Guest Insight: Job Design Critical to Sustainable Employee Engagement

In this time of “The Great Resignation,” organizations and leaders need to create work that is intrinsically meaningful. But they often have no idea where to start. How do we create jobs that people genuinely want to do and help them become more effective and engaged in the process? Frederick Herzberg said it best: “If you want someone to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” Motivational Work Design offers a framework for creating a truly competitive work product.

By Thomas Bertels

What are the Benefits of Work Design?
Identifying Work Design Opportunities
How to Redesign Work for Impact
Implementing the Design

The pandemic fundamentally changed how we work. For almost two years, offices around the world stood empty and people did their jobs from home. Now, as companies eye returning to in-person work, they face some harsh realities. As fellow consultant Joe Spadaford points out: “We have an increasingly remote workforce where staff need to perform at a high level without direct supervision. We have difficulty finding and retaining talent—with staff turnover at record levels, leaving many positions unfilled. We also have issues with staff placed in unproductive roles, and not adding enough value to the organization. These are real challenges.”

Organizations must also factor in the altered expectations of their workforce. It is no secret that people seek more meaning in their lives, but what’s new is the predominance of work-life balance in this exploration. With more time for self-reflection during the pandemic, many employees are now asking themselves what they want and need from work, and it goes well beyond a bigger paycheck. Those who determine that their current role isn’t delivering on their deeper needs, are looking for greener pastures elsewhere. And with so many jobs available, they’re finding plenty of places to apply.

What are the Benefits of Work Design?

Redesigning work to be fit for humans has benefits that extend far beyond having a more engaged workforce. You also experience the benefits of:

Attracting top talent by offering a competitive ‘product’: jobs that are intrinsically motivating and productive
A better customer experience, critical for referrals and repeat business
Direct feedback from customers
Streamlined processes
Start-to-finish ownership and accountability for the work product
Reduced need for supervision to manage performance and coordinate how work gets done

Companies that embrace work design often achieve remarkable results: Reduced turnover, improved customer satisfaction, higher productivity, and lower cost.

The underlying issue for employers struggling to retain and recruit talent is that their offering is not competitive. And the way we typically define jobs lies at the heart of the problem. Leaders often reuse what worked for them before, so they copy and paste job descriptions, organizational structures, and process designs - one of the reasons why job descriptions within a certain industry or function tend to look alike. But by doing so, we perpetuate job designs that are rooted in outdated industrial era models, creating highly specialized roles and elaborate hierarchies to manage and control how work got done. What we fail to consider, though, is that these industrial models are ill-suited for the today’s workforce and fail to address fundamental psychological human needs for autonomy and purpose. And that is no longer acceptable if we hope to attract and retain the best.

Not content to just bring home the bacon, today’s humans want work that we perceive to be meaningful; autonomy to decide when and how to do it; technology and tools that enable us, and knowledge of the result or how well we did. When these deeper needs are met, we experience work as motivating. When they are not, however, it can lead to employee disengagement and turnover. Extensive research over the last fifty years has proven this point again and again that we’re seeing the results in today’s “Big Quit.” When done right, work design can provide a solution.

Identifying Work Design Opportunities

The starting point for any work design effort is to identify where within an organization it could make a difference. Various survey-based tools can identify specific jobs that could be improved and where these jobs are lacking in regard to six underlying drivers:

Autonomy: The ability to use judgment and discretion
Feedback: Doing the work provides feedback
Purpose: The outcome is very important to others
Entirety: Being responsible for the entire work product
Variety: Being able to apply a broad range of skills
Tech: The technology used is fit for purpose.

With that data in hand, companies can zero in on where work is broken and what is missing from their job offerings. They can then start to build the necessary leadership commitment to act, an imperative piece in the puzzle.

How to Redesign Work for Impact

To be successful, a work design effort requires an integrated approach. It must be tied to the organization’s goals and culture to ensure a good fit for those participating. From there, deliberately designing jobs to be intrinsically motivating is surprisingly straightforward. Here are the seven basic principles behind a work design effort:

Streamline the process and eliminate unnecessary tasks
Pull tasks together into jobs or teams
Create natural work units that own the work product from start to finish
Minimize switching cost
Create direct client relationships
Delegate responsibility to lowest possible level
Open up feedback channels.

Implementing the Design

So how do you begin implementing a motivational work design model? Should it be top down, or is an incremental approach from the bottom up better? The answer is simple: The more you engage people in developing their own design, the better. Leadership needs to be on-board because without their buy-in, nothing will happen. But those actually doing the work must be involved and encouraged to offer their ideas and suggestions for how redesign the work. Without that, it’s hard to make meaningful, lasting change. As John Uzzi, a leading expert on motivation work design notes: “The more you can engage people in and the more you get them to design their own work, the better. They are the people who know it. And if they don’t know they will know that. And they will tell you that and then figure out who does know it.”

Are you seeing high employee turnover and low customer satisfaction? Then you might be a perfect fit for this solution. But what about cutting costs? You don’t start a work design effort to simply save money – you do it because you want to create a better workplace and offer a higher service or product for your customers. You probably will save money along the way, but it should not be the main driver for work design. Work design is not a one-size-fits-all solution and should be tailored to its context and company culture. And it might not be appropriate when the work itself is distasteful, technology drives everything, or the organization is too small to have it make a real impact.

An effective work design can be a powerful antidote to turnover in this unprecedented time of competing for talent. As we emerge from the pandemic, meaningfulness, doing things right, and doing the right things is becoming more and more important. And if done well, a work design effort can have a dramatic positive impact on people’s lives.

Motivational work design provides a unique opportunity to foster increased meaning and engagement in our occupations – an important aspect of our lives. As many companies question whether and how to bring people back to the office, work design offers a framework that allows people to work more independently, foster engagement, reduce turnover, and create scalability. In the words of Joe Spadaford, “We want our organizations to be both efficient and effective, so we should make sure most jobs are well designed in this digital world.”

For More Information
Thomas Bertels, Founder
Purpose Works Consulting LLC
Purpose.works
Thomas.bertels@purpose.works

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