People

Job enrichment

Job enrichment means giving workers more interesting, challenging and complex tasks. Workers should also be given the opportunity to complete a whole unit of work rather than individual separate tasks.

This is motivating for several reasons:

It gives workers the chance to test themselves and use their full range of ability

It is more motivating than job enlargement or job rotation (see below) as it increases the complexity or challenge involved in the task, rather than just simply providing more variety to the work.

Workers should obtain a greater sense of achievement and possibly more praise or recognition of their work when they have successfully completed a tougher task

Workers respond better as managers have shown trust in the fact that they possess the ability to handle the increasing complexity and pressures of the work.

The managers need to judge carefully however what an appropriate task is for a worker to handle- if it is too complex for the workers or they do not posses the correct skill level, then expensive mistakes could be made.

Job enlargement

Job enlargement means simply giving workers more tasks to do of a similar nature or complexity. This will reduce the monotony or repetition involved in a persons work but over time this will not increase a person’s satisfaction or sense of achievement.

Job rotation is a part of this and involves having a wider variety of tasks to do, perhaps rotating jobs with other members in your team, but not increasing the challenge of the job.

Teamworking

Teamworking is where employees work in groups or teams. This can meet a worker’s social needs as a person can more easily build friendships and feel a sense of belonging to a unit or group and hopefully to the business as a whole. This applies in much the same way as being a member of a sports team or any other team representing a school or college.

A business can create a number of different types of team; examples include production teams (often known as cells), quality circles and management teams.

Teamworking has other advantages to a firm over and above improving motivation. It can lead to greater flexibility of production, as employees are likely to be multi-skilled (able to do more than one persons job) as they have learnt from other team members or undertaken formal job rotation. This means they can cover any absences and can quickly adapt to a new production technique.

Empowerment

Empowerment is like delegation. It is when power or authority is given to employees so they can make their own decisions regarding their working life. For instance workers have control over how to use their time and deciding the priority of tasks that need to be done. They are encouraged to consider problems they face and come up with some solutions.

For empowerment to be successful, workers must have adequate training and/or good skill levels in order to be trusted to make the correct decisions. If they do not, then expensive mistakes can be made that could affect the whole business. It is the manager’s job to judge whether a subordinate can cope with more authority and decision-making power. It should be noted however, that even if managers pass down authority to their subordinates, they are still responsible for the work that is done by them.

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