I explore the importance of the Position Management feature of SuccessFactors Employee Central and the various use cases that make it a critical piece to establish an effective core HRIS. Today’s business environment of growth and steep competition requires companies to constantly enhance their people-management strategies. Position Management helps create the foundation that serves as the fulcrum, enabling companies to operate with flexibility from a budgetary and operational perspective. Position Management empowers companies to create jobs and positions that define their business needs better. This, in turn, allows companies to integrate the workforce recruiting strategies and plans for succession and career development with Position Management to create an adequate talent pipeline, while helping employees to stay skilled to fulfill a myriad of roles in the organization. This is especially true for organizations that strive to build a strong talent pool and focus on the KSAOC concept (e.g., Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics) to hire, reward, and retain the right people. Learn more details around the Position Management functionality delivered with SuccessFactors Employee Central and the various factors that make Position Management a critical gap that needs to be filled by businesses. In addition, I address the confusion caused by the terms job and position, and explain the critical differences between the two. First, here’s an overview of how and why businesses should consider using Position Management.

A Business Perspective of Position Management

It is becoming apparent that today’s business demands multi-skilled talent and the required skills are constantly changing and evolving in the dynamic and competitive environment businesses operate in today. This competitive environment creates a need for companies to clearly define their business needs for talent. This in turn requires them to clearly understand the roles and responsibilities and areas of expertise that will fulfill these roles and responsibilities. Therefore, companies need a mechanism to sharpen the definitions of the responsibilities that their employees are expected to fulfill. With these responsibilities comes the challenge of defining adequate skill and competency requirements, providing adequate career development and succession planning support and coming up with that magic compensation number for rewarding and retaining talent. The first step is to ask: Is your organization a potential candidate for Position Management? Before answering this basic question, you need to ask a few additional questions to arrive at the most complete answer:

• Are you a global organization exposed to the risks of global talent shortages and an aging workforce?
• Do you have the appropriate tools and methods to provide you with accurate headcount in your organization?
• Do you create a new position for every new hire in your organization?
• Do you use the terms job and position interchangeably?
• Does your succession planning (if you have a process) rely on individual roles instead of position characteristics?
• Are you a publicly traded company and subject to Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 compliance regulations?

If the response to any of these questions is yes, then you should look at implementing the Position Management feature of SuccessFactors Employee Central in your organization. To get started, here’s an overview of the functionality of Position Management.

An Introduction to Position Management in SuccessFactors Employee Central

As the name suggests, this functionality renders the tools and procedures required by companies to implement Position Management if they are establishing a core HRIS in the cloud with SuccessFactors Employee Central. To fully understand the concept of Position Management in SuccessFactors Employee Central, you must first have a basic understanding of the difference between the terms job and position. Job and position are adjacently paired entities that must be well understood if one is to make any progress in the overall concept of Position Management. It is critical for companies to understand the difference between the two terms if they are to meet the challenges of the modern workforce. For a long time the terms job and position have been used interchangeably (erroneously) by companies due to a lack of an accurate understanding of the unique roles played by each. To build a flexible workforce management solution in Positon Management, you first must have a firm grasp of these two very different, but complementary, concepts. A job is a homogenous set of tasks and responsibilities that must be performed to accomplish work within an organization. A job possesses characteristics such as skills, educational credentials, and work experience to qualify a person for that job. A job also consists of static attributes that are characteristics of the job in the organization irrespective of the holder of the job, such as the pay grade for compensation, and statutory and compliance characteristics such as the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) code in the US. The job is also linked to competencies that will be used for career and succession planning and performance review assessments. In contrast, a position is a specific occurrence of a job. It inherits all the characteristics of the job and some more. That some-more element is what distinguishes a position from a job, and it also defines other required skills and characteristics that characterize the position. A position always lies within an organizational entity, such as an organizational unit, division, or department. It reports to another position and also can have other positions reporting to it. A position is always defined as being filled or vacant and can be budgeted or unbudgeted based on the business needs. In addition to the who-reports-to-whom hierarchy, positions provide organizations with a holistic view of the organizational landscape, assess talent needs, and make appropriate workforce -planning decisions. In SuccessFactors, the Position Management feature pertains to building a blank organization chart with all the jobs and positions that the organization needs. Position Management also fills in all the required information associated with these jobs and positions (except for the specific information pertaining to individual employees). Next, I discuss some important features of Position Management that allow companies to get the most out of this functionality using the standard tools delivered with SuccessFactors Employee Central.

Four Important Features of Position Management

Let’s discuss four significant features of Position Management to get an overview of the building blocks that make up Position Management. They are as follows. 1. Position Management allows you to create positions and maintain position-related attributes. Figure 1 shows the Position object in Employee Central and a sample of various attributes that can be maintained. Companies can configure additional fields as needed. 2. The Position object is dated effective from the Start Date shown in Figure 1 and maintains a history of position changes and incumbent history. Figure 2 shows the history being tracked by the system when the example Position (e.g., Administrative Assistant) was moved to another Business Unit, Division, and Department owing to a change in organizational needs.   3. The SuccessFactors Employee Central system provides a number of controls and checks and balances to implement the Position Management design that suits a company’s specific needs. These controls and checks and balances are located in Position Management Settings (Figure 3).  

4. The Position object is subject to role-based permissions (Figure 4). These settings provide the necessary security and authorizations when building Position Management.

Position Management Feature Implementation Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks to use when implementing Position Management:

1. Position Management needs to be enabled as a separate setting in Provisioning.
2. Position Management is built using the Metadata Framework functionality; therefore, you need to enable Generic Objects in Provisioning as well.
3. To view the Position Org chart in v12, you need to enable the v12 Position Org Chart setting in Provisioning.
4. The Position field needs to be added to the HRIS element section of the Succession Data model if it doesn’t already exist.

In this article I provided you with an introduction to the concept of Position Management in SuccessFactors Employee Central. I described the necessary criteria to evaluate if it is important to meet your business needs. I also discussed some important features of Position Management and tips and tricks for implementation. In my next HR Expert article, I will discuss detailed use cases for implementing Position Management.