Job Design and Analysis Strategies

Study Notes

Work is effort directed toward accomplishing results, organized into jobs for people.
A job is a grouping of tasks, duties, and responsibilities that constitutes the total work assignment for an employee.

Work Flow Analysis and Business Process Re-Engineering: Checking to see that work is effectively divided into jobs.
Job Design or Re-design: Improving jobs for motivation or efficiency.
Teams: Using group inputs where appropriate to improve jobs for flexibility or retention.
Alternative Scheduling Options: Improving jobs for flexibility or retention.
Job Analysis: Accurately identifying what is done in a job now.
Job Descriptions and Specifications: Committing to writing the tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities required to do a given job.

Workflow analysis: Study of the way work (outputs, activities, and inputs) moves through an organization.
Business process re-engineering (BPR): Measures for improving activities like product development, customer service, and service delivery.
Job design: Organizing tasks, duties, responsibilities, and other elements into a productive unit of work.
Person/job fit: Matching characteristics of people with characteristics of jobs.

Job enlargement: Broadening the scope of a job by expanding the number of different tasks to be performed.
Job enrichment: Increasing the depth of a job by adding responsibility for planning, organizing, controlling, or evaluating the job.
Job rotation: Process of shifting a person from job to job.

Job Characteristics (enriched jobs): Skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback.
Psychological States: Experienced meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of results.
Desired Outcomes: Motivation, performance, and satisfaction.

Skill variety: Extent to which the work requires several different activities for successful completion.
Task identity: Extent to which the job includes a “whole” identifiable unit of work that is carried out from start to finish.
Task significance: Impact the job has on other people.
Autonomy: Extent of individual freedom and discretion in the work and its scheduling.
Feedback: Amount of information employees receive about how well or poorly they have performed.

Special-purpose team: Organizational team formed to address specific problems, improve work processes, and enhance the overall quality of products and services.
Self-directed team: Organizational team composed of individuals who are assigned a cluster of tasks, duties, and responsibilities to be accomplished.
Virtual team: Organizational team composed of individuals who are separated geographically but linked by communications technology.

Technology: Information system hardware and software.
Training of Team Members: Training on effective collaboration and technology use.
Virtual Management: Planning and managing tasks, and coordinating and conducting virtual meetings.

Compressed workweek: Schedule in which a full week's work is accomplished in fewer than five 8-hour days.
Flextime: Scheduling arrangement in which employees work a set number of hours a day but vary starting and ending times.
Job sharing: Scheduling arrangement in which two employees perform the work of one full-time job.

Job analysis: Systematic way of gathering and analyzing information about the content, context, and human requirements of jobs.
Methods: Questionnaires, interviews, observation, logs/diaries.
Sources of Data: Employees, supervisors, managers, job analyst, outside consultants. . Used for: Job descriptions, job specifications, HR planning, recruiting, selection, compensation, training, performance management, health, safety, security, employee/labor relations.

Task: Distinct, identifiable work activity composed of motion.
Duty: Work segment composed of several tasks that are performed by an individual.
Responsibilities: Obligations to perform certain tasks and duties.
Competencies: Individual capabilities that can be linked to enhanced performance.

HR Unit: Coordinates job analysis, writes job descriptions and specifications, periodically reviews, and ensures accuracy; may seek outside experts for analysis.
Managers: Completes/assists with job analysis information, reviews/maintains job descriptions/specifications, requests new analysis, identifies performance standards, and provides information to outside experts.

Job description: Identification of tasks, duties, and responsibilities of a job.
Job specifications: The knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) an individual needs to perform a job satisfactorily.
Performance standards: Indicators of what the job accomplishes and how performance is measured in key areas.