Work Design and Job Specialization

Introduction to Work Design

• Work design is crucial because an organization's success depends on human effort.

Job Design

• Job design specifies the content and methods of a job.
• Considerations include what needs to be done, who will do it, how it will be done, and where.
• Objectives include productivity, safety, and quality of work life.
• Two schools of thought exist, an efficiency school and a behavioral school.
• The efficiency school takes a systematic and logical approach.
• The behavioral school emphasizes satisfaction of wants and needs.
• Specialization is a point of contention between the two approaches.

Specialization

• Specialization involves concentrating on a specific aspect of a product or service.
• The primary rationale is to focus efforts and become proficient.
• Highly specialized jobs yield high productivity and lower unit costs.
• Monotony and boredom in lower-level jobs can lead to dissatisfaction, turnover, and absenteeism.

Behavioral Approaches

• Behavioral approaches can make jobs interesting and meaningful.
• Job enlargement gives workers more to do, on the same difficulty level.
• Job rotation involves workers switching jobs.
• Job enrichment involves increasing responsibility for planning and coordination.
• Lean operations utilize job enlargement and enrichment through cross-training.

Motivation

• Motivation impacts the quality and productivity of the work environment.
• Factors include compensation, socialization, self-actualization, status, and a sense of purpose.
• Management is supported in developing motivational frameworks for employees that are positive and goal oriented.
• Trust also influences motivation and productivity.
• An ideal work environment involves trust between workers and managers.

Teams

• Businesses have started rethinking the ways tasks are completed due to efforts to become more productive and competitive.
• Teams and the methods in which workers get paid are being used more and more, especially in lean production systems.
• Teams are now assigned nonroutine assignments with the purpose of developing and delivering solutions to problems.
• Short-term teams collaborate on specific goals such as quality improvement, product design or service design, or solving a problem.
• Self-directed teams are long-term teams increasingly used.
• Self-directed teams are designed to achieve a higher level of teamwork and employee involvement.
• These teams are given the agency to make certain changes in the various tasks in their process.

Ergonomics

• Ergonomics incorporates human factors into the design of the workplace.
• Ergonomics promotes human well-being and system performance.
• Improves productivity by reducing worker discomfort and fatigue.
• Ergonomics involves physical, cognitive, and organizational domains.
• The Gilbreths introduced motion study principles to improve worker efficiency and reduce injury by using ergonomics which also include human-computer interfacing.

Quality of Work Life

• Affects worker well-being, contentment, and productivity.
• Quality of work life includes coworker relationships and good management.
• Working conditions and compensation are also important.

Working Conditions

• Physical factors like temperature, humidity, lighting, noise, and ventilation impact worker performance.
• Governed by government regulations.

Temperature and Humidity

• Work performance tends to be negatively impacted if temperatures or humidity levels are too stressful.
• The stressful levels depend on how intense the work is.

Ventilation

• Noxious smells can be distracting and possibly even a workplace hazard.
• Removing any smoke and grime is necessary to ensure air quality

Illumination

• How well lit the workspace is depends on the type of work being done.
• It is important to have other considerations like the amount of glare and contrast.
• Having good lighting in halls and stairwells can also be a good safety precaution

Noise and Vibrations

• Noise is an unwanted sound that can stem from equipment and people.
• Noise can be distracting and can cause accidents or hearing damage.
• Noise and vibrations can be solved with implementations such as padding, stabilizers, shock absorbers, cushioning, and mounts

Work Time and Work Breaks

• Employees are more happy when work seems flexible, such as work hours or reasonable control
• Long work periods can cause boredom and fatigue.
• Periodic vacation are a means of motivation for workers.

Occupation Health Care

• Positive health outcomes contribute to productivity, less health care costs, and better attitudes of workers.
• Employee fitness and wellness programs are tools that help to keep employees more healthy.

Safety and Ethical Issues

• Worker safety is a basic need within job design.
• There are two sources of risk, accidents and carelessness.
• Ethical Issues affect operations through work methods, safety, accurate record keeping, appraisals, fair pay, and advancement.

Compensation

• A main concern when constructing a work system is employee compensation.
• Suitable plans are beneficial to both the employer and employee.
• There are a variety of pay structures, and they are as follows: time-based, output-based, and knowledge-based.
• The time-based system provides set pay for workers based on their day-to-day work.
• The output-based method is based on the employees production output that would determine their pay.

Management Compensation

• Many organizations are focused on changing their compensation models, with some even considering customer service and satisfaction.
• Depending on the company or division of work, executives pay can even be tied to the performance of the specific division.

Recent Trends

• Emphasis on variable compensation systems.
• Profit sharing and bonuses are viable options.
• The increase of health care costs can also influence what type of compensation package an employee receives.

Methods Analysis

• How a task is done is carefully analyzed.
• Job design first concentrates on the overall operation, then the specific arrangement of motions, materials, and workers.
• New equipment and tools can be one of many reasons why someone would need to analyze and test methods.

Motion Study

• This type of study systematically reviews the human motions used to perform an operation.
• A goal of this study is to remove movements that do not serve the purpose, and discover the most efficient order of movements.
• Frank and Lillian Gilbreth set the foundation for these practices in work
• Effective method can be developed with the motion study practices, which is done with reviewing: principle of motion, analysis of therbligs, micromotion study, and charts.
• There are important guidelines in these different categories to follow when improving motion efficiency in workspace arrangements.

Work measurement

• Concerns determining the time to complete a job.
• Time standards reflect the time it take to complete a task whilst working under typical conditions.
• Common method of work Measurement: Use of stopwatch time study, review historical times, predetermined data, and work sampling.
• All are methods for studying time.

Stopwatch Time Study

• Development of a time standard based on observations of one worker taken over a number of cycles.
• The following main steps are involved in this process: Determine the task, decide how many times to observe cycles, compute target standard time, and measure job and worker's rate of success.

Time standards

• Standards derived from historical time data.
• Standard are found thanks to accumulated data from previous company experiences.
• Analyst must analyze job to see the needed elements.
• It saves time and reduces having to repeatedly go through a complete time study each time.

Predetermined Time Standards

• Data published on what the standards should be that is based of research.
• Analyst must divide job into its basic elements (reach, move, turn, disengage), measure the distances involved (if applicable), rate the difficulty of the element, and then refer to the appropriate table of data to obtain the time for that element.

Work Sampling

• The process of estimating time of a worker based of their various activities done in a work day
• Useful in time studies and unlike time study has more use for ratio delay studies.
• With a sample given of how many tasks a person does or pieces of equipment is being used, managers can better validate and measure time expectations for their employers.

Operation Strategy

• Management should make the design of work systems a key consideration.
• Despite reliance and reliance on technology, businesses still rely on people at their core.
• Workers are valuable and can often provide the best contribution insights due to them doing physical day to day work.
• A spirit of cooperation can often be a good tool in getting the team working together to come to positive resolutions and results.