Technological advances produce a “bipolarisation” – de-skilling some lower level jobs and increasing the skill requirements at higher level jobs.
This condition can only be cured by periodical job redesign considering the abilities of people and by continuous effort of human resource development. Job redesign can be of three kinds:
Kinds
1. Job Enrichment:
Job enrichment increases the amount of job “satisfiers”. According to Hertzberg “motivators” or “satisfiers” include – achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth.
Thus, the responsibility level (control by oneself), growth level (continued learning opportunities) and therefore the challenge level could be increased in the job, thus “enriching” it.
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Of course, the people should becapable of handling these higher level demands of the “enriched” jobs.
2. Job Enlargement:
It is not always possible to enrich jobs. Instead, one can increase the variety of tasks in a job. All these tasks do not differ significantly in their level of responsibility.
This is termed as job enlargement. Job enlargement is gaining much relevance in the manufacture of automobiles, for example, which are traditionally made on an assembly line.
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The enlargement process tries to make the jobs as “complete” as possible. The worker therefore not only has variety but is also held responsible for a “complete” job.
The job redesign methods will not only produce more motivated workers, less defects in quality and higher productivity, but will also mean less supervision, and less movement of men or materials. Of course, there will be additional costs of training which will be small compared to the benefits gained.
3. Job Rotation:
The third method is that of job rotation, whereby at periodic intervals people are posted at jobs of different nature (although of the similar level).
For instance, production employees could be rotated in the maintenance department and vice versa.
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Both production and maintenance workers would have learnt different skills and would appreciate one another’s problems.
Where jobs enlargement cannot be done due to physical reasons, variety and integration is brought in through a carefully planned periodic rotation.