The Origin Story: The Job Canvas
Origin stories seem all the rage at the moment. It feels like every other film at the cinema or TV box set is focussed on telling the story of where a character came from.
Jumping on Hollywood’s bandwagon, in this blog I wanted to share the Job Canvas origin story (I can’t promise it will be as exciting as the origin of “One” in Stranger Things or how Han Solo found the Millenium Falcon in Solo).
I’d like to say that the idea for the Job Canvas came like a bolt from blue, but the truth is, as an idea and then as a product it has been developing and evolving over a number of years. It emerged from thinking, testing and doing rather than as a fully formed product.
I sent the first email about the Job Canvas to someone in 2017 and gmail tells me that I have sent over 893 emails about the Canvas since this date (I write this in July 2022).
The starting point - the problem I wanted to solve
As I’ve written before as an HR professional, despite writing and reviewing 100’s of job descriptions, I have never been a fan. They have the potential to box people into fixed ways of working, are inflexible, often frustrating to produce, and out of date as soon as they are written.
The consequence of all this is that people seldom rely on or derive value from their job descriptions; they are often documents that are hidden away on a hard drive gaining digital dust only brought out for promotions, disciplinaries or the dreaded annual review.
Rather than providing clarity, job descriptions often blur the lines. They don’t capture the essence or reality of how a job is undertaken.
When I was doing research for my book (Personalisation at Work - available at all good and evil book stores) I started to realise that - perhaps unintentionally - job descriptions could be a significant barrier to people personalising their work.
Daydreaming about solutions to this problem, I began to get curious about what a more flexible, agile, personal and frankly more human way of describing and capturing and defining a job would look like.
From digital dust to digital canvas
When I was setting up Tailored Thinking I had been introduced to the idea of using canvases to capture and map out different parts of the business. These canvases were often split into different segments or elements that mapped out the different, but often interrelated aspects of a function. For example, the Business Model Canvas (probably the most well known and used canvas amongst start ups) maps out different elements of core business model.
Taking inspiration from the canvases I was using for the business, combined with other research and themes I was exploring from design thinking, I started to explore what a “Job Canvas” would look like.
Following testing with colleagues, friends, clients and other interested organisations, I developed 9 core elements of the Canvas that gave insights to different elements of the role and got to the heart or the DNA of a job.
I remember feeling really excited when I explored the canvas with the HR team at a challenger bank close to me and they were able to get a really good outline of the job in 18 minutes (2 minutes per section).
Creating a digital canvas
At first the Canvas was just a powerpoint template that I printed out and tested with individuals and teams.
Once I was happy with the 9 core elements of the Job Canvas, I started to consider addressing some of the other challenges with job descriptions. For example, they’re not always easy to update, they get lost, and the data in job descriptions aren’t centralised.
Looking back at my notes on the creation of the digital Canvas I wanted it to be:
Easy to access and update
Saved so that people didn’t have to re-complete it
Downloadable into a PDF
Centrally stored for managers and HR colleagues so that the documents didn’t get lost
Analysable to support broader organisational and people analytic insights
Having got some ideas of what I wanted, I was introduced to a patient, curious and amazing software developer (thanks Nick) who turned my thoughts into the first version of the digital job canvas that is now free to use.
Some unexpected results…
One of the joys of seeing individuals and teams use the Job Canvas is that you can see them gaining different insights and reflections.
Working with one HR team in the early stages, a team leader shared that the Job Canvas exercise allowed her to put her finger on an issue that she had been struggling to resolve.
One of the moments about the Canvas was that people doing the same role might view their roles differently. E.G. someone working in HR might see their key customers as employees or others might see their key customers as the organisation and the leaders. Now both perceptions are valid, but this might explain the behaviours in the team.
For example, one person might spend a lot of time sorting out individual issues with employees and advocacy whilst others might spend less time doing this - might be perceived as less accessible - and spend more time looking at strategic issues.
As a line manager, this enables you to have better conversations with staff and understand whether there are any conflicts or friction with how that person sees that job and requirements for that job.
Future thinking…
Building on the ideas of our current users and becoming more immersed in digital HR products, we see lots of opportunities to develop the canvas further and include greater features.
We’ve already started holding meetings with interested teams and prospective clients to explore how we could improve the Job Canvas and what they would like us to add into future iterations of the product.
If you would like to be involved and share any insights or feedback then please let us know at [email protected].
I’d like to thank the following people who have helped shape the early developments in the Job Canvas.
Satalia, Virgin Money, Anne-Marie Lister, Sarah Dewar, Lisa Davidson, Sara Cox, Melanie Cheung, Michelle Reid, Michelle Minnikin and many more (give me a nudge if I’ve missed you off).
The author of this blog, Rob Baker is founder and Chief Positive Deviant at Tailored Thinking. Rob is a chartered fellow of both the CIPD and the Australian HR Institute and has a first class Masters in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. He is passionate about making work better and making better work.
