Overview of Job Design
Discuss about the Job Design of Employees and Employers.
Job Design is a particular framework and model built by the human resources department of firms and is widely used by almost all firms or organizations working in the corporate and public or private sectors. It is in fact one of the central pillars that help the human resources department of the firm to frame the different constituents that shape the roles of different employees working in the department. It also prescribes the different methods through which the employees are expected to work and reach their objectives. These are in turn expected to affect and shape a person’s behavior and attitude towards work as whole and their role. These designs help in collaborating the different roles of different departments (technology, social, personal, commercial and financial) to help promote collaborated efforts toward reaching the company objectives. Job design essentially helps employees and employees to understand what is required of them and helps them to plan their present and future strategies accordingly.
Just like any other method used by the firms, the method of using job designs in a firm or an organization also is exposed to a lot of pros and cons. While on the one hand it helps in effective measurement of the effectiveness of the employees and helps the employees and employers in a combined way, on the other hand, the job designs cause more advantage to the employers than the employees. It produces only a partial view of the entire set of responsibilities to the employee while letting the employers to expect jobs that are both mentioned or not mentioned in the set of rules and responsibilities prescribed in the job design (Bakker and Demerouti 2017). However, the fact that it is in fact the most methodical method and helps in strategizing both for the employees and employers cannot be ignored at any cost. It helps in pointing out the roles that will help the employee to earn more and the roles and responsibilities that will help him to gain a promotion or add a new role to his already existing position. It is however noticed that in certain cases it restricts the capabilities and potential building of the workers such that they are notable to take up additional stress or challenges outside that which is required of their position.
Job design effectively helps in understanding whether or not an employee is fit for the role in which he is working, that is, it gives him the fully postulated criteria which determine his role. Using this he can find out whether his set of skills will allow him to perform exactly the roles he has been hired for or at least most of them. In other words it helps in forming a form of job crafting that allows him to perform and complete meaningful work at the end of the week and at the end of the quarter as well (Tims, Derks and Bakker 2016). This method allows for the demand of the employers and the supplies of the employees to fit and hence help in increasing productivities of the employee and the employer together and not just the employer. In the context of job crafting, the proposed models by the employer can also be modified and varied by the employee according to his skills resulting in reaching of the objectives in one way or the other.
Pros and Cons of Job Design
The job design also helps both the employer and the employee to discretely objectify and divide the holistic objectives or challenges into smaller subdivisions in the form of subheadings based on certain attributes. For example the overall objectives of the firm or the team can be subdivided into further bifurcations like resources needed and existing, technical challenges to be addressed, advertising challenges and so on. It also helps the employee to understand which objectives and challenges are required to be met with first followed by others, that is it allows the employee to assess his strengths and align them to the work he does based on the existing priorities of the employee. Being a very calculative and meticulous method of maintaining records and data related to employees, it provides pertinent and relevant information about the company and the employer to the employees which they can use for several activities and roles. For example, the relations of the company and the stakeholders or the clients are mentioned in the job design in certain cases which in turn help the employees to generate leads and sales revenue.
In certain or most cases, the job design changes with a change in the position of the employee and with increase in position in the hierarchy, the additional roles present in the job description help the employee to understand and allocate resources towards reaching of those objectives. It helps the employees to know what more is expected out of him now and wasn’t before. In certain cases it helps the employee to function independently and explore the capabilities that he was unaware of. In other words, the job descriptions also sometimes act as a factor of motivation which propels the growth of the employees in an indirect way (Bakker and Demerouti 2014). They are better able to manage their own skills as well as the potential capabilities of other employees working under them or with them. At different levels job designs help the employee in identifying how much he is required to work according to decisions imposed and how much effort he needs to put from his own discretion and take decisions based on the requirements. In fact there are certain specific job designs known as motivational job designs which aim at influencing job satisfaction and motivation of the employees and making them achieve goals that are beyond their capabilities in some cases. For example in Deloitte, the method of monitoring performances and giving feedbacks and also ratings in certain cases is followed so that the spirit of competition is instilled in the minds of the fellow employees and they thrive to perform better than before.
Benefits of Job Design
Employee engagement is also facilitated with the help of job designs and descriptions as these allow the employees to understand the differences in their roles and then collaborate their efforts to fill the performance gap of the team as whole (Anitha 2014). This also helps in improving the relationships of the employers and the employees as a whole. When people are required to work on a single project, they can combine their individual roles to achieve their project goals and objectives (Güntert 2015). Sometimes even if different people are supposed to reach different objectives they can exchange their roles and work out of their comfort zones depending on the need of the hour. According to studies, in this context, Deloitte finds it important that through scientific methods of standardization and taylorism, employee engagement is triggered and supported by job design. It helps in combining the segregated responsibilities of different employees and specializing those to achieve the targets of one particular project or company objective.
The method of job design is in fact one that is of immense help to the employees who are new to the work and are on their first job. The same is true for the employees who are new to a particular organization or firm and are completely clueless as to what is expected out of them both in terms of behavioral performance and productive performance (Güntert 2015). At Deloitte for example and in fact for many other firms, it helps the new employees to identify the major areas of focus and concern and also help them schedule and put into a framework their daily activities and targets. This method has specifically been noticed to help improve their quality and stress management skills. It has been reported to provide insight and vigor to the new employees in any organization and it also helps them to align themselves to the existing goals of the firm.
One of the most important aspects of job designing which is pointed out by and employed by Deloitte is that of job enlargement which allows the employees to take up added responsibilities outside their core responsibilities like improving the level of human relations and going outside the limits posed by the role to explore and work on building contacts that will help in increasing the consumer base of the client. This will result in identification and recognition of the employee and also help the employer out especially in case the business is new or the firm is trying to expand across a wider section of the country or even internationally. Further, the sentence itself suggests that job design helps improve the job performance of the employers which means that automatically the job performance of the employees working under them. In this century leaders are in fact more democratic and representative and not authoritarian and so their benefits will most definitely involve the benefits of the employees. It is inevitable that improvement and increase of job performance of the employers and the company means improvement of the capacity utilization of the employees, which is definitely the only benefit that employees aim to achieve apart from the wages.
Challenges of Job Design
Job design is very important for managers and employees working with responsibilities of a large number of people under them (Albrecht et al. 2015) . It helps them to allocate work efficiently and reach targets effectively and efficiently. This helps in removing ambiguity as to who should complete what amount of task and within what span of time. This in turn helps the employees under them to set individual goals and objectives either for the day or the week according to the time requirements of the project undertaken. The effect and impact of this is huge as it helps employees hired at different levels to learn the art of organizing and strategizing the work and provides a systematic approach to problem solving. It helps reducing and mitigating risks posed by the project on the managers as well as other employees working together or single handedly in the project.
However, one cannot completely ignore the aspect that job designing is specifically done in the first place to help the employers out and then the employees. It is definitely a tedious task for the employers to keep a track of the different employees and the roles that they are enacting and the responsibilities that they are fulfilling without keeping a framework or design into which they fit in and without maintaining a record of how much work they have finished out of the total amount that is needed to be covered in order to reach the objectives of the firm or a particular project. So in this way, the employers are benefitted more than the employees. Another disadvantage facing the employees is the fact that in the job design not all the requirements out of them are mentioned and some are just expected out of them which they are generally unaware of and do not anticipate. This sometimes result in confusion and ambiguity on the part of the employees and cause them to stressed and dissatisfied with the job and the organization as a whole.
Hence to conclude it can be asserted that like every phenomenon or strategy that is utilized in the corporate sector, job designing and job description also has some positive and negative impacts on both the employers and the employees. Employers are definitely benefitted with the implementation of job design as it helps them with the methodological analysis of the performance of the employees and makes maintaining records and monitoring performance easy for them. Some benefits are accrued exclusively and only to the employers but the employees are also benefitted to a very large extent. The various ways in which the employees are benefitted are mostly motivational and help the employees to be more engaged with the entire process and the values associated with the firm. The employees are also able to better strategize and organize their work with the help of the framework and design provided by the employers. Risks are mitigated and allocation of work becomes easier with the implementation of job design that helps in reaching targets and objectives collaboratively and easily.
References
Albrecht, S.L., Bakker, A.B., Gruman, J.A., Macey, W.H. and Saks, A.M., 2015. Employee engagement, human resource management practices and competitive advantage: An integrated approach. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, 2(1), pp.7-35.
Anitha, J., 2014. Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International journal of productivity and performance management, 63(3), p.308.
Bakker, A.B. and Demerouti, E., 2014. Job demands–resources theory. Wellbeing.
Bakker, A.B. and Demerouti, E., 2017. Job demands–resources theory: Taking stock and looking forward. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), p.273.
Güntert, S.T., 2015. The impact of work design, autonomy support, and strategy on employee outcomes: A differentiated perspective on self-determination at work. Motivation and Emotion, 39(1), pp.74-87.
Tims, M., Derks, D. and Bakker, A.B., 2016. Job crafting and its relationships with person–job fit and meaningfulness: A three-wave study. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 92, pp.44-53.
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