What is Job Design
Job Design is the process of matching our business needs with our employee’s (or potential employee’s) motivation and desires.
How Will The Concept Of Job Design Help You Win The War For Talent?
Millennials started to shift the world of work by demanding that their work mean more and that their career allowed for a better work-life balance. However, the pandemic accelerated the shift across all generations. Hiring the way you’ve always hired simply won’t work the way it used to.
Forward thinking leaders who recognize that the world of work is unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic norms are already looking at ways to get ahead of their competition that’s still hoping “everything will go back to normal in a few years…” The most strategic of these leaders are learning everything they can about the concept of Job Design to help them learn how to not only meet their business goals, but also attract and keep the best talent in the market.
3 Ways To Incorporate Job Design With Your Next Hire or Replacement
1. What is the Business Need for the position
This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to define. We’re looking for 1-2 sentences that explain why the business is investing the time, energy, and money in this position. What are the business results we expect to get from this investment of time and energy to onboard, train, and manage this role? Why is it worth the investment in payroll, benefits, taxes, and leadership time?
Once you’ve defined the business need for the position – use it as the “North Star” to guide your decisions.
2. Think outside the box
Once you have a clear business need for the position, use it to free your mind to think of different ways you can get that business need met. You may find that you may be better hiring an outside expert or vendor vs trying to find a full-time W2 employee with the skills you need. You may realize that technology has changed the job so much over the past 10 years that the job description is woefully out of date.
I strongly encourage you to spend 20-60 minutes brainstorming ways to meet the business needs that are different from what you’ve always done. Ask yourself “How can I get this business need met?” Then just write down all the different ideas and ways that occur to you. This is a no-judgment process. Some of the ideas will be terrible – others will be worth more consideration.
Then think about why people leave this role (or others like it) and challenge yourself to think of ways to address the items that lead to turn over.
3. Ask Don’t Assume
Recently I was reading an article about how as the pandemic went on it became clear that the work from home experience was very different for leaders and managers than many of their mid-level professional and hourly workers. You may have been working from home with a home office or rarely used guest room. However, many workers had less than ideal work-from-home situations. The article stated that many leaders assumed their team members had similar work from home situations and didn’t realize how challenging it would be for some of their team members. This isn’t because the managers or leaders were jerks (at least not all of them!), but because it’s easy to start to make assumptions based on your environment and how you’ve always done things.
It’s easy to make assumptions and limit our thinking by what we’ve always done. As the example above illustrates, it’s important to ask, not assume, because many employees want to work-from-home, but not all of them.
I want to encourage you to introduce the concept of job design with your trusted employees to get their insight. Share the business needs, goals, and objectives and involve your employees determining innovative ways to achieve those goals. When you involve your employees in looking at ways to more efficiently meet the business’s objectives – while also encouraging them to consider what motivates them and what they desire from their work, I believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many good ideas your team members will have.
Job design is an advanced recruiting and retention strategy – but the leaders and companies that adopt it early will win the war for talent.
Need help winning the war on talent? Schedule a complimentary Discovery Call to learn how we can help!
