Step One – Find out where people are dissatisfied with their current work assignments. There’s little point to enriching jobs and changing the work environment if you’re enriching the wrong jobs and making the wrong changes. Like any motivation initiative, determine what your people want before you begin.
Surveys are a good means of doing this. Don’t make the mistake of presuming that you know what people want: Go to the source – and use that information to build your enrichment options.
Step Two – Consider which job enrichment options you can provide. You don’t need to drastically redesign your entire work process. The way that you design the enriched jobs must strike a balance between operational need and job satisfaction. If significant changes are needed, consider establishing a “job enrichment task force” – perhaps use a cross-section of employees, and give them responsibility for deciding which enrichment options make the most sense.
Step Three – Design and communicate your program. If you’re making significant changes, let people know what you’re doing and why. Work with your managers to create an enriching work environment that includes lots of employee participation and recognition. Remember to monitor your efforts, and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of what you’re providing.
Advantages of job enrichment
*Interesting and challenging job :- When a certain amount of power is given to employees it makes the job more challenging for them, we can say that job enrichment is a method of employee empowerment.
*Improves decision making :- Through job enrichment we can improve the decision making ability of the employee by asking him to decide vation speaks of these higher order needs e.g. Ego and esteemed needs, self-actualization etc. These needs can be achieved through job enrichment.
*Reduces work load of superiors :-Job enrichment reduces the work load of senior staff. When decisions are taken by juniors the seniors work load is reduced.
Disadvantages of job enrichment
*Job enrichment is based on the assumptions that workers have complete knowledge to take decisions and they have the right attitude. In reality this might not be the case due to which there can be problems in working.
*Job enrichment has negative implications ie. Along with usual work decision making work is also given to the employees and not many may be comfortable with this.
*Superiors may feel that power is being taken away from them and given to the junior’s. This might lead to ego problems.
*This method will only work in certain situations. Some jobs already give a lot of freedom and responsibility; this me thod will not work for such jobs.
*Some people are internally dissatisfied with the organization. For such people no amount of job enrichment can solve the problem.
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