Over 2 years into the pandemic world, we have seen businesses pivot, the Great Resignation, a massive war on talent, hybrid work models, and even organizations testing the 4-day workweek.

Today’s world has never been more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The HR function is now at the forefront of all the action and is going through a transformation to empower the overall people strategies in organizations.

In 2022, the focus has shifted to the employee experience.  What can be done to attract, mobilize, and retain talent?  A good place to start is by reevaluating the roles and responsibilities to ensure that tasks are balanced, thus, reducing workloads for employees wearing multiple hats. Competitors have an edge by attracting talent with exaggerated salaries and mental health benefits that have a major impact on small and medium sized businesses.

There is an opportunity to engage and retain employees by shaping jobs to fit employees through different initiatives: job re-design, job simplification, job enrichment, job enlargement, and job rotation.  

  • Job re-design: this is a process that allows you to rearrange tasks and responsibilities to better align with the changes occurring within and outside of your organization
    • This is useful when tasks need to be automated and digitized to gain efficiency (ex: removal of manual tasks, implementating ERP systems, etc.)
  • Job simplification: this process allows you to assess the most time-consuming tasks from existing roles and removing them
    • The benefits include improvement of work methods and reduction of inefficient tasks to increase productivity
  • Job enrichment: this is an intrinsic motivator where added-value tasks give more meaning to the work being done
    • This is most relevant for highly-skilled employees that require more motivation and searching for job satisfaction (ex: someone in a career plateau requires freshness in their job)
  • Job enlargement: broaden a role by extending the range of job responsibilities
    • The wider range of activities favours learning, increases skill and task variety, and should improve the monetary value of the employee
  • Job rotation: when employees do not have the opportunity for short-term promotions, this process moves them laterally to learn jobs at the same level
    • Replacing departed or absent employees is a costly exercise. By giving the opportunity to learn a new job, organizations make roles more dynamic and challenging
    • Investing in new competencies across multiple jobs is surely to increase the internal talent power and company engagement

Employees are at the center of all workplace discussions. By showing importance to each role and responsibility, we could see a shift in the enthusiasm of the workforce. Organizations can start with small changes when carrying out these job initiative strategies to ensure a higher chance of success. Take the opportunity to build small committees to collaborate on these initiatives and implicate employees to be part of the process. The objective remains to achieve long-term commitment from employees and to be happy at work.

Published On: 29 April 2022

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