Job Design And Job Description In HR: Key Elements And Considerations

Job Designing and Redesigning in HR

1.TK Ceramics, Headed by Kate & Tim is in middle of a tricky situation. The company wants to send special talent to Indonesia which can do a quality management for one of its suppliers. In order to do so, Renne (General Manager HR) has been asked to redesign the internally facing and customer facing job for better utilization of the human resources.

Job design which is also called as work design is one of the important functions of the human resource department; it is related to the specification of the job, the content of the job, method and relationship of the job to satisfy the technological and organizational requirement while ensuring the job satisfaction of an employee (Certo, 2015). A job description is characterised by 5 things:

• Skill variety
• Task variety
• Task significance
• Autonomy
• Feedback (Demerouti,2014)

Redesign internally facing jobs

Restructuring the element of the job design, including the tasks, duties and responsibilities of a specific job in order to make it more encouraging and inspiring for the employees is called as job redesigning. The process encompasses revising, analysing, altering, reforming and reshuffling the current job related content to increase the variety of functions of a job to better suit the current needs of the organization (Oldham & Fried, 2016)

Figure 1 Showing job redesign process

(Source: Chae & Choi, 2018)

The job responsibilities of an internally facing staff member are:

• Unpacking, checking and shelving the incoming stock
• Preparing shipment for the company’s delivery fleet four times a day
• Managing accounts and finance of the business
• Managing the administration of the office
• Managing the customer service department

The job designing has to be done in accordance with the characteristic elements of Job design as mentioned above

Customer Facing Jobs

2.The employee count of TK ceramics can be summarised as:

• 22- Field sales representative
• 28 – Staff working in the warehouse
• 20 –Staff worked in the office

Job redesigning happens with a lot of ramification, which can be both advantageous and disadvantageous for the employees and the organization.

Advantages

Figure 2 showing the advantages of job redesigning

(Source: Schultz & Schultz, 2018)

• Ensuring the quality of work life-Pulling workers from the shop and giving them additional responsibilities helps to build the morale of the employee and increases their job satisfaction. It also helps in creating additional skills which can be used in other job roles (Holman & Axtell, 2016).
• Increase in the productivity of the organization-Changing the job role of the employees give them a sense of empowerment, they feel valued and responsible towards the accomplishment of the objectives of the organization ,hence they work harder, increasing the productivity of the organization (Moen, 2016)
• Helps in creating right person job fit-Job rotation, enrichment and enlargement are the ways by which an organization can harness the full potential of an employee and get to the point where they seem to be the right fit for the position
• Bringing sense of belongingness in Employees-If an employee is given autonomy and freedom to work in different job roles, he feel happy, satisfied and content with the job, developing a strong sense of belonging with the company(Jex & Britt, 2014) 

Disadvantages

• Lack of Training-At times, when employees are given different tasks to handle due to limited resources or optimum utilization of human resources, they miss out on imparting quality training due to lack of time at hand. This can cause a great job satisfaction among the employees as they feel they are being pushed into other role without giving proper training(Munsch, 2016)
• Increasing workload-Not every employee is able to prioritize the goals of the work; some are stuck with the previous job role and find it difficult to connect the two job roles, eventually they feel they are under a lot of workload, eventually leading to job dissatisfaction(Perlow & Kelly, 2014)
• Conflicting with non-participants-Another common scenario which occurs in the organization, some employees who have not been chosen to work elsewhere get a feeling that they are not liked by the management. This affects their productivity in the organization and they develop a feeling of hatred and anger towards the management.
• Poor Performance-Shop workers who are being moved to another role might fall into the dump of poor performance if there is no clarity of task, no focus and improper training. Employees when left to do duties which they have not done in the past without adequate training, support, rationale for the job tend to perform in a poor manner, thus destroying the entire purpose of moving them from the staff, deeply impacting the company in a negative way. 

3.A job description in plain vanilla language can be understood as a template which describes the tasks, duties, function and responsibilities of a position. It basically outlines the details of who is responsible for performing a type of work, how the work will be completed and the frequency and purpose of the job in relation to the organization’s mission and goals (Baker, 2017). Hence in order to create a good job description, the following point has to be kept in mind:

• Describes skills and competencies for the job (Rothe, 2017)
• It is used on the basis of employment contract
• It defines where the job fits within the overall company hierarchy (Dubin, 2017)

Job Description for Shop worker-The shop was being opened to cater to the needs of the consumers directly, TK ceramics was entering into a retail mode of business. After conducting the job analysis and essential skills required for the job, the Job description template can be designed as:

Advantages of Job Redesigning

The above template can be used to hire employees for the new shops to TK Ceramics

4.The job responsibilities of the field sales representative are to cater to the needs of few key accounts. The key accounts were limited to high end architects and bathroom stores all over Victoria. Hence, the employees were dealing with the retailers or the shop owners and not the direct consumers. The skill set required for the shop staff will have to be vastly different from those of the filed sales representative. Field sales representative work in a Business to Business model, whereas the model for the store will be business to customers, thus requiring different skill sets.  In dealing with customers employees have to ensure they thoroughly understand the sales process, understand the need of the customers and accordingly give them a solution catering to their needs. A lot of conviction and negotiation is involved in selling directly to the customers, their feedback has to be acknowledged and worked upon. Based on the above discussion, the skill required for the shop staff which varies with the skills of sales filed representative are: 

Customer relationship management- In B2C sales process, building relationship with the customer is of paramount importance. Once the customer develops trust in the sales representative he develops a relationship with the staff, which further helps in doing sales. Relationship building thus goes a long way in retaining the customers and ensuring sustainability in sales momentum

Sales Process- The sales representative is required to have complete understanding of the sales process. How to greet and meet the client, probing skills to do a need assessment, skills to engage customers by showing the vast product knowledge which fits the client buying criteria, prospecting of the customers, handling any negotiation and close the sales. All these steps in the sales process should be imbibed strongly in the sales staff at the store (Picken, 2017) 

Product Knowledge- Half knowledge is ignorance, and in sales, Ignorance is definitely not bliss. Each and every person employed at the store must and should have received the appropriate training on product knowledge so that they can answer any possible query of the customers. Great training will develop confidence in the sales staff to even handle tough to irate customers. Thus, it can be said that good product knowledge leads to better conversations resulting in driving sales for the organization (Rajan & Srinivasan, 2017)

Active listening-In sales, it is more important to listen more than to speak. Management experts say that sales representative should follow the 60: 40 rules in sales. Listen 60% of the time and communicate 40% of the time in a customer interaction. Active listening will help in better assessment of the client need, his requirement and thus helps in coming up with a solution better suiting the needs of the customers. At the same time, even the customer feels valued when someone listens to them actively without interrupting them and on the basis of his communication products are shown to him. 

References

Baker, T., 2017. Management Myth# 3—The Job Description Helps the Employee Understand Their Organizational Role. In Performance Management for Agile Organizations (pp. 89-106). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Certo, S., 2015. Supervision: Concepts and skill-building. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Chae, H. and Choi, J.N., 2018. Contextualizing the effects of job complexity on creativity and task performance: Extending job design theory with social and contextual contingencies. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

Demerouti, E., 2014. Design your own job through job crafting. European Psychologist.

Dubin, R., 2017. The world of work: Industrial society and human relations. Taylor & Francis.

Holman, D. and Axtell, C., 2016. Can job redesign interventions influence a broad range of employee outcomes by changing multiple job characteristics? A quasi-experimental study. Journal of occupational health psychology, 21(3), p.284.

Jex, S.M. and Britt, T.W., 2014. Organizational psychology: A scientist-practitioner approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Moen, P., 2016. Work over the gendered life course. In Handbook of the life course (pp. 249-275). Springer, Cham.

Munsch, C.L., 2016. Flexible work, flexible penalties: the effect of gender, childcare, and type of request on the flexibility bias. Social Forces, 94(4), pp.1567-1591.

Rajan, C.S. and Srinivasan, K.S., 2015. Salesmanship Skill as Effective Driving Force in Indian Pharmaceutical Industry. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6(6 S2), p.652.

Rothe, J.P. ed., 2017. The scientific analysis of personality. Routledge.

Schultz, D. and Schultz, S.E., 2015. Psychology and Work Today: Pearson New International Edition CourseSmart eTextbook. Routledge.

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