"Transactional" Roles Are Dead (And Have Been for 20 Years)

Today's transactions: not what should define your employees or their roles

Photo by Christa Dodoo on unsplash.com

The premise of this article: Viewing roles as transactional is an obsolete way of thinking based on a 1960s view of how the corporate administrative machine should work. “Transactional” is nearly synonymous with “static,” and no role in a modern company should remain static for long. Static elements of your enterprise are actually falling behind as everything around them advances.

You shouldn’t have roles you consider transactional. You can’t afford them.

I recently had a fantastic interview with, I felt, a high probability of landing the job. Alas, even though I impressed the panel they needed “to fill a transactional role with someone that would be willing and content with taking on that lower level responsibility.” My “insights into potential systems and solutions that sounded fascinating”¹ were not what they were looking for.

The day before I received this feedback an agency recruiter said the same thing about my presentation style, practically word for word.² Other interviewers have concurred, somewhat more obliquely, so I know it to be true.

The feedback is accurate in that it precisely identifies a disconnect between how I present myself in interviews and what employers are looking for. It’s simultaneously dead wrong because there is no such thing as a “transactional role”. They have not existed for at least 20 years.

You may now be incredulous: you have dozens, maybe hundreds, of transactional roles in your organization.

No – you don’t. You have transactional employees executing roles in a transactional manner because that’s how you’ve presented the jobs and instructed them. “Transactional” describes a behavior pattern, not a job structure.

But, you counter, “transactional” tasks define the role irrevocably. No, that too is incorrect.

In one position the employer needed a temp to cut and paste thousands of lines of Excel data between workbooks for six months. Transactional, right?

Wrong. Six weeks in I wrote a software package that eliminated the task, for both myself and the permanent staff performing the same work. Initially saving 800 hours, the function was later centralized and implementation of my code saved 2,300 labor hours per year valued at $180,000.

A one-off, freak occurrence? No. In the job before that I was also hired as a temp to cover a receptionist’s medical leave. Answer the phone, greet visitors, file paperwork – absolutely transactional.

Less than a month after I arrived the company implemented SAP R/3 and I became responsible for late payment expediting, vendor communications and eliminating the payment backlog. The receptionist who two months before had known nothing about procurement, accounts payable, IT or SAP was their best bet to solve this technically complex, highly visible PR problem. I viewed reception as a problem-solving, solution-delivering role – not the transactional role the employer had defined for me.

If the roles of receptionist-file-clerk and Excel copy-and-paste monkey can be performed in a non-transactional fashion and deliver substantial additional value to the enterprise, show me a role that cannot – and I’ll show you a role defined too narrowly.

What does it matter? If employers want to see roles as transactional, why shouldn’t they? The simple answer is: surviving the competition.

A transactional employee in a “transactional role” will be doing the same things the same way five years from now as they are today. That means that in five years, probably sooner, that function will cost more than today. Even with no pay increase their benefit costs and everything spent to maintain them is going up: rent, electricity, insurance, and the support of internal services like IT, HR and payroll.

If your competition jettisons the notion of transactional roles and instead welcomes those roles contributing cost reduction and profit growth, then their profit is going up while yours is going down. They’re winning. Not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve not locked their employees into static task-based identities.

Transactional thinking is deeply embedded due to the way organizations structure responsibility for change. Management is responsible for job descriptions, tasking, setting direction and implementing change. But must these be exclusively in the management purview?

There are two reasons this authority needs to be spread around in the modern enterprise.

First, if management is solely responsible for recognizing needed change, then designing and implementing every change to every process performed by every employee, that’s narrowly focused, in-the-weeds work that takes time away from strategic planning. It’s not where management should be focused.³

Second, when transactional-type people are hired and resolutely guided into a transactional mindset, the result is people emotionally attached to a list of specific tasks. “Their job” as they understand it is a fixed object that abides no change.

Why are whole books written about the angst of having someone come along and “move my cheese?”⁴ Why have numerous CEOs written memoirs focused on the challenge of getting people to embrace change? Because companies designed their staffs from the very beginning to resist change and make it a problem!⁵

If, instead of hiring transactional people wedded to transactions, you hire non-transactional people wedded to a broader set of concepts, you invest less effort defining what changes are needed because your staff will be doing half that work for you. And implementation won’t have to overcome resistance and even sabotage-by-inertia that comes from their emotional attachment to a fixed set of tasks.

When people self-define as change agents responsible for evolving a role rather than as transaction processors, your organization will be stepping on the change gas pedal instead of reflexively slamming on the change brake.

Applying a transactional mindset to any part of operations is a profit and opportunity killer. Ditch it.

Going forward with recruiting, look not for the transactional machines you think will be content grinding away at fixed tasks, but for the innovators – at every level, from managers to clerks – who believe that their duty is not to tasks, but to achieving potential – their own, and yours.

¹  Quoted from email received from the employer after I requested insight into their decision making.

²    The recruiter also said, “You’re absolutely the best person for this job, but you won’t get it” because they’re not looking for someone with this level of initiative. He was right about that too. Sour grapes? Absolutely! Looking back at a decade of my writing, about half concerns how corporate recruiting is companies shooting themselves in the foot.

³  In Workplace 2050 I expand on why it’s undesirable, even impossible, for management to have the level of control over administration they did through the mid-80s. This isn’t a challenge to management authority – it’s freeing management authority to focus on making a larger contribution themselves.

⁴  When I wrote this essay in 2018 Who Moved My Cheese? was a well-known work on organizational change, but it’s no longer part of the dialogue. For an update, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

⁵  A recent manager stuck a picture on his wall depicting the lane dividers in a competition swimming pool with the caption “Stay In Your Lane.” I.e., “Focus on your own job. Don’t be concerned about anything going on around you. You are your Job Description.It is all that exists for you.” And that manager will be confused by people who won’t change. That’s management incompetence writ large.

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