Importance of Job Design
Importance of Job Design
Job design specifies the contents of jobs in order to satisfy work requirements and meet the personal needs of the job holder.
Nearly 9 in 10 employees (86 %) revealed that they lose time each day on work unrelated to their core job, with 41% of full-time employees wasting more than an hour a day on these extraneous activities, according to a workforce management provider Kronos Incorporated survey. The survey was conducted on 2,800 employees, both full and part, in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico and Britain.
40% of employees waste an hour-plus each day on administrative tasks that do not drive value for their organisation.
The next highest-rated daily tasks for individual contributors is collaborating with
- co-workers 42%,
- administrative work 35%,
- manual labour 33% and
- responding to emails 31%.
While HR managers list
- attending to meetings 27%,
- administrative work 27%,
- collaborating with co-workers 26% and
- responding to emails 26% as the top ways they spend their workday.
The survey also reveals that full time employees feel
- Fixing a problem not caused by me 22%
- and administrative work 17% as the top two tasks they waste the most time on at work.
- Meetings 12%,
- email 11% and
- customer issues 11% round out the top five time-wasters.
Designing Efficient Jobs
If workers perform tasks as efficiently
as possible, not only does the organization benefit from lower costs and
greater output per worker, but workers should be less fatigued. This point of
view has for years formed the basis of classical industrial engineering, which
looks for the simplest way to structure work in order to maximize efficiency.
Typically, applying industrial engineering to a job reduces the complexity of the
work, making it so simple that almost anyone can be trained quickly and easily
to perform the job. Such jobs tend to be highly specialized and repetitive.
In practice, the scientific method traditionally seeks the "one best
way" to perform a job by performing time-and-motion studies to identify
the most efficient movements for workers to make. Once the engineers have
identified the most efficient sequence of motions, the organization should
select workers based on their ability to do the job, then train them in the
details of the "one best way" to perform that job. The company also
should offer pay structured to motivate workers to do their best.
Despite the logical benefits of
industrial engineering, a focus on efficiency alone can create jobs that are so
simple and repetitive that workers get bored. Workers performing these jobs may
feel their work is meaningless. Hence, most organizations combine industrial
engineering with other approaches to job design
Job design can be defined as “the specification of the contents, methods, and relationships of jobs in order to satisfy technological and organizational requirements as well as the social and personal requirements of the job holder” (Armstrong, 2003).
ReplyDeleteJob design is an important method managers can use to enhance employee performance. Job design is how organizations define and structure jobs. As we will see, properly designed jobs can have a positive impact on the motivation, performance, and job satisfaction of those who perform them.
ReplyDeleteJob analysis provides information about the skills and competency required to perform a job efficiently. Conversely, job design strives at organizing tasks, duties, and responsibilities associated with a job to achieve organizational as well as individual objectives. Job design is a relatively new term in HRM. Author has written a well organised article.
ReplyDelete