Build It

7Job Design

Chapter Objectives

In this chapter, we will:

• Discuss how we got to a place where too many people have jobs that provide no pleasure, satisfaction or pride.
• Present a model for thinking about jobs based on how demanding they are and how much control the person has.
• Explain the key ways we can create high‐engagement jobs.

Key Points

• Bad job design can sabotage any chance of employee engagement.
• Some jobs are just too easy to be engaging because they lack autonomy and freedom.
• The best‐designed jobs have recognition and learning built into them from the start.
• Job design problems can actually be the root cause of issues with recognition.

Introduction

I'm going to start by being blunt: We are universally terrible at job design.

Most jobs aren't actually designed at all—we're lucky if they are a list of loosely connected tasks and we rarely, if ever, think about how the person doing them will feel. As a result, we end up with boring, repetitive jobs; frustrating jobs; and jobs where the person can't tell if they've had a good day or a bad one.

To make matters worse, we then document these positions with job descriptions—some of the most awful documents to come out of HR, which I often think have a primary aim of being waved at someone as we fire them, saying, “See, you didn't do any of these things.” And then, as if this weren't enough, we convert the descriptions into job advertisements that paper over the cracks and make the key responsibilities even ...