Job Enrichment

Job design is the arrangement of the method, contents and interaction of the jobs in order to suit both technological and organizational demands, social and personal requirements of the job holder. It is a process that involves the structuring of the task related activities and individual acquaintances of a job by determining how responsibility, implication and self-sufficiency workers are allowed in their jobs. Job design is aimed at providing intrinsic rewards as compared to financial incentives which give extrinsic rewards.
There are various reasons why job design should be carried out in a company. They include; to satisfy organizational requirements for productivity, quality of products and services and for efficiency in operation, secondly to satisfy the individual needs which may include challenges and accomplishments thus bringing about commitment to carrying out the job well, to fulfill the social responsibilities of the organization to the people who work in it by improving the worth of working life, it brings about motivation, reduces boredom and monotony and finally leads to empowerment.
Thus the overall goals of job design are to blend the needs of an individual with the requirements of the organization. Therefore a job designer should consider a good set up of jobs which will provide maximum degree of intrinsic motivation for those workers carrying out the jobs with an aim of improving performance and productivity. (Raymond, 1994)

There are five main principles of job design which were suggested by Robertson and Smith (1985) and they include; first to influence duty identity, integrate tasks and form natural work units, second to influence task magnitude and inform people of their importance of their work, third to influence feedbacks, create good relationships and have open feedback channels, fourth to influence autonomy, give employees the responsibility of making their own working systems and finally to influence talent variety, provide opportunities for people to carry out several tasks and also combine tasks.
These principles bring about a variety of encouraging characteristics which are of great importance in job design. The characteristics are: use of abilities, response, diversity, attitude that a chore is noteworthy and finally independence, diplomacy, willpower and accountability. There are different techniques used in job design and they include;
Job Enlargement
This is making a job larger in scope and expanding it by combining extra task activities in to the job through horizontal extension and loading, again to increase variety and meaning of repetitive work. This involves expanding the job vertically. This expansion corresponds to compensation as well as increased power and usually goes with salary increment. The job holder is given a superior control over his or her work, more self-governance and responsibility.
There are different elements of job enrichment which include; accountability where by the workers are held responsible for their own performance, achievement where the workers should feel that they are accomplishing something valuable, feedback where workers should receive direct and timely information from the job itself regarding performance, flexibility where employees are able to get their own elasticity and work rates, control over resources where employees are able to manage their resources and costs finally personal growth where the workers should have the opportunity to learn new skills and technology.
(Raymond, 1994) Job Rotation This refers to internal transfers within the organizations. This is done by way of training program where by the employees a couple of time like two to three months in an activity and then move to another job. This broadens the employees’ scope of experience and gives them a wide range of knowledge. It also reduces job monotony by having a variety of jobs in a p of time. Self-managing teams These are self regulating teams who work without direct supervision. Read about Evolution of Job Design
This provides fundamental motivation by giving people independence and the means to control their work . The basis of the self sufficiency work group approach to job design is social-technical theory which states that the best results are achieved when workers are grouped in a way that they are related to each other by way of task performance. A self managing team enlarges a person’s job to include a wider array of working skills, divides tasks among its members.
High-performance working design
It fully concentrates on ensuring that a technical group with high standards of service delivery is developed to meet the need of the organization to give quality levels of performance. They usually design to ensure that the needs are fully met to address the changing technological methods of manufacturing and production while also having to ensure that the initial expectations from its introduction are taken care of. It also entails that systematic training is done based on the evaluations done on training needs. (Raymond, 1994)