Job design is vital as it adapts roles to be more engaging and effective, aligning with rapid job evolution and organizational goals. It explores methods to enhance job satisfaction and performance through a structured, scientifically based framework.
By Douglas Wade, Attorney
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Never before has job design been more important. More quickly than in the past, jobs are evolving, and new ones are created daily. In this post, we’ll go over the fundamentals of job design and how it may result in positions that are both enjoyable and valuable to the company for the person. We also provide a tried-and-true, scientifically grounded framework for creating better job designs.
The process of designing a work that both helps the company reach its objectives and inspires and compensates its employees is known as job design. This indicates that a well-designed job increases output and quality of work while simultaneously lowering absenteeism, employee turnover intentions, and job satisfaction.
The nature of work is changing more quickly in today’s VUCA environment, which makes ongoing job design more crucial than ever. The motivations behind job redesign were the subject of a prior article. This article aims to provide a practical explanation of job design and the various tactics that may be employed in the process.
We require a framework to direct the redesign process in order to appropriately redesign jobs. The job characteristics hypothesis by Hackman & Oldham is the most well-known framework.
In order for a job to be inspiring for an individual, Hackman & Oldham argued back in 1980 that any job should have 5 basic features. These qualities held true over decades and are still in use today.
Variety of skills: The extent to which a position calls for a wide range of abilities. More skill diversity will be possessed by a financial controller overseeing three distinct departments as opposed to a controller overseeing just one. More diverse skill sets in a job make it more difficult and competent.
Task description: The extent to which a person completes a task in its entirety. For instance, creating the interior of a whole house is more satisfying than creating just one room.
Importance of the task: How much the task affects other people. When a task has an impact on other people, it feels more significant and increases job satisfaction.
Autonomy: The degree of autonomy and liberty possessed by a person. People who have more autonomy feel more accountable for their work.
Feedback: The data that employees obtain regarding the efficiency of their job. Feedback can originate from both external sources (like consumer satisfaction) and the job itself (like a working product). The most fulfilling feedback comes from the task itself, which also reveals the outcomes of previous efforts.
These five traits will make a job more meaningful, increase a worker’s sense of accountability, and increase their understanding of the work’s outcomes. The results we stated in the beginning follow from this, including greater motivation, better performance, job satisfaction, low absenteeism, and low turnover.
This model, which serves as the foundation for work design, is a summary of the previously mentioned method. Now let’s examine some job design strategies that can be applied to enhance these fundamental job attributes’ motivating potential.
The concept of motivating power holds that when workers are happy in their roles, they are more inclined to put in their best effort and strive for higher standards, which is advantageous to the company as a whole as well as the individual worker. This is acknowledged by most people.
In their proposal, Hackman and Oldham named their approach the motivational potential score (MPS). This score is determined by factoring in all essential job requirements and using the results to determine the job’s potential for motivation.
To do this, a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high) should be used to rate each of the fundamental job aspects. Next, the following values can be entered into the formula:
MPS = (Skill variety + Task significance + Task identity / 3) x Autonomy x Feedback
The formula states that a poor score on autonomy or feedback will have a major effect on the job’s ability to motivate. A low score on task significance, skill variety, or task identity will have a less noticeable impact.
Four typical work design techniques are utilized to boost a job’s motivating potential. Every one of these tactics will affect one or more of the MPS formula’s components. Work rotation, job expansion, enrichment, and simplification are the tactics. After providing a quick explanation of each, we will provide a link to a detailed article on the subject.
The practice of transferring workers between positions inside a company is known as job rotation. This broadens the skill set, aids in job orientation for prospective new hires, and provides exposure to a variety of learning opportunities.
Programs for job rotation can boost motivation and provide deployment flexibility, making it simple to replace a worker in the event of an absence.
Job enlargement is the process of adding new responsibilities to an existing role that are located at the same organizational level. One illustration would be a designer who primarily worked on hotel rooms but is now branching out into restaurant design. Although the work’s topic varies, similar abilities are still required.
A worker can perform more similar tasks when their job is expanded, which decreases monotony, teaches a variety of abilities, and provides them with a wider range of duties, accountability, and autonomy. It also enhances task identity and skill variation.
Job enrichment is characterized by the addition of motivational dimensions, whereas job enlargement aims to add tasks. Thus, employment expansion may be considered a type of job enrichment.
The goal of job enrichment is to raise MPS by incorporating motivators into current work. In order to raise task importance, examples include adding feedback opportunities, building client relationships, and forming natural work units—which put comparable tasks together in an effort to increase job identity.
The antithesis of work expansion is job simplicity, which makes one feel a little odd out. The process of eliminating responsibilities from current positions to make them simpler to execute is known as job simplification.
Simplifying a job involves removing skill variation to produce a more targeted work. This can be applied in situations when an untenable work has grown over time due to job creep.
Thus far, we have presented job design as a hierarchical process wherein the manager or an Organization Development (OD) specialist ascertains what aspects of a work might be modified to enhance its incentive potential for staff members.
Employees can design, alter, and personalize their jobs to a great extent these days, either on their own or in conjunction with their manager. Job crafting is the act of an employee taking charge and modifying the requirements of their position.
Increased organizational support, increased autonomy, and increased self-efficacy—the belief in one’s own ability to accomplish goals—all contribute to the creation of more customized jobs. Increased job satisfaction is a direct result of job crafting.
Job design is an organized method to creating positions that are both rewarding for employees and beneficial to the company as a whole. The latter is crucial: the position must support organizational objectives and fit inside the organizational structure. Should this not be the case, the position is superfluous and need to be eliminated.
This demonstrates the difficulties and delicate balance of job design. Certain tasks are necessary even though they don’t inspire motivation. The toolset of an OD specialist still has additional tools in this situation. These include hiring individuals who thrive on consistency and predictability, developing a compelling vision and culture that engages and keeps people, and practicing excellent management.
When done correctly, job design may be very enjoyable and fulfilling for the employee as well as the manager or OD practitioner.
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