As leaders, operational managers, and HR teams strive to meet business objectives and optimize worker productivity amid rapidly evolving technology adoption, labor shortages, and shifting market conditions, improving how the organization’s work is conducted is a central theme and consideration. Consider the extent to which that work is performed by individuals with differing skills and levels of proficiency, and the fact that they apply those to their work based on a wide range of personal motivations, aspirations, values, and behavioral preferences. Understanding that, driving the performance and productivity of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of workers consistently at or above requirements is heavily influenced by how their jobs are defined and tasks are assigned. As a direct result, job design has an enormous impact on the level of success they achieve. 

In the current environment, companies are finding that as the very nature of how work is conducted changes, so too are the preferences, expectations, and demands of the newly dominant generation of workforce members. That combination is driving a demand to reassess and redefine job design in ways that simultaneously drive more efficient and effective individual, team, and business-unit contributions and support the stability of the workforce assigned to deliver business objectives.

Understanding job design

The design of jobs involves structuring and assigning tasks, responsibilities, and interactions to each individual role in ways that optimally align their efforts with their co-workers and business objectives while engaging them in motivating, satisfying, and high-performance conditions. Job design is, at its core, meant to meet the organization's operational requirements and employees’ talent needs simultaneously.

This human: work model has its roots in Adam Smith's 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, which introduced the concept of “division of labor”, followed by Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management (1911) that addressed standardization of how work is performed, and then by job enrichment research (Frederick Herzberg and others) in the mid-20th century, which suggested an evolution to more satisfying work. In the mid-to-late 1970s, Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Theory (JCT) proposed and evaluated the elements of jobs that drive performance and productivity while fully engaging and motivating workers, and it remains a widely used and relied-upon framework for job design today.

That theory suggests that well-designed jobs most often incorporate five key elements, including:

1. Skill variety: The ability to use different skills and capabilities when performing the job.
2. Task identity: The ability to start and complete an entire or "whole" piece of work.
3. Task significance: Understanding how the work being performed impacts organizational or customer goals, outcomes, or value.
4. Autonomy: The freedom to decide how, when, and where the assigned work is conducted. 
5. Feedback: The availability and delivery of continuous information about the level of performance achieved.
   
   

More recent updates in job design

While research on the Job Characteristics Theory demonstrated linkages between task variety and employee motivation and productivity, as well as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, the effects on job performance were small and unclear. Hackman and Oldham made an important observation that “not everyone responds positively to large, challenging jobs”. The reason is that performance and motivation are very individualized, and expanding job duties will not necessarily increase motivation for every individual in every situation. While those who are ambitious, curious, and seeking greater control over their work may respond positively, many others will seek control over their work environments by adhering to organizational norms, rigid job-task requirements, and role boundaries.

Other shortcomings of that model include its not addressing the social characteristics or requirements that are part and parcel of so many modern jobs that are increasingly reliant on collaborative and team effectiveness. The authors revisited the original research and highlighted the need to further explore the social characteristics of jobs (interdependence, feedback from others, social support, and interaction outside the organization) that affect work performance and attitudes.

Subsequent studies have uncovered a more comprehensive and robust model identifying 21 job characteristics (including those task characteristics in the JCT) predictive of employee performance, commitment, and turnover. The resulting work design model summarizes those 21 job characteristics across four categories:

• Task (autonomy, task variety, significance, identity, job feedback).
• Knowledge (job complexity, information processing, problem solving, skill variety, specialization required).
• Social (support available, interdependence required, external contacts, feedback from others).
• Work context (physical work conditions, ergonomics and demands, equipment use).

Further insights into job design are provided by Harvard Business School, which simplifies the conversation by pointing to three primary design considerations that are useful when building a culture and infrastructure supportive of well-designed jobs: 

• Task allocation: Assigning clear, achievable tasks, responsibilities, and duties that align with employees’ skills and capabilities.
• Job development: Enhancing jobs by assigning meaningful, challenging tasks and providing opportunities for skill development, autonomy, and decision-making.
• Feedback and communication: Encouraging open communication and feedback between employees and managers to foster a supportive work environment.

It further calls out the need to ensure that job design exercises clarify not only what is to be done by a job holder, but the conditions that support that performance, including 1) appropriate resourcing (people, budget, tools), 2) clear business-aligned performance KPIs, 3) access and authority to engage employees outside the direct sphere of influence, and 4) the support available from other functions and business units.

Why job design is so important today

Investing time and effort in redesigning jobs has become an essential response to the turbulence and challenges facing modern organizations. Work processes are being disrupted by the adoption of advanced technologies, the expectations of a new generation of workers are shifting away from long-standing norms, and labor markets are forcing companies to reconsider how to maintain productivity and production volumes with fewer available workers. The needs are substantial, and just as workflow and process improvements can help adapt to smaller work teams, job design can further enhance them to better motivate, engage, and retain workers. The specific environmental elements that create a value proposition include:

The nature of work is changing

Consider how the work of modern organizations is rapidly shifting, driven by increased automation, robotization, and the rapid adoption of AI. As companies lean towards greater automation to enable 24/7 operations, lower error and rework rates, and lower the costs (e.g., pay, benefits, taxes, injury and illness, facilities) associated with employing large employee populations, a focus on process efficiencies and effectiveness is driving process and people: technology co-working higher. The use of these technologies is reshaping how work is performed and the skills and capabilities that employees need to apply.

The nature of the workforce is changing

The work being conducted in advanced economies is increasingly focused on service and white-collar-oriented (professional, administrative, and service) activities. With estimates of 66% or more of workers contributing in those roles, there are significantly more opportunities to increase the discretion and autonomy allowed in individual decision-making regarding how, when, where, and with whom work activities are conducted.

Staff reductions are increasingly commonplace

In response to market conditions, competitive investment priorities, and a push for more efficiencies, organizations are rightsizing, downsizing, and flattening, leaving fewer workers and managers to perform and oversee the work. Each of those actions needs to be accompanied by changes to process responsibilities and accountabilities, meaning that the assignment and distribution of tasks will directly impact the job design of the employees who are retained.

Attraction and retention difficulties continue 

The competition for top talent and critical-skills workers is as challenging as ever, as labor market shortages and voluntary turnover continue to plague organizations. As a result, the need to manage a robust employee value proposition and employee experience (EX) that differentiates one employer from another enhances hiring and retention efforts. Well-designed jobs that offer more decision-making discretion, development, meaningfulness, and feedback support such efforts.

Employee stress and burnout levels are increasing

The reported rates of employee stress and burnout are at record levels, driven by competitive volatility, changing market and customer demands, and generational personality trends. Job design offers a uniquely high potential to manage those by clarifying job responsibilities, reassessing the reasonableness of goal assignments, better distributing workloads, and proactively raising individuals’ awareness (meaningfulness) of how their efforts align with business, financial, operational, and customer objectives. When jobs are properly resourced with shared accountabilities, and tasks are allocated in manageable chunks that are well-mapped to the skills and motivations of role-holders, and management supports their efforts with feedback and coaching, burnout, absenteeism, and turnover can be better managed. 

As companies seek ways to increase employee productivity, improve engagement, retain high performers and future leaders, and raise the overall well-being of workers and teams, job design offers a structured pathway to achieving these goals.

Steps to improving job design

Job design is conducted as part of a process, often led by compensation or total rewards experts (internal or external), to design or update an organization’s job architecture or job classification structure. Its utility as a starting point is undeniable, as it encourages consideration of not only what tasks will be assigned to an individual role holder, but the extent to which those can be balanced between co-workers, provide employee decision-making authority, and allow them to engage a variety of skills to make the work interesting, challenging, and motivating. 

Alternatively, a job design effort can be conducted in partnership with an HR Business Partner, Manager, or Generalist as a team effectiveness enhancement approach, or as part of a work process improvement and redesign effort in conjunction with formal methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, or Kaizen. In any of these cases, a process would follow steps such as these:

1. Conduct or leverage job analysis

Job analysis is the formal process of identifying and documenting the duties, responsibilities, skills, and requirements of a job. It generates insights used to populate a job description or success profile, including information on duties and responsibilities, skills and capabilities, knowledge and experience, work environment, and tools and equipment needed to meet the role requirements. Such information is collected through structured interviews, direct observation, and surveys.

2. Assess job design characteristics

The nature of the role, as both performed and experienced by incumbents, is assessed by collecting direct insights from role holders, engaging current and former workers to ensure a sufficient number of perspectives are included. Surveys such as The Work Design Questionnaire (WDQ) provide objective data based on research (discussed above), make interpreting opportunities easier and more consistent, and offer the potential for benchmarking. The same or similar questions can also be presented and discussed in worker interviews or focus group sessions. The results of these data collection activities yield insights into:

• Uneven workload distribution
• Overly (or under) complex and taxing work assignments
• Restricted freedom to exercise discretion across assigned tasks
• Lack of feedback and linkages to larger team, department, or customer outcomes
• Continuous and repeated physical or mental work processes
• Over or under-dependence on others that undermines the social benefits of work
• Time spent in difficult, uncomfortable, or unhealthy physical demands and conditions

Any of those should point to opportunities to redistribute tasks to better balance necessary tasks with more satisfying assignments.

3. Evaluate opportunities for role redesign

Among the possible approaches to job design, five classic methods improve the employee work experience, benefiting both the organization and the individual. These changes target not only greater work efficiency, but also employee development, engagement, and refreshment. These options include:

• Job enlargement: Adding different tasks to a job to increase its variety, expand skills development, and reduce monotony.
• Job enrichment: Assigning greater levels of responsibility, autonomy, and control over how, when, and where the work activities are conducted.
• Job rotation: Formally moving employees between different roles to increase their range and diversity of skills, and their understanding of different steps of a work process, phases of production, or stages of customer value creation. This is an effective method for keeping people fresh, rapidly developing their appreciation of the value added by all roles and functions within a workstream, and finding a specialized role or career development opportunity that best suits them.
• Job simplification: This involves breaking down complex tasks into simpler, more manageable components that can be performed more effectively across a team. While it may appear to reduce the motivational value of a role, overly complex work tends to tax and frustrate employees when they are looking for successful completion within a reasonable timeframe.

Other approaches to improving the design of jobs involve consideration of where and when they are performed, with an eye on making the work more efficiently delivered while engaging different worker needs, including: 

• Workplace and ergonomic design: Making physical or structural changes to the worksite to make performing the tasks more comfortable, less physically taxing, and safe. From offices to manufacturing locations, industrial and human factors engineers, occupational therapists, industrial designers, and ergonomists all provide services in support of this.
• Flexible work scheduling: Establishing, encouraging, and enabling the use of non-traditional (e.g., 9-5, M-F) working hours and days, flexibility in creating irregular schedules on an ongoing basis, and remote work locations to avoid burnout, stress, and dissatisfaction. These can be particularly effective in jobs that require substantial individualized time and effort, significant travel, and distance from a shared office location, and can be efficiently performed through asynchronous communication and collaboration.
  
  

Personalizing job design

Taking cues from technology providers, learning content and delivery developers, and human-centered design experts, personalization is increasingly becoming a key driver of success in improving human performance. When considering job design at the individual or small-group level, as an HR-created intervention to address flagging performance or as a retention-motivator for a critical individual contributor, for example, some emerging concepts are worth understanding.

The first is job crafting, where employees are given permission to redesign their roles to customize their duties, responsibilities, output requirements, and performance KPIs to better align with how they view their mission/purpose/value proposition relative to those of the larger organization and its customers. While management retains the right to approve/disapprove, edit, or alter the suggestions, this can provide those in highly specialized roles, approaching their retirements, dealing with significant health or family challenges, or offering unique value-added product or service development innovations, to establish a highly personalized job design. 

A broader approach to personalization at scale involves collecting aspirations and motivations, and mapping the psychological profiles of top performers and contributors across different roles to better understand and match and redesign their jobs. This could be analyzed using the WDQ and compared to the needs that come from what are known as the “Big Five Personality” dimensions or traits, widely acknowledged and accepted as differentiating human capabilities and behaviors:

• Openness to experience (intellect/imagination): Measures curiosity, creativity, and desire for novelty. High scorers are imaginative and adventurous, while low scorers are conventional and prefer routines.
• Conscientiousness (thoughtfulness/order): Measures organization, responsibility, and goal-directed behavior. High scorers are disciplined and organized, while low scorers are more spontaneous and careless.
• Extraversion (sociability/energy): Measures comfort level with social interactions and energy levels. High scorers are talkative and energetic (extroverts), while low scorers are reserved and reflective (introverts).
• Agreeableness (kindness/cooperation): Measures trust, altruism, and kindness. High scorers are empathetic and cooperative, while low scorers are competitive, cynical, or manipulative.
• Neuroticism (emotional stability): Measures emotional resilience and reactivity to stress. High scorers often experience anxiety and moodiness, while low scorers are more stable, calm, and resilient. 

Jobs could then be designed to better leverage the strengths and capabilities, and avoid the shortcomings, of the most common mix of Big 5 characteristics among the most successful job holders in any given job or job family.

Simplified job design for teams

While some approaches might seem too complicated, time-consuming, or beyond the resources of a given HR team or organization, a simpler, more effective approach can be implemented with smaller groups by an HR Generalist or HR Manager, with little to no support from a compensation professional or team. What is critical is a) basing all activities on standardized and updated job descriptions, and b) the use of a structured and consistent approach across workers and teams.

The process engages employees directly in understanding the current state, identifying challenges related to the most efficient, effective, and engaging performance of their jobs, and recommending how to redesign their job responsibilities and accountabilities. Group sessions can be conducted, collecting insights using the following steps and questions:

1. Ask your employees for feedback on their job responsibilities and structure (e.g., what is working and what is getting in the way of achieving individual and team goals, quality outputs, and required timelines?).
2. Review work process maps and task responsibilities matrices, and ask the employees how they would redesign the work and redistribute responsibilities (e.g., What added steps and capabilities would enhance our ability to add more value to the required functional, operational, business, or customer outcomes?).
3. Bring the outputs of the employee sessions to managers and leaders and have them evaluate the ideas and get further insights into updating job requirements (e.g., What skills and proficiency levels are needed to best execute these WITH MINIMAL supervision? What level(s) of employees hold those capabilities at the minimum level?).
4. Generate ideas around streamlining and replacing repetitive and mundane tasks through better use of technologies (e.g., Which repetitive and low-risk tasks can we automate? Outsource?).
5. Ask how discretion and decision-making authority can be effectively shared to relieve common process bottlenecks and delays (e.g., How far down can we push responsibilities and delegate decision-making authority?).
6. Finalize the job design analysis and problem-solving by identifying how jobs can be enlarged with associated skill growth and expansion (e.g., What other skills or capabilities (technical, functional) might be integrated into the team(s) to enhance the team's effectiveness and outputs?).

The resulting observations and insights can be aggregated and shared with upper management for approvals, and, with the support of HR professionals, new job designs can emerge that offer more meaningful, motivational, and engaging work, resulting in more efficient and effective workflow processing.

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