FREE online courses on Career Paths WBT - The Changing Career Strategies - Job enrichment

• Job enrichment involves increasing a worker's responsibility and control over his or her work, and is also called “vertical job loading”
• Job enrichment allows you to expand your responsibilities or change your role to develop new competencies without leaving your current position or the organization altogether.
• Job enrichment is also used as an effective motivational technique.

 

According to this perspective, if a job provides a sense of responsibility, a sense of significance and information concerning performance, the employees will be internally motivated to high levels of performance. The key to creating this situation is to enrich jobs so they provide five core characteristics: task variety, task significance, task identity, autonomy and feedback (Whittington, 1998).

 

Again consider Vandana, an assistant manager and a plateaued employee  is exploring alternative career paths. To try to retain Vandana and her expertise, her manager begins by allowing her to monitor certain duties the department is assigned, and asks her to participate in a focus group developed to advise management on improved communications between departments. Later, Vandana is asked to become an advisor, or short-term mentor, to new employees in the department. Vandana seems to be more satisfied now, and is proud of her “senior” status.

Job rotation

Job rotation is the systematic movement of employees from job to job within an organization, as a way to achieve many different human resources objectives –

• For simply staffing jobs,
• For orienting new employees,
• For preventing job boredom, and, finally,
• For training employees and enhancing their career development.

 

Job rotation is often used by employers who place employees on a certain career path or track, usually for a management position, where they are expected to perform a variety of duties, and have a variety of skills and competencies.

 

Job rotation is often confused with cross-training. While both interventions perform essentially the same service of providing employees with a varied set of skills, job rotation goes beyond this. Besides being used as a means of management training, job rotation can also be used as a form of job enrichment, by adding increased responsibilities, increasing challenge, and reducing boredom or burnout.

 

For example, when Tarun, the new printing division manager, was completing the job rotation part of his training, he realized how much more interesting this made coming to work each day. Even though he may be assigned a duty that he did not like at the moment, he knew that next week he would be rotating to a different task. Tarun also realized that this rotation could be used as a valuable training and staff coverage tool. One of his first big projects was setting up a regular job rotation system within each department at the new division. For example, in the pre-press area, staff members rotated weekly between the functions of design and layout, creating negatives, creating masters, and plate making. Boredom and absenteeism decreased, and jobs were covered when there was an absence.