Job design is the planning and specification of job tasks and the work environment involved in their accomplishment. It includes all the structural and social elements of the job, and their impacts on employee behaviour and performance. The objective of Job Design is to help make jobs meaningful, interesting and challenging. This is achieved when Individual needs, task attributes and work setting lead to performance and satisfaction. There are four major approaches to job design.
They are:
- Job simplification (Job engineering) – is to standardise work processes and employ people to carry out clearly defined and specialised tasks.
- Job enlargement – is to increase the variety of tasks by combining tasks of similar skill levels that were originally carried out by several workers.
- Job rotation – is to increase the task variety by occasionally shifting workers around jobs that have different tasks but are at a similar skill level.
- Job enrichment – is to have motivating factors built into job content.
Poor Job Design results in lower productivity, staff turnover, absenteeism and sabotage compared to a good Job Design that promotes the achievement of the organisations strategic business objectives by providing management requirements for efficiency and employee needs for satisfaction.
By Warren Scobie
BiznessWins – Diversity Managers
warren@biznesswins.com
I write for this magazine because it is informative and reaches a wide cross-section of the community.
