Successful leaders organize employees effectively. They design and define job descriptions so that workers can maximize performance, achieve job satisfaction and produce quality products or services. Job specialization reflects the degree to which tasks get broken down and divided into smaller tasks. Benefits include worker proficiency, decreased time between task transfer and the ability to develop specialized equipment for a specific function. However, job specialization typically results in worker boredom and dissatisfaction. To promote career development, alternatives include job rotation, job enlargement and job enrichment activities.
You can enable employees to develop and expand their abilities in a few ways. Broaden the job characteristics, such as the number of tasks a person performs. Raise the perceived importance of the task and add to the degree of control the employee has over how work gets done. Leaders can organize work teams and empower them to make decisions about work assignments. Leaders can also group jobs into departments to enable effective coordination. Additionally, leaders can focus on organizational structure on customers, geographic locations, products or services.
Instead of focusing on job specialization, implement a job rotation program that allows employees to move from one job to another. This reduces employee boredom. It also enables you to ensure that you have trained employees ready to perform all the different types of tasks required to produce a product or service. Depending on the complexity of the tasks, workers could rotate jobs on an hourly, daily, monthly or yearly basis. This program can be complex and difficult to manage from a human resources perspective, but improvements to employee morale might make it worthwhile for your business.
By expanding the scope of a job, you increase the number or types of tasks a worker performs. This can make employees feel more valuable to the organization and reduce absenteeism due to low morale and boredom with a single task. However, when employees receive too much responsibility, they can feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped to handle the job, so implement this type of program only after conducting adequate training. Workers must have the skills, knowledge and resources to complete all job tasks assigned to them.
By increasing both the number of tasks and the control the worker has over the job, you can significantly improve employee morale. When workers have a high degree of autonomy, they tend to take more interest in their work. This motivates them to produce products and services of high quality. For example, when you implement quality management initiatives using techniques such as Six Sigma, you empower employees closest to the work to become accountable for improving processes, reducing errors, eliminating waste and improving customer satisfaction. Six Sigma is a data-driven methodology for eliminating defects. It strives for near perfection, with processes that have six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit.
- Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology; Thomas H. Davenport
- Armstrong's Handbook of Management and Leadership: Developing Effective People Skills for Better Leadership and Management; Michael Armstrong
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