Job enrichment
Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and organizational behavior, is the process of improving work processes and environments so they are more satisfying for employees. Many jobs are monotonous and unrewarding. Workers can feel dissatisfied in their position due to a lack of a challenge, repetitive procedures, or an over-controlled authority structure. Job enrichment tries to eliminate these disfunctional elements.
Job enrichment techniques include:
- Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone. The overall corporate mission statement should be communicated to all. Individual's goals should also be clear. Each employee should know exactly how she fits into the overall process and be aware of how important her contributions are to the organization and it's customers.
- Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes support functions like information technology, communication technology, and personnel training and development.
- Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicing.
- Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy.
- Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered.
- Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.
- Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training.
- Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.
- It may be necessary to re-engineer thr job process. This could involve redesigning the physical facility, redesign processes, change technologies, simplification of proceedures, elimination of repetitiveness, redesigning authority structures.
See also
