The goal-based work plan creates the structure useful for action planning. It includes:
- A Tasks column that provides the location for much job redesign. Listing the 8–10 major tasks the job includes, it’s where scientists can add formal and informal roles to address their passion, purpose, aptitudes, and pay. Each task begins with a verb (e.g., in science, Research, Study, Analyze, Write, Measure, Assess, Decide). Half the tasks are quantitative and analytical, and the other half involve communications (e.g., Communicate with team members, Partner with users, Manage project team members, Mentor new hires, etc.).
- An Outcomes column that further advances job redesign, asking the scientist to articulate, as specifically as possible, what the expectations for achievement are for each task. In the column, it’s useful to articulate several quantifiable outcomes that doing the task is expected to produce in a three-month time period. The ASMART acronym helps generate outcomes that are clear: Agreed on, Specific, Measurable, Results-Oriented, Time-Bound.
- A Priorities column that often generates considerable thinking. It asks the scientist to divide his/her overall 100% effort into the task categories. The numbers should reflect what’s most important, not how long tasks take.
Completing this form, most people list the tasks quickly and easily, but have to think more about the outcomes (and especially the outcomes for the communications tasks) and struggle most to clarify priorities allocating the 100% among all the tasks.
To illustrate how the form advances job redesign, we illustrate two versions of it for James, a statistician working in a mid-sized biotech company. Figure 1 is his first draft, Figure 2 is his revised version.