Dimensions of ?JOB” concept in HR - A Basic Understanding

?? The very first step when discussing about job is the process of JOB ANALYSES.

?? Job Analysis is an exploration, study and recording the responsibilities, duties, skills, accountabilities, work environment and ability requirements of a specific job.

?? The process helps in finding out what a particular department requires and what a prospective worker needs to deliver. It also helps in determining particulars about a job including job title, job location, job summary, duties involved, working conditions, possible hazards and machines, tools, equipment and materials to be used by the existing or potential employee.

?? It also extends to finding out the necessary human qualifications to perform the job. These include establishing the levels of education, experience, judgment, training, initiative, leadership skills, physical skills, communication skills, responsibility, accountability, emotional characteristics and unusual sensory demands. These factors change according to the type, seniority level, industry and risk involved in a particular job.

Performing a job analyses you collect the following:

?? Job Content: It contains information about various job activities included in a specific job. It is a detailed account of actions which an employee needs to perform during his tenure. The following information needs to be collected by a job analyst:

• Duties of an employee
• What actually an employee does
• Machines, tools and equipment to be used while performing a specific job
• Additional tasks involved in a job
• Desired output level (What is expected of an employee?)
• Type of training required

?? Job Context: Job context refers to the situation or condition under which an employee performs a particular job. The information collection will include:

• Working Conditions
• Risks involved
• Whom to report
• Who all will report to him or her
• Hazards
• Physical and mental demands
• Judgment

?? Job Requirements: These include basic but specific requirements which make a candidate eligible for a particular job. The collected data includes:

• Knowledge or basic information required to perform a job successfully
• Specific skills such as communication skills, IT skills, operational skills, motor skills, processing skills and so on
• Personal ability including aptitude, reasoning, manipulative abilities, handling sudden and unexpected situations, problem-solving ability, mathematical abilities and so on
• Educational Qualifications including degree, diploma, certification or license
• Personal Characteristics such as ability to adapt to different environment, endurance, willingness, work ethic, eagerness to learn and understand things, behaviour towards colleagues, subordinates and seniors, sense of belongingness to the organisation, etc

The most common methods of job analysis are observation method and questionnaire method and the process results in collecting and recording two data sets including:

• JOB DESCRIPTION
• JOB SPECIFICATION

??Any job vacancy cannot be filled until and unless HR manager has these two sets of data. It is necessary to define them accurately in order to fit the right person at the right place and at the right time. This helps both employer and employee understand what exactly needs to be delivered and how.

Job Analysis plays an important role in:

§ Recruitment and Selection

§ Performance Analysis

§ Training and Development

§ Compensation Management

§ Job Designing and Redesigning.

?? The next step after job analysis is the JOB DESIGN.

Job design essentially involves integrating job responsibilities or content and certain qualifications that are required to perform the same. It outlines the job responsibilities very clearly and also helps in attracting the right candidates to the right job. Further it also makes the job look interesting and specialised. It aims at outlining and organising tasks, duties and responsibilities into a single unit of work for the achievement of certain objectives.

A well-defined job encourages feeling of achievement among the employees and a sense of high self-esteem. The whole process of job design is aimed to address various problems within the organisational setup. More specifically the following areas are fine-tuned:

? Checking the work overload.

? Checking upon the work under load.

? Ensuring tasks are not repetitive in nature.

? Ensuring that employees don not remain isolated.

? Defining working hours clearly.

? Defining the work processes clearly.

The above mentioned are factors that if not taken care of, result into building stress within the employees.

The following are the benefits of a good job design:

?? Employee Input: A good job design enables a good job feedback. Employees have the option to vary tasks as per their personal and social needs, habits and circumstances in the workplace.

?? Employee Training: Training is an integral part of job design. Contrary to the philosophy of ‘leave them alone’ job design lays due emphasis on training people so that are well aware of what their job demands and how it is to be done.

?? Work / Rest Schedules: Job design offers good work and rest schedule by clearly defining the number of hours an individual has to spend in his/her job.

?? Adjustments: A good job designs allows for adjustments for physically demanding jobs by minimising the energy spent doing the job and by aligning the manpower requirements for the same.

Job design is a continuous and ever evolving process that is aimed at helping employees make adjustments with the changes in the workplace. The end goal is reducing dissatisfaction, enhancing motivation and employee engagement at the workplace.

However, there are a number of existing issues emerged recently while designing the jobs in organisations. These are alternative work patterns that are equally effective in handling organisations functions.

• Telecommuting / Work from Home (see now the effect of pandemic!)
• Job Sharing (two or more individuals share the responsibilities of a full-time job
• Flexi-Working Hours
• Alternative Work-Patterns (companies these days allow their employees to work on alternate months or seasons)
• Technostress (is the latest technology to keep a check on employees’ performance even when they choose to work from home. Because of the introduction of new machines, there performance can be electronically monitored even when they are not aware of it)
• Task Revision (task revision is nothing but modification of existing work design by reducing or adding the new job duties and responsibilities to a specific job.

?? Restructuring the elements including tasks, duties and responsibilities of a specific job in order to make it more encouraging and inspiring for the employees or workers is known as JOB REDESIGNING. The process includes revising, analysing, altering, reforming and reshuffling the job-related content and dimensions to increase the variety of assignments and functions to motivate employees and make them feel as an important asset of the organisation. The main objective of conducting job redesigning is to place the right person at the right job and get the maximum output while increasing their level of satisfaction.

?? JOB CLASSIFICATION is a scheme of classifying a job according to the current responsibilities and duties associated with the job. It is different than job design in that the person assigned to the job is not taken into consideration. Jobs are classified with the purpose of studying jobs in a holistic perspective.

Job classifications group’s jobs into various grades, each grade having a certain specific class description and many times a pay scale that is used for job comparisons. Often the title is also assigned on the basis of grade arrived at after the job classification.

There are various methods available for classifying jobs and often these vary across organisations and the industries. The basic purposes of classifying jobs are:

? To help in recruitment and selection by defining significant qualification standards.

? To help in designing and developing standards for performance and appraisals.

? Allocating responsibilities aligned to the company mission and vision and those that help in the realisation of organisations business plans and strategies.

? Identifying career and growth paths in organisations.

? Establish standards for compensation.

Job classification is not a constant or one-time process; it is an ever changing one. They change due to introduction of new policies and procedures, new management initiatives and in many cases due to introduction of new technologies.

Many organisations use the tools of job balance assessment and competency matrix assessment for dealing with the changes associated with job classification. These tools help in aligning the employees with changes in the external environment such that their productivity levels are enhanced and not otherwise.

?? JOB ROTATION is a management approach where employees are shifted between two or more assignments or jobs at regular intervals of time in order to expose them to all verticals of an organisation. It is a pre-planned approach with an objective to test the employee skills and competencies in order to place him or her at the right place. In addition to it, it reduces the monotony of the job and gives them a wider experience and helps them gain more insights.

Job rotation is a well-planned practice with the following objectives, being beneficial both for the employees and management:

? Reducing Monotony of the Job

? Succession Planning

? Creating Right-Employee Job Fit

? Exposing Workers to All Verticals of the Company

? Testing Employee Skills and Competencies

? Developing a Wider Range of Work Experience

? Helps Managers Explore the Hidden Talent

? Helps Individuals Explore Their Interests

? Identifies Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes

? Motivates Employees to Deal with New Challenges

? Increases Satisfaction and Decreases Attrition Rate

? Helps Align Competencies with Requirements

Let us go through the disadvantages of job rotation:

?? Lot of time as well as effort go in motivating and persuading employees for job rotation

?? Individuals take some time to acquaint to a new process, set up, be friendly with other employees and so on.

?? Job rotation also leads to stress and anxiety among employees.

?? Job rotation it does not consider the time wasted in training someone who is not worth it and does not deserve to be in the system also.

?? Sometimes, employees even after working for few months, in another department hardly learn anything. All your efforts go waste when the end result is a zero.

??????Organisations are increasingly facing the heat of attrition and often it is not for the money that people leave, many of those who quit their jobs complain of their jobs as uninteresting!

?? All this has compelled organisations to think of ways to make the job they offer interesting: JOB ENRICHMENT is one of them. It is the process of making a job more interesting, challenging and satisfying for the employees. It can either be in the form of up gradation of responsibilities, increase in the range of influence and the challenges. It is an increase in responsibilities and scope, and this increase is often vertical.

Job enrichment opens up a feedback channel for the employees. Employees are frequently apprised of their performance. This keeps them on track and helps them know their weak and strong points.

?? JOB ENLARGEMENT is a job design technique wherein there is an increase in the number of tasks associated with a certain job. In other words, it means increasing the scope of one’s duties and responsibilities. The increase in scope is quantitative in nature and not qualitative and at the same level.

Job enlargement is a horizontal restructuring method that aims at increase in the workforce flexibility and at the same time reducing monotony that may creep up over a period of time. It is also known as horizontal loading in that the responsibilities increase at the same level and not vertically.

The following are the major benefits of job enlargement:

? Reduced Monotony

? Increased Work Flexibility

? No Skills Training Required

The difference between job enrichment and job enlargement is essentially of quantity and quality.

?? Whereas job enlargement means increasing the scope of job quantitatively by adding up more tasks, job enrichment means improvement in the quality of job such that employees are more satisfied and fulfilled.

??Through job enrichment an employee finds satisfaction and contentment in his job and through job enlargement employee feels more responsible and worthwhile in the organisation.

??Job enrichment entails the functions of planning and organising and enlargement involves execution of the same. Both complement each other, in that job enrichment empowers and enlargement executes.

??Job enrichment depends upon job enlargement for success and the reverse in not true.

??Job enrichment means a vertical expansion in duties and responsibilities and span of control whereas in job enlargement the expansion is horizontal in nature.

??Job enrichment has been found to have greater impact in terms of motivation when compared to job enlargement. Since enrichment gives employee greater insights in managerial functioning and a better work profile, it is looked upon as an indicator of growth and development. The same is not true in case of job enlargement which is seen as an employer tactic to increase the workload.

?? In conclusion, paying enough attention to all dimensions mentioned above in due and at the best possible time for the organisation, it will bring a lot of benefits for all the parties involved: employer, employees, HR department:

§ Designing new organisation and roles/jobs

§ Changing the organisational design or roles

§ Aligning roles and pay to organisational changes

§ Designing an effective organisation

§ Defining interdependencies among different jobs

§ Clarifying accountabilities of jobs

§ Managing succession in organisation

§ Reviewing the existing pay structure

§ Auditing legal compliance of pay policies

§ Implementing benchmark pay structures

§ Setting value-based pay policies

§ Carefully monitor the performance of every employee

§ Defining training and development needs for an employee

§ Giving feedback to employees

??? What other benefits do you think there could be? Let me know your input! ??

Source of data: own experience & managementstudyguide.com