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Fitting Jobs to People
By admin | April 15, 2007
Large numbers of management officers sooner or later face the challenge of coping with Lordstown Syndrome, i.e. boredom and alienation among the employees that would render their performance weaker and full of flaws.
Lordstown Syndrome is particularly more likely among workers who are employed to do more mechanical sort of jobs where creative abilities of the workers are stifled. The poor performance resulting from this situation makes it a serious problem since it threatens the company’s reputation among clients and muddles the working relationship between the staff and the management.
Experts in management issues usually deal with this potential risk by adopting two main strategies:
- Fitting People to Jobs
- Fitting Jobs to People
Job rotation is the commonest way of fitting people to jobs after the online recruitment process. What you do is move people periodically from one specialized job to another with the purpose of avoiding stagnation and hence preventing alienation. The rotation should, however, not be so frequent that the staff starts feeling as if they are being unfairly manipulated.
An alternate strategy of preventing alienation among workers is changing jobs for the existing employees instead of changing people. At the heart of this approach lies the point of achieving a fit between the employees and their work so that both high work productivity and satisfying work experience for the employees be made possible at the same time. Experts would propose two techniques for getting at this approach. These are:
- Job Enlargement
- Job Enrichment
In job enlargement, two or more specialized tasks are combined, in a work flow sequence, such that they become a single job. For example, the role accounting clerk with a job in Las Vegas may be enlarged by asking him/her to include a brief description of the company or organization whose products he/she uses to list in a breakdown prepared weekly or monthly.
This introduction of novelty and complexity has been found helpful sometimes in preventing alienation. However, if kept prolonged and overly complex, this technique may itself become a bore. Another factor is the employee’s concern about doing additional work for the same amount of pay. Therefore, a balance needs to be maintained between the enlargement in work and the compensation.
Job enrichment is another way of fitting jobs to people. Enrichment of a job is obtained by redesigning it in such a way that greater complexity and depth is added to it nature, increasing its potential to motivate the worker. The same task is loaded with planning and decision making on part of the employee to involve his energies more fully in his/her job. Job enrichment can be accomplished by upgrading five main aspects of work:
- Increase the employee’s skill variety involved in the job.
- Escalate the degree to which the job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work.
- Add to the significance of the task by upgrading its substantial impact on the lives of other people.
- Provide autonomy i.e. greater substantial freedom and discretion to the employee in scheduling his/her work.
- Provide timely and rewarding job feedback.
It’s additionally important that sufficient background checks are done on all employees, but that’s for another post.
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