Making job enrichment effective
Job Rotation
Job rotation involves moving an employee from department to department in order to enhance their skills and get wider exposure. This adds more variety and versatility to an employee’s job. Rotating the job is a great way to break the monotony and get rid of repetitive tasks.
Feedback
Make sure employees make the best use of the feedback they’re provided. Feedback is aimed at making work better for the employees and helping them increase the value of their work. Therefore, feedback is a great way to enrich a dull and boring job.
Job Crafting
Job crafting is the process of redesigning a job in order to change perceptions about a job, making small changes to tasks, and focusing on bettering relationships with others. This process adds more to enrich the job.
Combine Tasks
When one task sounds boring, combine it with another. One major benefit of this technique is that the employees will find their combined tasks more challenging. Therefore the urge to complete this challenge will motivate them to finish the task.
One example is Corning Glass Works, a laboratory hotplate assembling plant. Instead of doing separate tasks of assembling, inspecting, and shipping, each operator was asked to combine tasks. As a result, every operator could gather, inspect and deliver a hotplate. In this way, every operator felt valued because of the autonomy they practiced.
Suggestions from Others
If you are looking for ways to enrich a job, ask others for help. Suggestions from others will bring in different perspectives and a broader sense of viewing things. Employees too can ask for suggestions from others to make their work more meaningful. The purpose is to improve the work quality and improve their overall performance.
Practice Autonomy
To make a job richer, motivate your employees by giving them autonomy and control over certain things. When employees are given a sense of control over things, they feel valued and think you consider them trustworthy enough to finish important tasks without much supervision.
Try Automating Tasks
Most paperwork is boring. For instance, dealing with payroll manually is boring. For such tasks, think about if you can automate them for your employees. When most of the tasks will be automated, they will have more time on their hands to focus on other interesting and high-priority tasks.
Get Rid of Worthless Tasks
How many tasks do your employees work on that don’t provide much value to the organization? For example tasks like organizing files and paperwork just in case someone needs that in the future. We all know we rarely use something like that later.
So take some time out and encourage your employees to get rid of useless tasks. It will help them develop a sense of how few meaningless tasks they have on their plate now. This is a good motivator to get important things done faster.
Surveying
Surveys are a good way to enrich jobs. When you survey, you don’t assume what a particular job lacks and what can be done to add more meaning to it. Instead, you ask the real audience i.e your employees.
On the survey, include questions like:
- What makes them happy?
- What would they like to change about the job?
- Which other skills would they like to learn?
Based on the results, makes changes to the job description. Surveying is therefore a good practice to make a job richer through employee feedback.
Encourage Them to Enrich
Sometimes, you may not have the time to add more to a job to enrich it. In times like this, ask your employees to see ways how they can enrich their jobs for themselves. This includes for example encouraging them to join a few classes and learn new skills. This will help them in working with a new skill set in a fresh way.
Incentive Programs
In some cases, setting a reward for completing a certain task is a great motivator for employees. Paid recognition gives them a sense of accomplishment and motivates them to achieve more.
Steps in Job Enrichment:
The process of job enrichment consists of the following steps:
(i) Job Selection:
Selecting jobs which are amenable to job enrichment.
(ii) Identifying the Changes:
Identifying the changes that may enrich the selected jobs.
(iii) Change in Contents of Jobs:
Changing the contents of jobs by forming natural work groups combining tasks and opening feedback channels. This will be done to provide self-control, responsibility, achievement and advancement.
(iv) Employees Counselling:
Training, guiding and encouraging employees whenever necessary.
(v) Job Integration:
Integrating the enriched jobs with the daily work routine of the organisation.