Challenging Jobs!

Challenging Jobs are not for everyone. Rather, not everyone wants a challenging Job! Some of us prefer highly complex and challenging jobs, while many of us prosper in simple, routine work.

Not every employee in any organization is looking for a challenging job.  Many of them fulfill their real interests, outside of their work. Work rarely consumes more than 30% of 168 hours everyone has in their week. This leaves all – plenty of opportunity to pursue other interests away from workplace. Nothing wrong!

Interestingly, for many people -work is just a means to earn a living, to pay their bills and/or a status symbol. It will never excite or challenge them. They don’t expect to find their fulfilling experience at the workplace. Neither do they participate beyond execution of tasks allocated to them. They are not bad workers. Most of them – seek out to find challenges elsewhere – in sports, with family, friends, clubs, etc… and do well too…

If you are a business owner, manager or a leader required to run a business, you need best of everyone! How do you get the best productivity?

Some of the actions I have seen work, include the following:

1. Create a Module of work – Move away from ‘tasks’ to modules of work – by moving & combining tasks to ensure that the overall output is significant and meaningful. This makes the work – important and critical to the success of the business. This tends to create ‘ownership’ that builds engaged employee – than detached, task executing resource.
2. Make every work customer facing – Remove middlemen in all forms. Everyone is interested in seeing their work being effectively put to use. Direct customer feedback on the work/result greatly improves the value of contribution. Reinforces ‘ownership’ and builds a high-performance culture. Risky for those managers who believe in command-and-control v/s empowerment and self learning/healing systems.
3. Expand jobs vertically – In every opportunity to expand scope of an individual’s work, move away from the tendency of expanding work by adding more tasks of the same kind or totally unrelated -  into whole of the same! E.g.: Instead of adding more functions to code or some other piece to test, let the engineer design, architect, test the module he/she is coding! It will help employees scale up – towards becoming owners of the module and be engaged on the journey. This will help elimination of too many supervisory layers and create self-managing teams that every business owner will love to have.
4. Cultivate periodic, milestone driven feedback system – Let outputs and work usage feedback be immediate and continuous. Let the team appraise themselves continuously and provide feedback to each-other for helping course correction, quicker realignment to objectives and ensure engagement. Self-managing teams emerge with no extra effort!

Better engagement provides better productivity.

It is the careful “job design” and not the “challenging job” – essential at all levels in the organization to get better engagement – beyond several routine drills of team-building, fun-at-work and out-door activities….

How are you designing the job in your business?

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