What is Job Enrichment? Adding Motivators in Existing Roles to Increase Employee Productivity

Faced with recent trends of the Great Resignation and “quiet quitting”, many employers have been wondering how they may motivate their workforce to stay in their current roles and perform them with dedication. Financial incentives can be an effective solution, but they’re expensive and their impact wears off with time.

In an article published in 2011, Adam Grant and Jitendra Singh from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania argued that intrinsic motivation should be favored over financial incentives. They advocated “designing jobs that provide opportunities to make choices, develop skills, do work that matters and build meaningful interpersonal connections.”

In short, they advocated job enrichment as a way of motivating employees to be more engaged at work and of improving their productivity. Read this article to find out more about the idea of job enrichment, ways to achieve it, its benefits and potential challenges related to its implementation.

What is job enrichment?

Job enrichment can be defined as a process of making existing jobs more motivating by adding new dimensions to them. This can involve adding new tasks, adding meaning to the job, drawing on a more diverse skillset, creating autonomy or providing feedback to the employee. The goal is to improve job satisfaction and productivity.

Job enrichment differs from job enlargement and job rotation. While job enrichment involves adding a variety of motivating factors to a role, job enlargement is simply about adding new tasks to the role. Job rotation, meanwhile, involves placing employees in different roles to make their work more interesting.

How to achieve it

There are many ways to achieve job enrichment. The choice depends on the job concerned and the expected outcomes. The top interventions leading to job enrichment include:

• Assessing which aspects of a job require enrichment and identifying the kind of enrichment that is needed: This can be done with a job diagnostic survey (JDS), or other tools such as employee surveys
• Creating meaningful tasks: Combining specialized, divided tasks into larger processes and grouping related tasks together can result in more meaningful jobs, which give employees more control and allow them to see more tangible results of their work
• Letting employees work in groups: These can take the form of task teams, in which a group of people work together on a specific task; or quality circles, which meet on a regular basis to work on solutions to problems faced by their organizations and to find ways of improving productivity at their workplace. For example, they may discuss public and hybrid cloud benefits and recommend the best solution to the leadership
• Giving autonomy and assigning responsibility: Higher levels of autonomy and responsibility will make employees feel more in charge when performing their tasks, which has a positive impact on motivation
• Giving a sense of purpose: Letting employees see how their work makes a difference in the world acts as a strong motivating factor. This can be done, for example, by having employees engage with clients who benefit directly from the services they provide or the products they sell
• Providing feedback: Feedback can come from managers, but it can be provided by other employees as well. Having one’s efforts recognized is a powerful motivation to keep on delivering great work

Benefits of job enrichment

Job enrichment has multiple benefits for the employee and for the organization. Essentially, working in an enriched job tends to be more fulfilling and more motivating to the employee, which leads to better engagement, higher motivation and greater loyalty. These outcomes, along with improved communication between the staff and management and the continual development of employees, ultimately ensure better results for the enterprise.

• Improved job satisfaction and higher motivation: Job enrichment improves employees’ experience of their job in ways that make them more engaged and willing to work harder for the company’s success. There are many ways employers may try to achieve this end, from offering financial incentives to the gamification of certain tasks. Yet, few of these methods work so well as adding challenging and rewarding responsibilities to the role.
• Lower employee turnover and absenteeism Motivated and fulfilled employees are less likely to be absent from work without a legitimate reason or to quit their jobs. If you master the art of job enrichment, staff retention will not be a challenge anymore!
• Employee empowerment through a sense of purpose Knowing the purpose of their jobs and seeing the difference they make to the organization or its clients empowers employees, making them willing to work even harder.
• Better communication between employees and managers Job enrichment can encourage better communication between managers and the staff they oversee. This is because managers initially need to instruct employees in their new tasks. At the same time, the distance between them reduces, as employees show more initiative and accept more responsibility for their roles.
• Allowing employees to grow and progress within the organization Taking on new responsibilities and making decisions within their roles allows employees to demonstrate more of their potential and acquire new skills. This may help them achieve promotion to more senior positions. What’s more, they may not require additional training, as they will have mastered all the relevant skills in their jobs.

Disadvantages and challenges of job enrichment

There are no perfect solutions and job enrichment is no exception to this rule. It has some disadvantages and potential negative consequences, though the list of these is very short, compared to the list of advantages. The main downsides to job enrichment include:

Increase in workload

Though new tasks added to the job as part of job enrichment may be exciting and satisfying, they must be carefully fitted into the employee’s work schedule. After all, the purpose of job enrichment is to enhance the employee’s experience, not to extend their working time. Using technology, such as Make, Jira and HubSpot integrations, to manage new workflows can help. Still, it’s crucial to be sensible about how much workload the employee can take on.

Micromanagement

Managers need to collaborate more closely with employees as they accept new tasks and develop the skills needed to perform them. This creates the risk of too close supervision and micromanagement, which is the opposite of the autonomy and empowerment that job enrichment is expected to bring.

Resistance from some staff members

Job enrichment works when it’s targeted at the right people; namely, those interested in finding purpose and meaning in their work, acquiring new skills, and taking more responsibility for what they do. Those who treat their jobs just as a way to make a living may not be enthusiastic about taking on new duties or having to invest themselves more deeply into their job roles.

Barriers within the system

Systems within an organization may make job enrichment difficult or even impossible. For example, the HR system may rely on rigid job descriptions, which would need to be completely rewritten if jobs were to be modified through job enrichment. If these descriptions are then used in digital tools, such as WFM for call center software, a reconfiguration of the software would be required as well.

Final thoughts

There are numerous benefits to implementing job enrichment as a means of improving employee motivation and productivity. Some experts argue that adding a variety of motivators to a job is more effective than financial incentives. Contrary to what may often be believed, job enrichment can be achieved at a low cost, for example, by combining existing tasks into meaningful units, adopting teamwork and providing feedback.

The best ways to implement job enrichment strategies depends on the job in question. Before you begin, it’s best to make a careful assessment of the job and its enrichment potential, choose the most relevant job enrichment interventions and make sure you avoid common traps.