Enriching jobs

Expanding the range and scope of a job so that it is less specialised and more fulfilling.

During the Industrial Revolution specialising work was all the rage. Rationally, it was argued, the more specialised the work assigned to an individual, the greater the potential for efficient performance. The snag with this is that the advantages of specialising the work are negated by the disadvantages of having someone do a job they find monotonous and boring. Countless motivation studies demonstrate the importance of work itself as a key determinant of whether someone is switched on or switched off.

From a learning and development standpoint there is no doubt that specialisation is a dirty word. The more jobs can be enlarged and enriched the better for both motivation and for development.

There are two main ways to enrich someone's job; you can increase the range of activities (strictly speaking this is called job enlargement) and/or you can increase the level of responsibility. So, for example, you could enlarge a subordinate's job by giving them an extra activity such as raising invoices for a new product in addition to invoicing for all the existing products. You could enrich a subordinate's job by getting them to take responsibility for the accuracy of the invoices they raise. In practice, enlargement and enrichment tend to go hand in hand, but it is possible to do one without the other.

Involving the job holder in thoughts on how their job could be enlarged and enriched is in itself an example of job enlargement. The secret of success is to ensure that the different aspects of the work someone has to do are related, rather than being a hotch potch of miscellaneous things. One way to assess this is to check whether the knowledge and skills necessary to perform the work are closely allied and can reasonably be possessed by the same person. It would be reasonable, therefore, to enrich a salesperson's job by increasing the range of products or type of customers, but unreasonable to expect the salesperson to take on responsibility for psychometric testing.

Broadening the range of activities and increasing the amount of responsibility automatically generates learning opportunities for the job holder. This is so even if the enrichment is temporary, as in covering for holidays or 'acting up'.