Our Shared Agenda

“If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.”

 'Industry Week'  Frederick Herzberg, American psychologist (1923-2000)

 

As I said previously, each of us wants to know what is expected of us; the extent of our responsibilities; how our input contributes to the whole; how well we're doing and to have the opportunity to show our potential and be recognised for good work. That's equally as true for you and me - as leaders - as it is for each individual in our group.

 

So one of your most challenging, but rewarding, tasks is to really get to know your people and to use this knowledge to create jobs for each that optimise their talents and abilities. It's often referred to as job enrichment. 

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Fred Herzberg, about whom I wrote in the section on 'motivation', argued that job enrichment should create jobs with clear opportunities for achievement and feedback on performance. Essentially, the individual needs to:

 

• experience the work as meaningful - if the job appears to be trivial and insignificant, an individual is very unlikely to be internally motivated;

 

• experience responsibility for the results of their work - if the quality of an individual's work depends more on external factors than on their own efforts, there's no reason to feel personally proud when they do well or deflated when they do not;

 

• have knowledge of the results of their work - if individuals rarely find out whether they are doing well or badly, they have no basis for feeling good about doing well or unhappy about doing badly. 

 

There are a number of specific job design characteristics that can enrich jobs:

 

• skill variety - jobs that require individuals to use a range of skills, abilities and talents that stretches them;

 

• task identity - jobs that require completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work, with a visible outcome. Doing a whole job, putting together an entire product, delivering an entire service, being able to point to an item and say "I made that", is more satisfying than being responsible for only a small part of the job;

 

• task significance - jobs that have a significant effect on the lives of others. Putting drawing pins into boxes is likely to be experienced as less worthwhile than putting medical prescriptions into bottles, even though the skill levels required may be the same. In the second case, lives may be at stake;

 

• autonomy - this relates to freedom, independence and discretion in scheduling one's own work and determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out. As autonomy increases, so people seem to feel more personal responsibility and involvement in the successes and failures that occur on the job and are more willing to accept personal accountability for outcomes;

 

• feedback from the job - actually carrying out a job that gives some direct clear information about the effectiveness of the individual's performance;

 

• feedback from others - (managers, co-workers etc.) about how well or badly they are doing.

 

And here's an interesting footnote....in the i newspaper of 13th June 2020, I read the following:

Bored employees A French perfume company has been ordered to pay €40,000 (£36,000) in damages to an ex-employee who suffered from 'bore out' because he was given only menial tasks to do for four years.

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And another footnote....those of a certain age might recall hearing about how Volvo assembled cars 'back in the day'. It was termed the 'Team Assembly System'. The teams organised themselves any way they wished and at the speed they chose. While someone on a conventional assembly line might spend their entire shift mounting one number-plate lamp after another, every member of a Kalmar work team would work at one time or another on all parts of the electrical system—from taillights to indicators, headlights, horn, fuse box and part of the electronically controlled fuel-injection system. The only requirement was that every team met its production goal for a shift. As long as cars rolled out on schedule, workers were free to take coffee breaks when they pleased or to refresh themselves in comfortable lounges equipped with kitchens and saunas. The group assembly system operated in two ways - teams of 2-3 that covered one aspect of the car on multiple vehicles or teams of 3 that built entire individual vehicles from the ground up. There were 25 production teams in total at Kalmar and every team had access to their own individual break room, workshop and sauna.

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In the mid '70s, I used to take colleagues around two vehicle assembly plants in Singapore - one assembled Mercedes using a system not too dissimilar to the Volvo use of teams, the other built Fords on a conventional assembly line. My purpose was to encourage my fellow bankers to compare and contrast two distinctly different production methods and examine how the organisation of work could affect quality. (It won't come as a surprise to learn that Mercedes won the day). Of course, my hope was that my colleagues would look more critically at the way they organised work and find ways to enrich the jobs of their staff....some did take up the challenge, others stuck to the old ways...oh well, t'was ever so. At least some tried.

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