Refusing to take on additional responsibilties at work

[ILikeBirds]

Colleague had handed in her notice at work and I fully expect that her job will be divided up amongst others rather than replaced.

I suspect that it might be attempted to give some of that work to me but it is way beyond my job description.

Bearing in mind I'm not the only person with my job description but i am the only one with the technical capabilities to do this part of the work is it unreasonable to put my foot down and refuse to take on anything extra for no reward.

(in the past year I've already taken on additional responsibility due to someone else leaving)

I was nosing around our HR policies today with something similar in mind. For my organisation, it appears that they if they really wanted it to be done by my current role, they would need to re-write my official role description and then send it back to Pay and Grading to have it upgraded. On the other hand, I could unofficially take on the additional work without it going onto my role description, with a view to using the experience to add to my CV, and then look for another job elsewhere. That's as I understood the policies, though, so may not be correct.

My take on it is you can't give additional duties to one person who shares a job description with others. I think they might try and argue it comes under 'other duties' but in that case any one of the people i share my job description with should be able to do it. If it's specific to me only then my job description should be amended and regraded (the person whose work it is now is two paygrades above me)

Yes, but looking through our HR policies, I think there's a difference between your official role and what you personally can do because you're particularly competent / experienced. Our HR policies suggest that the rule of thumb is whether, if you left and they recruited someone to replace you, whether the new person's specification would include this task. If so, then the role should be regraded.

That makes sense, the responsibilties are such that they should be listed in the job description but going on past experience this doesn't always happen.

To give you an idea of the situation, say i'm a web developer and the person leaving is an account manager who deals with French accounts and thus has to speak French. She leaves and they decide I can do part of her job because i happen to speak French, a second language is not any sort of requirement for my post.

Your job description is unlikely to be contractual, and it would be unusual for all responsibilities anyone might ever have to possibly take on to have to be listed in the job description in order to require someone to do them.

Having said that, if the new stuff is completely different, is extra responsibility and requires different skills, I don't think you are unreasonable to ask for financial recognition for that.

Whilst a job description may not be contractual we're currently going through a pay and grading review so job description is very relevant to pay outcomes. This isn't about adding one task, it is adding a whole job area. It is not something you could miss off the job description and expect to recruit into.

I am currently the lowest paid in this position (due to length of service) so I'm not minded to take on any additional responsibility without further remuneration bearing in mind I already took on some of my former manager's responsibilties when his post was erased.