Top tips for Job enrichment

In this blog we will explire Job enrichment. We will explain what it is and offer Job enrichment tips. To answer the first question, What is Job enrichment? Essentially expands the range of tasks that you perform while expanding the skills you can develop. The idea is the employee then becomes more satisfied while giving the business more productivity. This makes for more stimulating and interesting work. It adds variety, challenge and depth to everyone’s daily routine. Job Enrichment give you more freedom, independence and responsibility.

Does Job enrichment motivate employees?

Job enrichment is practiced largely to give the employee variety with their responsibilities, but importantly it gives them more control over their job. As mentioned, it promotes new skill development and broadens how the employee will work and contribute to the business or project, they are assigned to within there IT job.

The tasks are generally similar in nature to what they are currently doing but opens new windows for the employees to explore into.

In my research for this blog, I came across a number of scientific theories (by Frederick Herzberg ) that bring the practice of job enrichment to the surface. Just briefly (as I don’t want to bore you too much) they are:

Hygiene Factors – These are basically the environment of a person’s work. Are they a reason for job dissatisfaction, are they doing what they were hires to do, how they are treated etc. “Some simple examples of hygiene factors include organizational policies and procedures, supervision, relationships with co-workers and supervisors, physical work environment, job security, and compensation. It is part of Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory”. (ref)

The idea behind the study is to focus on the factors mentioned s removing the dissatisfaction elements, a good example of this today would be remote working. If there are rigid policies put back in place in this ever-changing world of work. An employee might be ok with it, but a business will run the risk of a key employee becoming unsatisfied directly due to the policy. But by being more flexible with the policy you remove the element that might lead to dissatisfaction. Each business will have these policies, managers that will eventually lead to job dissatisfaction.

True Motivators – The second theory by Frederick Herzberg are True Motivators. True Motivators are satisfiers, if someone is motivated, they generally want to work.  These motivating factors are associated with the actual job they do and to the reward directly associated with the result from doing good work. They are believed to cause happy feelings or good attitude within the worker. They motivate people towards superior performance; to desire challenging tasks, growth, and development. Herzberg suggested job enrichment to provide true motivation. You can enrich the Job by increasing skill variety, task identity, the significance of what you do, give autonomy.

5 steps on How can a business implement a job enrichment policy?

Here are a few strategies that are easily designed into most businesses today. Firstly, have a quick look at the work design – this picture will give you an idea how to implement your own one using a pretty simple template.

1. Rotate jobs –Give your team the opportunity to perform different tasks where possible.  Ensure the tasks use a variety of skills. Job rotation will encourage the team to expand their skill set. It can also give the team a fresh perspective on what others do and understand how other areas of the organization is run. This can be very motivating. Especially for those performing repetitive duties or using limited cognitive skills in their jobs.
2. Adding tasks– Look at combining work activities again where possible. This can add extra skills to an employee’s job and challenge them more. For example, if you work in a Data Centre and you have specific people working in specific areas such as server repair, you could encourage them to learn how the entire line works from decommissioning to diagnostics to customer success. By combining tasks, you can encourage employees to use a wide variety of skills. Not only will that team member feel more fulfilled but also offer more productivity to the overall Data Centre Ops team.
3. Transparent Feedback – Sharing feedback is a great way to show your team how much you value them. It’s important to hold regular reviews and appraisals where you will get the opportunity to and tell your employees how they are doing (Positive or negative). Share advice on how they can improve importantly workable targets and help them achieve them. Without micromanagement, it’s really important to monitor and evaluate the performance of your employees, the more enriched their jobs will be. And the more feedback an employee receives, the more likely they are to take the initiative to improve their performance. It will lead to better retention and motivation company wide.
4. Employee Surveys – Always let the employees have a way to voice, not only their grievances but also on policy, procedure, always find out where the business can improve, but also find those golden nuggets of information where policy is causing fixable headaches. Employee Satisfaction Surveys are an excellent way to seek out this feedback.
5. Embrace Automation – Considering Hygiene factors for a second. When you consider those boring tasks that do not bring the best out of an employee or team member. With the power of digitalization and AI in todays job market automating certain tasks is becoming the norm. Tasks such as file management, data processing, text and image recognition have been reduced. They are boring tasks that frustrated the best of us. AI can now cover these roles. This will allow HR and management to give more job enrichment to people. By keeping these boring tasks to a minimum of an employee’s time, the more valued and satisfied they will feel. So, embrace AI. People want to feel important and that they are contributing.  People want to make better use their time. They want to work on new activities that challenge them and expand their skill set. There motivation and productivity will lead to a better and happier employee.

Conculstion

Elwood Roberts is an IT job hunter also known a Recruitment Partner. We work in both the Irish and US markets; you can check out our service and offerings here.

We also post regular blogs to offer advice on the latest trends in Recruitment. Please do check out our insights here.