In which of the following ways can job enrichment be accomplished check all that apply

In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Job enrichment is a well-researched and effective method of motivating employees. The strategy is to motivate employees by giving them tasks which are interesting and challenging, and as such require more skill. Put simply, it is making someone’s role or job more interesting for them by enhancing the tasks which make up their role – ‘enriching the role’. It is thought that through enrichment, an individual will find their role more engaging, rewarding and interesting.

Job enrichment as a managerial strategy includes a three-step process. Let’s go through it.

1. Translate employee effort into improved performance.

• Aligning employees with the company’s vision. Ensure that objectives are understood and defined.
• Provide necessary resources and tools for employees to give them the best opportunity to perform.
• Open communication
• Providing functional and technical skill improvement opportunities.
• Provide freedom in job roles.
• Provide recognition and appreciation.
• Provide job role variety.

2. Connect performance directly to reward.

• Define what ‘reward’ entails.
• Coherent information and explanation of how performance translates into a reward.
• Make sure reward is incremental with performance so that the better the performance, the greater the reward.
• If reward is not given, an explanation is needed.

3. Is the reward wanted?

• Ask the employee.
• Use surveys.

The history of job enrichment

Job enrichment dates back to 1968 and the American psychologist, Frederick Herzberg. He released an article called ‘One more time: how do you motivate employees?’. In it, he advocated enhancing individual jobs to make them more challenging and rewarding. This provided the basis for job enrichment research. Herzberg added to his theory, citing a number of important motivators to make a given job more exciting, challenging and rewarding, subsequently enhancing the job and improving performance. The motivators are:

1. Giving greater freedom.
2. Encouraging participation.
3. Allowing more wiggle room for employees to choose the pace at which they work.
4. Allowing workers to choose the tools they need to work.
5. Allowing employees to choose the method of their working.
6. Providing employees, the opportunity to decide the layout of the office.

As you can tell job enrichment gives a great deal of freedom to the employee. But with this increase of freedom, comes an increase in individual responsibility. For some workers this will be great, and for others, not so much.

Advantages of job enrichment

Let’s go through some of the advantages of job enrichment. Here are some of the reasons why you might want to try out job enrichment:

Learn new skills – With a successful job enrichment strategy in place, the employee is likely to have greater opportunities to learn and develop new skills. The employee will also have a chance to increase knowledge in pre-existing areas of skill.

Reduce boredom – As has been discussed, job enrichment enhances the challenges and interest associated with a job role. It then follows that boredom will be negated as the job becomes more enriched.

Creates a better, more positive workplace – Job enrichment strategy has a good association with creating a positive work environment. A positive workplace has a bi-directional relationship with engagement and motivation. The more positive a workplace, the more engaged the workforce. The more engaged the workforce, the more positive the workplace.

Reduces absenteeism – Why would you not want to come to work if you actually enjoyed it? By making word more interesting and engaging, employees are more likely to come in.

Boosts motivation and engagement – By making tasks interesting and challenging, employees will become more engaged with their work. Further as a by-product of creating a more positive workplace, employees will not only enjoy their work, but enjoy being at work with their colleagues!

How can you utilise job enrichment to improve employee engagement?

So, we’ve given you the definition, the history and the advantages of job enrichment. When it comes to employee engagement, how can you utilise job enrichment to profit from more employee engagement. Here are some techniques which you might want to implement…

Education, training and mentoring

To really grasp all the benefits of job enrichment, you need to offer opportunities for education and training for the employee to take. Employees appreciate the opportunity to widen their skills and you continue training your workforce.

You could also assign a more senior employee to mentor the employee who is going through job enrichment.

Responsibility and freedom

It’s been a common theme in this blog, providing more responsibility and freedom via job enrichment. It’s easy to say, but it’s harder to do. Make sure that throughout the job enrichment process, you continue to provide your employees with greater freedom and responsibility. When an employee feels trusted by an organization they gain motivation and feel more engaged.

Career Development

Aligning career development with job enrichment is a strategy which will ensure improvements in employee engagement. Although job enrichment should lead to a broadening of skills, aligning career development will boost motivation, engagement and give the employee a sense of purpose at the organization. Have a look at our employee development plan to generate some ideas.

👉 Click here to listen to our webcast discussing employee development

Vertical Job Loading

Vertical job loading is a term coined by Herzberg describing how to enrich a position. To enrich a given position, you have to first determine the changes that will be made. It is also important to determine the timeline of changes. Do not, I repeat do not, make all the changes to a position immediately, this is likely to cause too heavy a workload for an individual. Once you have determined the potential changes, it is recommended to follow these principles to select which changes you will make:

1. Increasing accountability of an individual
2. Giving additional authority to an individual
3. Giving greater transparency to an individual
4. Introducing new and more challenging tasks to an individual
5. Giving an individual specific task to increase skill areas

What Is Job Enrichment?

Job enrichment is a method of job design that involves adding extra dimensions to a job to make it more interesting and motivating. The term was popularised by Frederick Hertzberg, a researcher working in the 1950s and 60s — but the same principles apply today.

How Does Job Enrichment Work?

The purpose of job enrichment is to expand the tasks that each employee performs, allow them to perform tasks in different ways, and ultimately give them more control over their work. This makes work more stimulating and helps to motivate employees to do their best work.

A key principle of job enrichment is to give employees more responsibility and increase the variety and complexity of the tasks they complete. Companies that want to introduce an enrichment programme usually begin by carrying out a job diagnostic survey (JDS), which is a formula that scores jobs based on factors like meaningfulness, autonomy and feedback.

Then, employers might introduce various strategies to add variety and interest to each job, to help motivate employees and increase their satisfaction at work.

Characteristics of Job Enrichment

Many job enrichment programmes are based on the Hackman & Oldham model (1974), which outlines five core job dimensions that affect job satisfaction:

• Autonomy: how much control an employee has over their work

• Skill variety: how many different skills employees use in their daily work

• Task identity: the ability to perform a task from start to finish

• Task significance: how directly the task impacts the organisation as a whole

• Feedback: communication around the results of an employee’s work and recognition for doing a job well

Job enrichment strategies based around these key elements might include:

• Combining tasks into meaningful units: Reorganising work to let employees take responsibility for entire projects instead of just one task can be a useful way to increase job satisfaction.

• Letting employees work in teams: Allowing employees to work together helps them to develop new skills and understand how their role fits into the organisation’s activities as a whole.

• Delivering and encouraging feedback: Actively telling your employees when they’re doing well can be a great motivator. Equally, listening to (and implementing) employee feedback shows employees that their ideas and voices are valued.

• Eliminating micromanagement: In many organisations, processes are needlessly complicated by unnecessary approval steps, which can stand in the way of efficient workflows.

Give Potential Room To Grow With Personio

Automate your performance cycles to open up time for job enrichment with Personio today.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Job Enrichment

Focusing on enrichment can have some big advantages for your organisation and your employees alike — but there are some disadvantages too.

Job Enrichment Advantages

Here are some of the advantages of implementing an enrichment programme:

• Increased motivation: Creating a collaborative work environment where employees work together and get to see the results of their work can help to increase employee motivation. Delivering feedback and recognition when employees do great work can also encourage them to take on new responsibilities and learn new skills.

• Improved employee experience: Job enrichment allows employees to continuously learn and build on their skills — a key factor in the employee experience.

• Lower turnover: Employees who are happy, engaged and motivated at work are much more likely to stay with your company for longer — which means job enrichment should be a big part of your retention strategy.

• Uncovering potential: Giving employees the chance to experience work outside of their traditional job description could reveal hidden talents, and allows employees to grow within their role.

Job Enrichment Disadvantages

Enrichment also comes with some downsides, including:

• Increased workload for employees: When you give employees the chance to work on different tasks outside of their normal roles, there’s a chance that you’ll simply overload them with work.

• No guarantee of participation: Some employees are simply not interested in job enrichment, and just want to get their work done. This means you could end up wasting time and resources putting together job enrichment initiatives for employees who ultimately don’t participate.

• Possibility of micromanagement: Taking on new tasks often means employees need to be in close contact with their managers. This can mean additional work for managers, who may feel the need to micromanage every step.

Job Enrichment Examples

Here are some examples of job enrichment so you can understand how it might work in practice in your organisation:

Example #1

Imagine a customer service department that receives a lot of calls from customers seeking after-sales care. When a customer requests a refund, the customer service representative has to send a request through to their line manager who reviews the case and decides whether it should be granted.

This creates a bottleneck in the process, delays things for the customer, and makes the representative feel like they’re only there to answer calls.

In this case, a useful form of job enrichment might be to give customer service reps the autonomy to decide when a refund should be granted. This both makes the process more efficient and gives the employees more responsibility — which could lead to better job satisfaction.

Example #2

For our second example, let’s say you have a copywriter in your marketing department. They create content for the company website based on briefs put together by the content manager.

Before being published, their content is proofread by an editor and then checked and optimised by the SEO manager.

Allowing the copywriter to own this process from start to finish might be a good form of job enrichment in this situation. This would mean they would create the brief themselves, then write the content, proofread it and ensure it’s in line with the company’s SEO guidelines.

5 Barriers to Job Enrichment

Job enrichment can have big results for organisations in terms of reducing absenteeism, increasing workplace satisfaction and even improving retention.

But these initiatives are not possible in all situations, and there are certain barriers that can stand in the way:

1. The Technical System

Existing systems within an organisation can present a barrier to job enrichment. For example, if an assembly line in a factory is physically set up to allow each employee to focus on one task all day, it can be difficult to increase the variety of tasks each worker performs.

2. The HR System

In some organisations, the HR system includes formalised job descriptions that can’t easily be changed. Collective labour agreements or roles defined by labour unions can also make it difficult to adjust an employee’s responsibilities.

3. The Control System

Organisational departments and internal systems like budgets, production reports and accounting practices can all play a role in making job enrichment more difficult. For example, assigning tasks that have traditionally been owned by one department to employees in another team can lead to internal struggles and competition.

4. The Supervisory System

Like any other HR initiative, job enrichment needs active and enthusiastic management participation to work. Trying to give employees more autonomy and responsibility can cause problems with certain managers, who may see this as their domain.

5. Individual Motivation

Job enrichment is effective for employees with a high need for growth, who welcome new challenges and the chance to learn new skills. However, some employees are simply not interested in this — which means these programmes won’t work for them.

Job Enrichment vs. Job Enlargement

The terms ‘job enrichment’ and ‘job enlargement’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Job enlargement is actually just one form of job enrichment, which involves adding additional tasks to an employee’s workload.

This allows them to gain experience in different areas, broadening their skill set and giving them more variety in their day-to-day work. It can also mean allowing them to participate in a process from start to finish, instead of just being responsible for one task.

However, job enlargement can have some downsides too. Some employees may feel that they are simply being expected to do more work for the same salary, which they might grow to resent. Plus, employees performing tasks that they have limited experience in can lead to errors and an overall decrease in productivity.

Continually Enrich Your HR Expertise

Want to learn more about what you can do to increase job satisfaction, motivation and retention in your organisation? Read our complete guide to employee experience, and our guide to boosting employee motivation to find out more.