How Role Clarity Can Help Maximize Employee Performance

Imagine that your role involved loading a wagon with heavy stones and pushing it for a mile. Now imagine that after reaching that one-mile mark, drenched in sweat and exhausted, a manager comes to you, frantically telling you that you’ve been pushing your wagon in the wrong direction the whole time.

Worse, there’s someone at the other end of that now two-mile stretch who needs those stones, and their project is now delayed.

A lack of role clarity leads to frustration from the person working in that role, panic from those who rely on their work, and confusion from managers who struggle to lead their reports.

Role clarity ensures the tasks and responsibilities of a particular job are properly defined. Organizations that take role clarity seriously also outline the expectations that other collaborators and teams can have of that role.

As hybrid work and remote work have grown in popularity, workers have struggled to stick to their job responsibilities and managers struggle to keep a close eye on their work. Clearly defined roles are essential when two remote workers could potentially take on the exact same task without realizing it, or, worse, a critical task goes undone.

Proper documentation, processes, and standard operating procedures can help achieve and maintain role clarity, but performance management tools like 15Five can reinforce clarity at every turn.

Here’s how your organization can establish and maintain role clarity, and how 15Five can help.

Key Takeaways:

• What role clarity is and why it’s vital for employee performance
• The risks of unclear employee roles and expectations
• How to establish role clarity during onboarding and performance reviews
• The link between role clarity and team alignment
• How 15Five’s performance management tools support and scale role clarity
• Actionable steps managers can take to define and maintain employee role clarity

What is role clarity and why does it matter?

Role clarity aligns everyone, including the person in that role, their manager, and their collaborators, on that role’s responsibilities. This includes the tasks they perform, who they report to, and more. Clear roles mean everyone knows exactly what to expect.

That’s one of the key differences between role clarity and a simple job description. According to executive coach Dr. Joel M. Rothaizer, most organizations focus too much on a role’s tasks and not enough on the expectations. By clearly defining these expectations, organizations can streamline collaboration and prevent misunderstandings that slow productivity to a crawl.

Centering a role within the team is essential for this. Take a marketing team, for example. What can a content marketer expect from a partner marketer when the two collaborate? No role works in isolation, and clearly outlining the way roles should interact is crucial.

According to research from Effectory, employees with clear roles are 53% more efficient and 27% more effective than those with more nebulous responsibilities. These benefits add up.

The hidden costs of poor role clarity

Poor role clarity can quickly lead to problems that seep into every project, workflow, and team. If the people in your teams aren’t clear on what’s expected of them, you’ll start seeing:

• Misalignment: When a role isn’t clear, everyone has their own idea of what it actually entails. This leads to a lack of alignment on the very basics of a role, leading to mismatched expectations between managers and their direct reports, individual contributors and their collaborators, and even leadership and entire departments.
• Duplicated work: Without clear roles, managers struggle to send tasks to the right person. Multiple employees might work on the same task, both convinced that it falls within their role. That leads to lost productivity, frustration from both parties, and slower projects throughout the organization.
• Employee burnout: Employees with unclear roles often find themselves doubling up on other people’s work and starting projects only to be told to move on to something else. This leads to frustrated, overworked employees who never know if their work matters, a perfect recipe for burnout.
• Disengagement: Engaged employees buy into your mission, are motivated to innovate, and are more productive. Disengaged employees, meanwhile, aren’t as productive, rarely innovate, and are more likely to see their job as little more than a paycheque. A lack of role clarity can lead to disengagement, as an employee feels like no one around them knows what they should be doing, so they might as well stick to the minimum.
• Friction between team members: Without role clarity, it becomes incredibly difficult for employees to know what they should be working on and what their coworkers should be taking on. This leads to friction as important deadlines go missed, with multiple parties thinking someone else is to blame.

Curious what that might look like in practice? Imagine a team of designers, each with their own specialty. They’re working on a project together, but it’s unclear who should be working on each part. Every step of the project is fraught with friction as individual tasks are passed around, with no one knowing what’s actually their responsibility. The project gets completed more slowly, with unnecessary misunderstandings and friction between designers.

A lack of role clarity decreases employee satisfaction throughout your organization, potentially even leading to higher turnover.

Establishing baseline role clarity: Building the foundation

A foundation of clear roles creates better collaboration, even as these roles evolve to meet new market demands. Additionally, they streamline your hiring efforts, as recruiters and prospects alike have a clear understanding of specific roles.

New hires are more likely to leave in the first few months of their tenure, and typically that’s due to a mismatch between their expectations and the reality of the role. A lack of role clarity contributes to this, as recruiters and managers fail to consistently explain the responsibilities of a role, leading the new recruit to learn the truth on the job.

Your onboarding process plays a key role in establishing role clarity, for both existing and future employees. Likewise, manager 1-on-1s allow you to reinforce clarity for a role as a new employee settles into their new job. It also gives managers an inside look at an employee’s responsibilities, allowing them to adjust them if the role needs to change.

Performance management platforms like 15Five can help keep roles clear at every stage of an employee’s tenure. Roles, responsibilities, and expectations are documented in these tools. Questions, changes, and updates can all happen within these tools as well, making everything from feedback loops to employee engagement surveys contribute to role clarity.

How to improve role clarity in the workplace

Clear roles lead to better productivity, more efficiency, and more engaged employees. If roles aren’t clear at your organization, here’s what you can do to change that:

• Use performance reviews to clarify roles and expectations: If leadership has a clear understanding of each role but the people in these roles don’t, you can use performance reviews to reinforce each role’s responsibilities.
• Run a role expectations workshop: This workshop leads to the creation of a role expectations matrix, which lists all roles in your organization (or just a team, to start small) on both axes of the matrix. Where one role intersects with another, have the workshop’s participants write the expectations they have of one another. This can help create a baseline for these roles.
• Document every role in a shared tool: Accurate documentation can help answer any questions about a role and its responsibilities. It can also serve as a basis for updating roles as needed.
• Encourage employees to share their perspective: A leader’s idea of a role might not match the reality of what happens in an employee’s day-to-day. Encourage employees to share their perspective on their role through feedback loops, so everyone has a clearer understanding of that role.
• Communicate changes quickly and clearly: Roles are rarely static. They evolve as teams change, the organization scales, or leadership’s priorities evolve. If roles need to change, ensure everyone in the organization knows it as soon as possible, both for their own roles and those of frequent collaborators.

How 15Five helps establish and reinforce role clarity

Clear roles are documented, revised, and updated in a way that everyone can consult them when they need to. Documenting a role can be as simple as writing a summary of its requirements in a word processor, but this makes it difficult to review that role in the context of performance management.

That’s where 15Five comes in.

15Five is a performance management platform that streamlines, optimizes, and automates every aspect of performance management, including contributing to role clarity. With 15Five, you can:

• Clearly define roles during an employee’s onboarding process and show their responsibilities throughout that process.
• Refer to roles and responsibilities during regular performance reviews, improving clarity and better tracking an employee’s progress.
• Reference responsibilities in feedback loops and real-time performance data.
• Help employees connect their strengths with success in their roles with Best-Self Reviews.

Other 15Five features, like alignment tools, goal-tracking, and 1-on-1 agenda, also help reinforce role clarity.

Want to see how this works? Book your demo here.

Role clarity drives long-term business success

Role clarity is essential to helping employees achieve better results, improving collaboration across teams, and creating better results for the organization at large. You’ll see the impact of clearer roles in:

• Performance outcomes: Employees who know what they’re working towards can better deploy their strengths towards those goals. Knowing how their role fits in with the broader organization is also inherently motivating.
• Team collaboration: Collaboration depends on clear communication, common expectations, and alignment. Clear roles mean everyone in a team knows exactly what to expect from their collaborators, preventing misunderstandings and miscommunications that bring projects to a halt.
• Employee engagement: With a clear role, employees know they're always working towards your mission. That encourages them to innovate and dedicate themselves to their work.
• Employee retention: A clear role leads to greater employee engagement, greater employee satisfaction, and, ultimately, greater retention.

Managers may not always be responsible for defining the roles of their direct reports, but they’re the front line when dealing with unclear roles. As such, leadership relies on them to identify issues with a role if it needs to change, as well as keeping that role clear for their teams.

Let’s get this clear

Role clarity is crucial at every level of your organization. It keeps individual contributors productive and engaged, as clear responsibilities ensure they’re always working according to the expectations of managers and teammates. It keeps teams cohesive and collaborative, as everyone knows what to expect of their coworkers. It allows managers to more clearly gauge a direct report’s performance. Finally, the entire organization as a whole benefits from the productivity and engagement gains that come from role clarity.
Want to evaluate and improve role clarity in your organization? See how 15Five can help you with a demo.