How to Design Jobs People Want To Do
Employee wellbeing expert Bob Merberg shares with HR and business leaders the science-backed nuts and bolts of job motivating potential, job characteristics, job design, and job crafting.
Adapted from a transcript of Bob Merberg’s presentation to the Impairment without Disability Conference on November 18, 2021.
When I work with organizations, HR departments, and employees, I find that jobs aren’t designed; they’re assembled. This is expecially true for individual contributors doing knowledge-based work. Usually, a manager or HR person looks at the work that needs to be done, which sometimes includes work that no one else wants to do, and it gets crammed into a multi-page job description.
What’s missing? First, the job holder’s capacity (some would say their resources) and the demands of the job are rarely matched, but typically are determined by trial and error, at the expense of the job holder. We certainly aren’t matching the job holder’s strengths to the job. We’re not mapping out who that individual will interact with on the job. And we’ll get to several of the other elements that are absent from the process of assembling a job.
In a paradigm that’s been around for a while but never taught in HR or business curricula, we design jobs. And every model of job design I know of depends on the participation and input of the job holder.
Job Characteristics
Here’s the definition of job design…
“The organization of work content, tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities to optimize individual health, well-being, and motivation, as well as the health and productivity of teams and organizations.”
It seems like a lot, but most of the concepts in this definition are symbiotic. Improve one, and the others improve.
How do we do it? We need to understand the link between the elements and the outcomes of job design.
Let’s examine the Job Characteristics model. We’re not going to go through the whole thing. But it has to do with the 5 core characteristics of a motivating job.
The model is 40 years old, but remains a foundation, albeit imperfect, of everything we know and believe about good jobs. I’m not providing you with outdated research, but with seminal research. I will also share with you some very current work.
The model was developed by Greg Oldham and Richard Hackman, who validated it based on studies of more than 6000 workers in a variety of industries, across socioeconomic strata, and throughout the United States. Don’t get distracted by the flow chart (below). We’re not going to go through the whole thing.
Today, I’m going to focus on 5 core characteristics of a motivating job, and a formula to produce a single score of a job’s motivating potential.
Hackman and Oldham identified 5 characteristics of a motivating job:
Skill Variety — The degree to which a job consists of different activities that require the jobholder to call upon a diverse set of skills and talent.
Task Identity — The degree to which the job requires completion of a “whole” and identifiable piece of work — i.e., doing a job from beginning to end with an outcome that can be observed by the jobholder.
Task Significance — The degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people — within or beyond the jobholder’s workplace.
Autonomy — The degree to which the job provides freedom, independence, and discretion of the jobholder in scheduling the work and in determining how it’s performed.
Feedback — The degree to the work activities required by the job results in the jobholder getting direct and clear information about the quality of their performance. This was later expanded to include the type of feedback we’re more accustomed to talking about — feedback from supervisors and co-workers.
Hackman and Oldham created a Job Diagnostics Survey, which distilled a job down to a single Job Motivating Potential Score. It was validated in many work settings, countries, and languages. There have been a few versions and refinements. It used to include about 23 questions. (Note that it was never intended to diagnose the situation of an individual job holder, was more for use with groups of employees holding a particular job.) I’ve never seen the full questionnaire used in an organization, nor do I think it needs to be.
However, a shortened version was used in a fairly rigorous analysis of more than 40,000 US federal workers representing almost every government agency. This shortened version simply asks respondents “To what extent is each core characteristic of a motivating job present in your job?”
The scoring formula in the federal project is the same exact formula used in the original assessment and many versions since then:
Job Motivating Potential equals the score for Skill Variety plus Task Identity plus Task Significance — divided by 3, times Autonomy x Feedback. Of course, the scores for any individual characteristic can give insight into what aspect of a job holds its motivational potential back.
The government cross referenced this data with performance appraisal data and concluded:
“Employees who believed their jobs had desirable characteristics such as skill variety, autonomy, and feedback were more likely to perform well. However, many Federal employees reported that their job lacked one or more elements necessary to a high level of motivation.”
Like most workplace studies, this doesn’t prove cause and effect.
But what’s important in scoring is that Autonomy and Feedback are weighted substantially higher. Consequently, if a job is short of Skill Variety, or Task Identify, or Task Significance, it can still have high motivating potential. But absence of Autonomy or Feedback will doom the job’s motivating potential.
So these are the factors that should be designed into a job. Other factors may play an additional role. One that’s conspicuously absent is social support, and Oldham and Hackman acknowledged this omission at a later date. Perhaps this is why the Federal government flexed the original definition of Feedback to include feedback from others, and not just the work itself as it was originally defined.
I should mention that there are other models job redesign can be built on, such as the job demands-resources model, which has to do with achieving a balance of the job demands with both organizational and personal resources… and demand-control-support model, which positions the correct proportion and kind of job demands, control (i.e. autonomy), and social support as pillars of employee wellbeing. We’ll leave those for another time, recognizing that much of their propositions are embraced by the Job Characteristics model.
How to Design a Job
There are a few levers — for lack of a better word (perhaps it should be elements or tactics) — that can be pulled to design the job. Here are the classics:
Job Enlargement — which has to do with adding more and/or different tasks
Job Enrichment — which is expanding responsibility, accountability, and independence
Job Rotation — moving employees from one set of tasks to another.
You can imagine a matrix that matches the five job characteristics to these levers. Skill variety, autonomy, and some of the others may be fairly obvious. Task Identity and Feedback are less conspicuous but, for example, if someone is doing work that isn’t conducive to them being involved with an identifiable process from beginning to end, job rotation may be a solution.
A recent meta-analysis of 55 job redesign studies, mostly based on the Job Characteristics model, included: job rotation; increasing task variety; making jobs more complex or highly skilled; giving workers greater autonomy and decision making power in their jobs; and involving employees in problem solving groups.
The researchers found that job redesign predicts positive outcomes like job satisfaction, wellbeing, performance and lower absenteeism.
In a separate study, one of these authors, Sharon Parker, also found that "poor work design begets poor work design.” That is, leaders who are in jobs that lack the characteristics of motivating work are more likely to design — r I should say, “assemble” — boring, repetitive jobs that also lack motivating characteristics.
This a collaborative (or participative or interactive) process. Employees can be brought in as individuals or in teams for their perspective on the best ways to design the work that will be an effective FIT for them.
Job Crafting
“The perfect job is a mirage. From a distance, it looks real. But up close, you see that a role designed by someone else can't be everything you want. If you like your work, don't search for your dream job. Try crafting your existing job to better fit your values, interests, and skills.” — Adam Grant, “Give and Take”
I’ve emphasized a participative process. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant takes it a step further, saying that a role designed by someone else isn’t likely to ever be your dream job. He recommends “crafting your existing job to better fit your values, interests, and skills.”
Job design, as it’s traditionally been conceived, though collaborative, may be what we’d consider a top-down process — usually leader-driven. Now, let’s talk about a bottom-up approach: employee-driven job crafting. It’s what Adam Grant was referring to, and earlier in his career he did some of the research that sets the stage for what we know about job crafting.
University of Michigan researchers Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski and others focused their attention on housekeepers (aka janitors or environmental service workers) at a major Midwestern hospital. (Housekeepers, sometimes referred to as cleaners or janitors.)
And it turned out to be an investigation into how some people personalize — or craft — their jobs. They tweak the actions (tasks); the interactions (relations with other people); and reactions (how they perceive the job). I call this the air model:
Actions
Interactions
Reactions
The Michigan research team found that there were two kinds of housekeepers: Crafters — those who personalize their work — and non-crafters, those who don’t.
The crafters tweaked their tasks and their interactions, and they viewed their work as important and saw themselves as part of the care team. The non-crafters were just doing a job, and doing as little as possible for the paycheck.
The crafters viewed it as calling; they had a more positive experience at work and were more satisfied with their lives.
The crafters, in the course of their cleaning work, noticed who hadn't had a visitor, and they would double back to spend time with those patients or with those patients family members. They also did things like bringing the patient a glass of water if no one else was available to do it. There were patients in comas, and some of the crafters took extra care of those rooms to the point of adjusting some of the framed pictures that hung on the walls.
Here’s how this research team defined job crafting:
“The changes employees proactively make to their own job designs in ways that can bring about… Engagement. Satisfaction. Resilience.”
Note the emphasis on “their own job designs.” Because this is bottom-up job design.
Considerable research since then has reinforced that many employees, like these hospital housekeeper job crafters, craft their jobs. So, an inevitable concern is: “What if workers craft their jobs in a way that reduces productivity or undermines the organization in any way?” And the answer to that is: Recognizing that employees will craft their jobs, bring job crafting out in the open and promote positive job crafting. This is a role for leaders.
Back to our AIR Model. You can tweak actions by crafting the quantity, the scope, or the method of job tasks (how you go about doing them).
Burt's Bees is a popular Natural Personal Care Company that encouraged all employees to rewrite and personalize their own job description.
A creative Burts Bees branding manager found herself in an analytical job that she crafted by emphasizing her creativity and storytelling strengths for the creation of story based on her analyses.
Now this was several years ago, and I don’t know if Burts Bees still does this since they got acquired. Do you know who acquired Burts Bees?
For other examples of Actions, think about those housekeepers bringing a patient a glass of water or adjusting a picture on the wall. And at Burts Bees we have this brand manager hired into an analytical role, but crafting that role to create stories from the data. And there are lots of examples these days of data analysts leveraging their creative side with beautiful, high-impact data visualizations.
Crafting interaction… like those housekeepers taking extra time to chat with patients or their families. In another example (I think this is from Burt’s Bees, but it doesn’t really matter) this maintenance technician personalizes on-the-job interactions by proactively initiating training relationships with new technicians. So he’s crafting some actions of his job — training — while also crafting social interactions.
Reaction. This is more commonly called “cognitive” crafting. Think of the hospital housekeepers who thought of themselves as part of the care team. And this is a big part of successful job crafting — viewing your job as an important part of a greater purpose, whether it’s a profound goal like helping make the world a better place or fulfilling the organizational mission (or a personal mission).
This quote from an interview on a podcast, from early on in the pandemic (think back to what the grocery scene was like in March 2020, when many of us were in lockdown and a lot of people weren’t going into grocery stores) in an episode called Coronavirus: Feeding A Sick Nation, a worker who delivers tortillas to grocery stores poignantly articulating an example of Reaction crafting:
“Before all this, I was dealing with my own internal struggle and feeling like my job wasn’t meaningful. Everyone wants to feel like they’re helping contribute, and I didn’t have that. Since COVID-19, I feel necessary. When I go to work, I feel a sense of fulfillment, like I’m making sacrifices for other people. It’s brought meaning to my job.
Oh my God, people need me!”
It’s tempting to think, “Well, maybe job crafting doesn’t lead to better employee experiences. Maybe happier, more engaged employees are just more likely to be hired into jobs that fit, or to take the reins of their job.” And that would be a good, skeptical thought. The Michigan research team, Adam Grant, and some folks at Google decided to take a look at that by setting up some experimental conditions.
And they found lasting improvements for Google employees — I think these were mostly engineers — who went through a job crafting workshop. They increase happiness and performance… compared to a control group. And those workshop participants who also had it emphasized to them that, not only are their jobs malleable, but their skills are malleable, too, had a 70% better chance of promotion compared to the control group. So this helped with career path, too!
Later research also showed that people who participate in a job crafting workshop had greater adaptability to change, which is the holy grail for many organizations.
Logitech ran an initiative that had 2/3 of their employees globally go through the Clifton Strengths process and then the Job crafting workshop, and while the program manager acknowledges that it’s not a panacea and doesn’t work for every worker in every situation, it was transformational for a great many employees and for the company, saying that job crafting inspired “a sense of progress and got them reinvigorated about what they're doing.”
How to Encourage Job Crafting
There are steps you can take to encourage those you lead to craft their jobs, or things you can ask of your leader if you have the opportunity:
Boosting autonomy — that is, empowering people to personalize their roles
Build job crafting into developmental plans. When you lead people in organizational setting, you should work with them on a career path developmental plan for themselves, and collaborate with them to encourage job crafting and recognize how it fits into their development.
Create and communicate strategic goals in a way that involves employees. Everyone should understand how their role fits into the bigger picture, and they should see or experience the final product, if possible.
Hold job crafting swap meets. You know when you're on a team, sometimes, Joe has to do data analysis and doesn't like it, and Jane has to write the text of the report and doesn't like it and they each like to do the other person's thing. So, is there an opportunity for them to switch?
As a leader, model job crafting. Tweak the actions, interactions, and reactions in your own job and let others see that you are doing it.
Evangelia Demerouti (Eindhoven University of Technology) in “Design Your Own Job Through Job Crafting”:
“Motivate employees to craft their jobs, give them the freedom to do so, but also specify what ‘good’ crafting looks like by… creating an open climate in which individual needs are discussed, attention is paid to best practices of job crafting, and where the supervisor acts as a role model with his/her own personalization. In this way, job crafting can complement job design with an individual focus. To this end, it is important for organizations to recognize that an individual employee is the person who knows the job best, and who can recognize where there is room for improvement such that the job fits better to the person.” -- Evangelia Demerouti
Resources
These are ideal jumping off points for anyone who wants to explore further:
Job Design
Curtin University Centre for Transformative Work Design
Job Crafting
University of Michigan Center for Positive Organizations
Job Characteristics and Design: Case Study
The Merit Systems Protection Board (US). Federal Employee Engagement: The Motivating Potential of Job Characteristics and Rewards. US Government Printing Office. (2012)
I recommend the US Governmentt report on Employee Engagement: The Motivating Potential of Job Characteristics… Though it would not qualify as best practice, it’s a starting template for how to implement job characteristics and job design in a large employer setting. It goes into further depth about job characteristics and job design and how they’re related, with examples, and it provides extensive detail about its data collection, scoring, and stratification methodology.
Summary
You don’t need to launch a big assessment throughout your organization, or transform your systems and processes, or set up committees.
The most important thing, at this point, is consciousness raising…that leads to incremental changes. I hope you’ll come to see that….
We know the characteristics of jobs people want to do. They’re Skill Variety, Task Identity, Task Significance, with extra importance on Autonomy and Feedback. And social support can’t be overlooked.
Recognize that these are studied and validated. And you don’t have to measure them, but know that they are measurable!
Jobs can be designed, rather than just assembled, using job enlargement, job enrichment, and job rotation.
There are no simple solutions to job design. So, if you you ask "how would you change this manufacturing job, or this social service job, or this executive job," my answer will be the same: You don’t need to pay a consultant to answer those questions. Consult the people in those jobs.
And seize opportunity …. Encouraging employees to craft their own jobs — the actions, interactions, and reactions. You can do what Logitech and Google and others have done around the world, and systematize structured job crafting workshops across your employee population. But when that’s not a possibility, you can encourage job holders to tweak their jobs.
Build any or all of this into your work with jobs. As you review a job description, or a new assignment, you can ask yourself: Does this job have the Core Characteristics of a motivating job? Can it have them? How has the employee’s input been integrated. And how can I, and others, model positive job crafting behavior?
About Bob Merberg
Bob Merberg worked for several decades in employee wellness, overseeing safety, EAP, and other programs related to employee experience… for a variety of employers including more than 10 years with a Fortune 1000 company. His interest focuses on the work environment and the design of work, with an employee-centric approach that honors both the wellbeing of the worker and of the organization.
Bob’s work has consistently emphasized employee emotional wellbeing, launching the first-ever evidence-based employee positive psychology program, managing innovative Employee Assistance Program (EAP) partnerships, and serving as trusted advisor to companies seeking to improve employee mental health support and services. He served for a year as a volunteer Crisis Counselor for Crisis Text Line and has written whitepapers on burnout, financial wellbeing, and employee mental health.
Bob’s programs received a Best Employer for Healthy Lifestyles award from the Business Group on Health seven times.
The Institute for Healthcare Consumerism named him a Superstar for Employee Empowerment. And industry experts convened by the Rochester Business Journal recognized him for…
“Creativity and ability to effect measurable improvements, sustainability, and program outcomes.”
In this Substack newsletter Heigh Ho — Work and Working Life, Bob uniquely weaves together the worlds of human resources, business management, wellness, industrial organizational psychology, economics, and thought leadership, with workers and labor steadfastly at the center.