Job redesign involves reorganizing duties to adapt to changing work environments, allowing businesses to remain agile and competitive. This process helps align roles with new technologies and evolving organizational needs, enhancing productivity and employee engagement.
By Brad Nakase, Attorney
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When planning for the future of work, job redesign is a powerful tool for shaping the evolving roles that people will play. A well-executed plan can produce employees who propel the business ahead. Here, we’ll define job redesign and provide a framework for doing just that.
In order to better adapt to the ever-changing internal and external environments of a business, job redesign involves reorganizing duties and responsibilities.
Let’s go over the final portion of the definition first. Roles in organizations evolve in response to shifting conditions both within and outside the company. There has never been a time when the globe was more VUCA—volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous. Digitalization and automation are having an effect on job functions within the company as well.
Think about this example when you think about how the world outside the company is changing. The soda jerk industry employed half a million workers throughout the 1930s and 1940s. It was a dream job for many to work as the Soda Jerk, operating the soda fountain in a grocery or pharmacy. Also prevalent during that time were linotypists, elevator operators, and switchboard operators.
Every one of these positions has vanished. Many vocations in the service industries, including sales, personal care, construction, cleaning, and food preparation, are experiencing the same thing in today’s society. These changes have an effect on duties and jobs as well.
Part two of the definition discusses the reorganization of duties and obligations. Automating tasks isn’t always possible. Rather, computers take over some routine jobs. As a result, tasks such as manually checking receipts will eventually become unnecessary for a novice accountant. A computer program can now do this for you, turning a junior accountant into more of a consultant.
In keeping with this, self-service solutions have put human resources administration in the hands of managers and employees. This frees up HR advisers and others to concentrate on providing strategic advice and value-adding analysis by reducing the administrative burden on their schedules. The use of integrated, self-service dashboards is also driving automation in HR reporting. As a result, the data analyst will have more time to devote to producing high-quality reports.
This suggests that some jobs will become obsolete as a consequence of technological automation. There will be additional responsibilities for some jobs and the elimination of others.
Job redesign, which is sometimes called “work redesign,” is the process of moving these duties and jobs around to make them fit with how work is changing.
“Job redesigning” refers to a regularly utilized five-step process. With this methodical approach to job redesign, you’ll be able to easily complete each of these steps.
Redesigning jobs begins with adapting to new circumstances.
Redesigning a job is necessary when it seems like the duties of the job have shifted and need to be amended. This may be due to the fact that these jobs are becoming obsolete due to automation or because they demand specialized knowledge.
The latter includes developments such as the widespread need for proficiency in digital platforms as a condition for employment. While statistics are still limited, a recent Dutch study indicated that half of the workforce need digital skill upgrades. Naturally, these abilities are role-specific, but they may include things like programming, social media savvy, proficient computer use, blind typing, and familiarity with programs like Microsoft Office. One can anticipate that these findings will be consistent across all industrialized countries.
Organizational incentives for reworking jobs are another possibility. It takes new skills in old positions for a consulting business to decide to make advice-giving their future service offering or for a traditional store to decide to put money into its online capabilities. Job redesign is also useful in this context.
Redesigning a job is typically a response to a change in reality that starts with an internal organizational event. If a direct manager wants to know how tech-savvy the administrative staff is, that request might come from them, but if the company’s core principles need updating, that would come from the top. Your approach to stakeholder management and analysis will vary according to the request.
In the first stage, you’ll want to figure out what needs to change and then pick out a few jobs or categories of jobs that will be most affected by that change so you can start thinking about how to redesign them.
After deciding which professions to revamp, the second step is to examine them. There are various ways to accomplish this, such as the Critical Incident Technique, the Job Element Method, the Task Inventory, the Functional Job Analysis, and narrative task or function descriptions.
The Functional Job Analysis documents the information, interpersonal abilities, and tools needed to carry out the job.
Identifying tasks and noting their relevance, duration, and frequency are all part of the task inventory.
To provide a more worker-oriented perspective, the Job Element Method identifies the traits of high achievers.
Interviews are needed to write narrative task or function descriptions, which are meant to make a story that explains the main tasks.
In order to assess exceptional performance (in a positive or negative sense), the critical incident technique focuses on the surrounding circumstances, actions, and their outcomes. The objective is to establish standards for appropriate behavior.
It would be too lengthy and complicated to cover all of the methods in this post. But in the end, there are only three things that matter. They begin by taking stock of the current state of affairs. Secondly, they rank the significance of these assignments. As a third step, they find out what abilities are necessary to complete the task.
Based on what was discovered in phase 1, these descriptions will reflect the reality that is always evolving. It is possible that jobs are now being done incorrectly and that new abilities are needed to execute them correctly.
There might be changes at the corporate level as well, depending on how extensive the job redesign project is.
There are a lot of companies that have well-defined skills that all employees must meet. Since they are applicable across functions, we refer to them as core skills. Although not all employees must possess these skills to the same extent, it is essential that they do so.
The hotel company Four Seasons exemplifies one of these key strengths. “Service culture” is one of their fundamental principles. They show their values most profoundly in the way they respect each other and by the example they set for one another, reads a line from the website’s “How we behave” section. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a guiding principle in all of their dealings with clients, consumers, partners, and coworkers. The Four Seasons and its employees are very competent in the area of service orientation.
Every department will feel the effects of any changes made to or updates to these company-level competencies. That’s why this level of research is so important when redesigning jobs.
Phase four involves redefining the work using all the feedback from the previous phases. Either a small revamp is in order, or the work can be merged with others, making it almost obsolete. Various parties will have a hand in the outcome, depending on the significance and extent to which the work has evolved.
It is important to manage the key stakeholders from the beginning, but this is a good time to check in with them to see whether they agree with your conclusions. Because they are more immersed in the details of their own daily lives, they are often in a better position to put things in perspective than you are.
One more thing: the worker. An individual with a distinct set of skills already occupies the majority of available positions. Employees are more likely to be satisfied with their work lives when they are a good fit for the roles they play.
Upon confirmation, it is common practice to formalize job and position changes in the company’s competency framework. It will be necessary to explain changes, even though they will have varying impacts on different jobs. Here we enter the last stage, which involves implementing the job redesign.
Phase four is all about putting everything into action. The redesign’s progress will be formally conveyed to various staff and next steps will be determined.
Learning and development programs that reskill individuals in the newly required abilities may emerge from job redesign efforts. Furthermore, it has the potential to alter the standards by which individuals are recruited, developed, paid, and let go. Because of this, it may also cause employees to quit. Both voluntary and involuntary forms of this occur when employees feel unprepared for their new positions or when management simply does not have faith in an employee’s abilities to thrive in a different setting.
Communication is an important aspect of this stage. When making changes that will affect a large number of people, such as revising fundamental principles or reorganizing important job functions, it is important to let individuals know about these changes as soon as possible so they can prepare for them. People must be aware of the necessity of change, actively participate if possible, and feel motivated to comply.
Jobs are evolving in tandem with the environment around us. The organizational development toolbox includes job redesign as one of its strategies. With proper implementation, it can aid in the development of a position that meets the demands of the company and the external environment while also making use of the employee’s strengths and abilities.
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