Job Design -- A Lost Science?

In my last blog regarding employee engagement, I introduced the notion that an important (but not the only one) factor to consider is effective job design. One of my blog followers wrote to ask that I say a bit more about this topic.

Job design know-how is an important part of the HR professional toolkit. Without it, it is difficult to understand, let alone to do, organization design. Sadly, most HR professionals do not have the working knowledge and expertise required to carry out these two critical functional assignments -- the hard side of HR. I do not recall seeing either course in most HR curricula that I have perused in the past 10 years. What seems to be in vogue nowdays is the softer side of HR.

My view has been for sometime that it is sheer folly to rely on just one side of the HR equation (hard or soft). Effective HR management work requires knowledge and experience in both sides. The lack of the hard side will break us while the emphasis on the soft side will make us more successful. Two sides of the same coin. One is not better than the other, they are both essential.

Back to job design. Its roots go back to the industrial revolution and the industrial engineers who pionered it. It all started with job analysis -- the study of the time and motions needed to complete an industrial task. The engineers' orientation was to find ways to fit unskilled people to the requirements of emerging mass production. Right just before and after the WWII, industrial psychologists got involved in a series of experiments designed to humanize the workplace. Assembly line work, while generating the desired efficiencies, took a huge toll on people's motivation, organizational attachment, and job satisfaction. These experiments gave rise to a new approach that tried to balance the technical needs of a job with the human side of the provider, more elegantly named the socio-technical approach.

Taking the mystique away, job design is a decision making process that tries to balance, on one side, the job designer's CHOICES in work design with, on the other side, CONSIDERATIONS for people. What are the choices? They are the tasks, activities, functions included in a person's job vis-a-vis the aspirations, skill set, and orientation (considerations). The designer can based on this analysis enrich a job by increasting its variety or enlarge a job based on individual needs and capabilities. This approach has taken hold in the more recent times whenever technology permits it. It is quite difficult to customize jobs in mass production or automated functions, but rather feasible in service or high tech industries for example.

Now, let me dispel some faulty assumptions. Job descriptions are not to be confused with job design. They are an expression of how management sees a particular job. The same can be said for position descriptions or role descriptions. Their uses are also different. Job descriptions are useful for salary survey work, by enabling us to calculate job worth in monetary terms. Role descriptions are useful for clarifying responsibilities, accountabilities, and authority. Position descriptions are functional descriptions of specific jobs in a job family. Job analysis tries to map out how people spend their time, how important what people do might be in the scheme of things, and the relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities required to perform them. It is a great tool for activity pricing and for eliminating wasteful efforts. Job analysis is also essential to solid needs assessment.

Increased employee engagement depends on the fit between the person and the job. Experts in employee engagement warn us that engagement is not the same thing as satisfaction, and I agree. But I posit that job satisfaction is a pre-condition. We all know that happy cows do not yield more or better milk. But we know, on the other hand, that unhappy cows will gore you, run away (turnover), or quit cooperating.

Research on employee retention suggests that people stay because they like the work they do and the context in which they do it (company, industry, location, etc.) Employees leave, on the other hand, principally because they have better opportunities, do not like their supervisor, find company policies wnating, or are dissatisfied with the work climate or work location. Two totally different sets of reasons!

In todays's world employees expect involvement and participation in those decisions that affect their job or livelihood. Management on the other hand expects compliance and flexibility. I believe that this is a fair exchange. Don't you?

A big subject to address in a short blog. I hope that I have contributed to the discussion.

Employee Engagement

Last month I visited Brazil for the second time the past year. I met with four different consulting firms on behalf of a company on whose board I serve. One of the recurring themes during my visit was employee engagement. It is a hot topic and many world class consultancies such as Hewitt, Hay, Gallup, and my old alma mater Louis Allen Worldwide are scrambling to respond to this market interest.

It is my view that fostering employee engagement is the core work of HR functions. In today's fragile economy, competitive advantage is elusive since other firms can pretty much copy your products and emulate your service offerings. However, no one can really copy how your employees feel about your company. Research has shown that organizations with better employee engagement perform better on a number of critical measures, e.g., profitability, customer retention, etc. Engagement means going the extra mile to achieve company goals. It is the extra that affects the competitive advantage.

Research on employee engagement suggests that what drives it varies from company to company, so there are no universal remedies or across the board solutions. What drives it in your organization might be very different than what drives it elsewhere.

We have made many advances in measuring and analyzing employee engagement, but we are in the primitive stages when it comes to targeted interventions. Consultancies seem to know less about how to improve it than they know about measuring it.

The source of implementation wisdom comes from the day to day experience and know-how in job design, carefully architected reward systems, effective leadership practices, and human resources policies and programs. HR departments need to step up and lead with properly configured strategies and programs. You cannot improve employee engagement with training programs, communication blitzes, or focus groups. Sure, these might help but they alone will not sustain change and improvement. It is not the job of consultants to do this. Most consultants lack the knowledge in the fundamentals of human resources management. It is not their mantra. Most make money by being good diagnosticians, not treatment specialists.

Treating the intervening variables may give the illusion of progress, but addressing the causal variables is where the honey is, so to speak. The former is akin to treating the symptoms. Unfortunately, this is where most effort goes in, in my view.

What are your ideas and successes in this area? Are you willing to exchange them? Enjoy the journey along the learning curve.