Why You Might Not Have a Well Designed Job

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Source: pexels/creative commons

Do you have a good job?

What comes to many people’s minds when they are asked this question is whether their job is secure and provides sufficient pay for life’s most important expenses. Perhaps add in a good boss who doesn’t maltreat you too much. But a good job also needs to be well designed.

You can think of your job as requiring you to engage in certain types of activities (cognitive, emotional, physical) and also providing you with resources to do so (information, support, tools). You can also think of a job’s characteristics, for example, whether it is routine, whether you can make decisions yourself, whether it provides you with feedback on your performance and impact, and whether it is only a small part of a bigger project. Finally, you can think of your job in terms of how much it exploits your talents, knowledge and skills.

There is mounting evidence that deskilled jobs (those that do not provide people with opportunities to exercise their skills) and jobs that have excessive demands (mostly around accomplishing lots of work in little time) are on the rise around the world. The promise of technology making our jobs lighter has not been realized. Though technology has sped up how fast work is accomplished, it seems to have increased the demands placed on us, and has not necessarily made work more interesting and stimulating. Why is that?

Sharon Parker and her colleagues may have found the answer. In their research, they asked university students and professionals to group and divide various work tasks into jobs. Then they asked them to explain the strategies they used to do it. The results were enlightening. The natural inclination was to design simplified and routine jobs. The most common strategies used (mentioned 73% of the time!) were to group tasks that were similar or that used similar skills. Though this might seem to maximize efficiency, it doesn’t take into account the negative effect this might have on people’s motivation or well-being, or the loss of accountability and innovation that demotivating jobs engender.

In a previous post, I mentioned that employees who are given autonomy, who feel competent, and who have positive and meaningful relationships with their colleagues are more motivated, perform better, and experience greater overall wellbeing. Other research going back nearly forty years has shown that people who have enriched jobs – that is, jobs with autonomy, a good variety of tasks, social support, reasonable job demands, and an opportunity to learn and use skills – have better mental and physical health, are more satisfied with their jobs, perform better at work, and are less likely to leave.

Sharon Parker’s research also offers some insights on what we can do to make sure we design better work. First, people seemed to replicate what they had experienced in their work. In other words, if they had experienced poorly designed work, they were more likely to create the same for other people. Managers were no better (and sometimes worse…) than non-managers at designing enriched work. However, people with deep theoretical and practical knowledge obtained through their professional training designed more enriched jobs. Therefore, training people to design good work might be a crucial skill that needs to be embedded into educational programs.

We have to get better at designing work if we want to see organisations and employees thrive into the future. If you are responsible for creating or shaping jobs for other people at your workplace, take some time this Monday to look at the types of jobs you have designed—are they healthy and motivating?

This post was co-authored with Courtenay McGill