Designing work

Job design refers to the way tasks are combined to form complete jobs. It involves trying to shape the right jobs to conform to the right people, taking into account both the organization’s goals and the employees’ satisfaction. Well-designed jobs lead to high motivation, high-quality performance, high satisfaction, and low absenteeism and turnover.

Defining jobs

Jobs vary considerably: a lifeguard, for example, will have very different day-to-day responsibilities than an accountant or a construction worker. However, any job can be described in terms of five core job dimensions:

Skill variety : the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities so that the worker can employ a number of different skills and talents.

Task identity : the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work.

Task significance: the degree to which a job has an impact on the lives of other people.

Autonomy: the degree to which a job provides freedom and discretion to the worker in scheduling tasks and in determining how the work will be carried out.

Feedback: the degree to which the worker gets direct and clear information about the effectiveness of his or her performance.

As a manager, you can maximize your team’s performance by enhancing these five dimensions. Skill variety, task identity, and task significance combine to create meaningful work. Jobs with these characteristics will be perceived as important, valuable, and worthwhile. Jobs that possess autonomy give workers a sense of responsibility for their results. Jobs that provide feedback indicate to the employee how effectively he or she is performing.

Skill variety, task identity, and task significance combine to create jobs that are seen as important, valuable, and worthwhile

Ways to design work by enhancing the five dimensions

CREATE NATURAL WORK UNITS Design tasks to form an identifiable whole to increase employee “ownership” and to encourage workers to view their jobs as important.

ESTABLISH CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS

Building direct
relationships between
the worker and the client— the user of the product or the service that
the employee works on—increases skill variety, autonomy, and feedback.

COMBINE TASKS Put existing fragmented tasks together to form
larger modules of work. This can help increase skill variety and task identity.

EXPAND JOBS VERTICALLY Giving employees
responsibilities formerly reserved for managers closes the gap between the
“doing” and “controlling” aspects of the job, and increases autonomy.

IMPROVE FEEDBACK CHANNELS Feedback tells employees how well they are
performing, and whether their performance is
improving, deteriorating, or remaining constant.
Employees should receive feedback directly as they do their jobs.

Tip

GET THE RIGHT PERSON FOR THE JOB

It is very difficult to completely change how a person performs, so try to match people to jobs that they are good at. This will make them most likely to achieve good results.