Integrating values in job descriptions

The Mission Services Division of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word Health Care Corporation, Houston, has established training sessions to help various facilities develop criteria-based job descriptions that integrate values. A major problem with traditional job descriptions is that they do not contain enough information for value integration to occur. Each facet of the job description--the responsibility statement, the task statement, and the standard--can integrate the facilities' values in explicit and implicit ways. Such integration reduces the possibility of a supervisor arbitrarily defining the qualitative aspects of how an employee performs the job and provides a better method for evaluating the quality of the employee's performance. The first step in value integration is to identify the organization's values. Next, illustrative behaviors are identified to emphasize value integration in both activity-based task statements and results-based standards. The final step is to integrate the values in the job description, which makes the value operational and bridges the gap between commitment to values and behavior that exemplifies those values. Although values cannot be measured as objectively as the successful accomplishment of a procedure with a specified method of measurement, evaluation of values is not fruitless. When the employee and supervisor agree on specific qualitative aspects of patient care or other tasks, the consistency of the qualitative aspects of the job can be evaluated.