’t an option.

Here’s the good news: there’s no need to choose one or the other. By introducing roles alongside positions, organizations may enjoy the best of both worlds. Let’s explore how this hybrid approach works and why it may be the perfect next step for your organization.

The Case for Combining Positions and Roles

Job titles, reporting lines, and hierarchies offer structure, clarity, and consistency that stakeholders value. Unfortunately, these stable structures are rigid and make organizations slow to respond to dynamic environments, new challenges, and opportunities.

Roles, on the other hand, introduce a layer of flexibility. They allow employees to step outside the boxed boundary of their job description, contributing their skills and expertise to where they’re needed most. Role-based approaches do a better job matching talent to current work needs and opportunities.

For organizations already structured with job positions, adding dynamic, role-based work offers the following benefits:

• Introduce iterative change: For some organizations, replacing positions with roles would require a radical, long-term re-organization. Working with both positions and roles means you can get started on your transformation today.

• Engage employees in dynamic projects: Employees feel empowered when they can contribute to meaningful projects outside their regular scope of work. This leads to greater satisfaction and retention without uprooting their primary responsibilities or home team.

• Promote collaboration across silos: Roles allow employees to work across departments and teams, breaking down silos without disrupting core operations.

• Transition toward a flexible mindset: Working in roles on temporary teams is an exercise in adaptability. Employees start to learn how their skills can be applied dynamically without losing a sense of where they belong in the organization.

How the Hybrid Model Works

Here’s how mixing positions and roles might look in practice:

1. Employees retain their job positions.

Each employee has a fixed position in a home-base team, complete with a job title, responsibilities, and a clear reporting line.

3. Employees take on dynamic roles.

These roles are tied to specific projects, teams, or goals. Role-based work usually takes place in temporary, mission-based teams composed of people from outside one’s home-base team.

2. Positions and roles are shared transparently.

To ensure clarity and alignment, positions and roles are documented and made visible across the organization. For instance, you might provide an "internal CV" that displays one's current roles and position.

Implementing the Hybrid Model

To successfully implement the hybrid model, it is crucial to document both positions and roles in a single, unified system. If work distribution is documented across two separate charts (e.g. in an organigramme and a role-mapping tool), you risk confusion and poor adoption of the hybrid model. There needs to be a common, comprehensive reference that outlines everyone's workloads across both roles and positions.

Here is how you could get started in Peerdom:

1. Chart out positions

Map fixed teams and their job positions. Assign each position to one person. This information can be taken from a classical pyramidal org chart (organigramme).

2. Map out a space for roles

Map role-based teams in a separate area. These finer-grained roles concern work toward a particular project, goal, team, or initiative. Read this article or watch this video for more tips about how to define roles.

3. Update peer workloads

Assign peers to their job position and their current set of roles. This automatically creates a profile that outlines workload, capacity, and priorities.

4. Share the map, start small, and iterate

Pilot this approach with one team or department before scaling it across the organization. Gather feedback and adjust as needed.

Overcoming Common Challenges

While a hybrid model offers significant benefits, it’s no silver bullet. Below, we highlight some of the most common challenges with suggestions of how to work past them.

1. Work overload

Employees may perceive this shift as adding additional work to their plate, making it difficult to balance their workload.

Try this:

• Hold regular coaching sessions that review and prioritize current workloads across roles and positions. Encourage a healthy balance.

• Maintain positions for administrative purposes such as compensation, recruitment, or budgeting, but progressively reduce job position responsibilities. Instead, move general job responsibilities into specific roles to more accurately represent ongoing work in relationship to concrete outcomes or projects.

• With the eventual objective of shifting toward role-based work, recognize role-based contributions and incentivize participation in the role-based area of your organization.

2. Confusion about the new working model

Any change comes with questions of what it means to one’s daily work. Anxiety and inefficiency can result without clear communications about what the transformation means for each individual.

Try this:

• Share a transparent map with everyone that shows how positions and roles operate side-by-side.

• Provide clear examples of colleagues who are already successfully balancing positions with roles.

• Try starting small, for example, by allowing that employees take on only one side role in addition to their job position.

3. Clarity on who decides

If role and position priorities are in conflict, which takes precedence? Can managers intervene on the dynamic and autonomous role-based work?

Try this:

• Hold coaching sessions with an open dialogue that identifies conflicts of interest between the two modes of working.

• Commit to developing the role-based area of your organization. Give employees more autonomy to operate in their roles without managerial intervention.

• Managers should understand their job may start to change. They'll now work as a coach or advisor that uses their expertise to help employees work within their roles – not to make decisions for their direct reports.

A Practical Way Forward

Blending positions with roles offers a practical solution for organizations that want to honor tradition while embracing the future. It can be an important first step to start the transition to a fully role-based approach. Organizations may find that this hybrid model provides stability without stagnation, structure without rigidity, and adaptability without chaos.

Are you ready to explore this hybrid approach? Reach out to us or book a demo to get mapping today.