Job Enrichment Options
A message from Sandy. The central focus of job enrichment is giving people more control over their work (lack of control is a key cause of stress, and therefore of unhappiness.) Where possible, allow your team to be more involved and have more influence over planning, executing, and evaluating the jobs they do.
In enriched jobs, people complete activities with increased freedom, independence, and responsibility. They also receive plenty of feedback, so that they can access and correct their own performance.
Here are some strategies you might try: (keeping in mind the size of your staff may or may not allow you the luxury of experimenting with some of these options)
- Rotate Jobs – Give people the opportunity to use a variety of skills, and perform different kinds of work within their area of expertise. The most common way to do this is through job rotation. Move employees through a variety of,( for example), front desk jobs, this will allow business team members to learn different skills and acquire different experiences, and more importantly, may prevent burnout. So if you have one person that is in charge of collections, or insurance follow-up, consider trading off responsibilities every 2 weeks–what kind of impact do you think that might have? This can be very motivating, especially for people in jobs that are very repetitive, stressful, or that focus on only one or two skills.
- Combine Tasks – Combine work activities to provide a more challenging and complex assignments. This can significantly increase “task identity” because people see a job through from start to finish. You can apply this model wherever you have people or groups that typically perform only one part of an overall process. Consider expanding their roles to give them responsibility for the entire process, or for a bigger part of that process. This would work great in an office with a very large staff.
These forms of job enrichment can be tricky because they may provide increased motivation at the expense of decreased productivity. When you have new people performing tasks, you may have to deal with issues of training,accuracy, efficiency, and performance. You must carefully weigh the benefits against the costs.
- Create Autonomous Work Team(s) – This is job enrichment at the group level. Set a goal for the team, and make team members free to determine work assignments, schedules, rest breaks, evaluation parameters,completion dates, see how team members will gain leadership and management skills from this option.
- Implement Participative Management – Allow team members to participate in decision-making and get involved in strategic planning. This is an excellent way to communicate to members of your team that their input is important. When people realize that what they say is valued and makes a difference, they’ll likely be motivated.
- Redistribute Power and Authority – Redistribute control and grant more authority to team members for making job-related decisions. Delegate more authority and responsibility,and you will see team members increase their autonomy and accountability.
- Increase Employee-Directed Feedback – Make sure that people know how well, or poorly, they’re performing their jobs. The more control you can give them for evaluating and monitoring their own performance, the more enriched their jobs will be. Rather than the doctor pointing out issues or mistakes, try making each team member responsibility for their own quality control. The team should receive immediate feedback, and they’ll learn to solve problems, take initiative, and make decisions.
Job enrichment provides many opportunities for people’s development. You’ll give them lots of opportunity to participate in how their work gets done, and they’ll most-likely enjoy an increased sense of personal responsibility for their tasks.
Job Enrichment
Increasing Job Satisfaction
A message from Sandy. Most of us want interesting, challenging jobs where we feel that we can make a real difference to other people’s lives. So why does our job become boring or monotonous? And what can we do to make our jobs more satisfying?
One of the key factors in good job design is job enrichment, most notably promoted by psychologist Frederick Herzberg in his 1968 article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?”. This is the practice of enhancing individual jobs to make the responsibilities more rewarding and inspiring for the people who do them.
With job enrichment, you expand the task set that someone performs. You provide more stimulating and interesting work that adds variety and challenge to an employee’s daily routine. This increases the depth of the job and allows people to have more control over their work.
Before you look at ways to enrich the jobs in your workplace, you need to have as your foundation a good, fair work environment. If there are fundamental flaws – in the way people are compensated, their working conditions, their supervision, the expectations placed upon them, or the way they’re treated – then those problems should be fixed first.
How Do You Design A Job That Motivates?
These five factors typically contribute to people’s enjoyment of a job:
- Skill Variety – Increasing the number of skills that individuals use while performing work.
- Task Identity – Enabling people to perform a job from start to finish.
- Task Significance – Providing work that has a direct impact on the organization.
- Autonomy – Increasing the degree of decision making, and the freedom to choose how and when work is done.
- Feedback – Increasing the amount of recognition for doing a job well, and communicate the results of people’s work.
Job enrichment addresses these factors by enhancing the job’s core dimensions and increasing people’s sense of fulfillment. Now where to start?
Don’t Look Back——-You’re Not Going That Way!
As You Travel Through Life…. By Unknown
As you travel through life there are always those times when decisions just have to be made, when the choices are hard, and solutions seem scarce, and the rain seems to soak your parade.
There are some situations where all you can do Is simply let go and move on, gather your courage and choose a direction that carries you toward a new dawn.
So pack up your troubles and take a step forward - The process of change can be tough, but think about all the excitement ahead, here might be adventures you never imagined just waiting around the next bend, and wishes and dreams just about to come true in ways you can’t yet comprehend!
Perhaps you’ll find friendships that spring from new things as you challenge your status quo, and learn there are so many options in life, perhaps you’ll go places you never expected and see things that you’ve never seen, or travel to fabulous, faraway worlds and wonderful spots in between!
Perhaps you’ll find warmth and affection and caring and somebody special who’s there to help you stay cantered and listen with interest to stories and feelings you share.
Perhaps you’ll find comfort in knowing your friends are supportive of all that you do, and believe that whatever decisions you make, they’ll be the right choices for you.
So keep putting one foot in front of the other, and taking your life day by day… There’s a brighter tomorrow that’s just down the road - Don’t look back! You’re not going that way!
Don’t Give Up—-Be Courageous!
Quotes For Today
“Here is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, ‘Live!’”
- Rumi, was an amazing Sufi poet and mystic.
“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”
- Stephen Levine, poet, author, teacher.
“To know when to go away and when to come closer is the key to any lasting relationship.”
- Domenico Cieri Estrada, is a Mexican author.
Simple Things You Can Do To……..
……….Encourage others. A message from Sandy. Everyone feels down, or loses their motivations occasionally, so we can all benefit from some encouragement. Let me share a few techniques that will help encourage and inspire others. (and let’s hope others do the same for us when we are trying to overcome our self-imposed limitations)
- Show genuine interest. This is a very effective way to encourage others. Let them know you care. Express interest by asking questions–get them talking.
- Acknowledge what’s important to them. When you acknowledge what is important to others, you provide a form of affirmation and validation about what they are doing. Everyone craves acknowledgement. The affirmation and validation are a huge boost to their confidence and self-esteem.
- Say “Well Done” Nothing worth doing is ever easy. Worthwhile things take time and effort. A good way of providing encouragement is simply saying “Well done,” or “Congratulations.” These magical words at the right time can make the difference between someone who can keep going or them giving up.
- Say “Thank You” Common courtesy. Good manners. That’s what this tip is about. It is only natural to expect some type of reward (even if it is only verbal recognition) after you have done some hard work to complete a task. It is natural to thank someone for doing something for you——so start now.
- Reciprocate the favor. This is a great way to show your appreciation. Think of this as a pendulum–someone does something nice for you–you do something nice for them.
- Respond with something unexpected. Another effective way to encourage others is to respond with something totally unexpected–out of the blue. That’s when maximum impact is delivered.
- Ask for advice or confide in them. Everyone likes their peers to ask them for advice or confide in you about something personal or important. When this happens, it makes you want to help do everything you can to ensure their faith in you is well founded.
- Offer to lend a hand. Be proactive by offering to lend a hand. If someone can see that you are willing to commit your own time and energy in their interests, they will be more committed to seeing things through.
So ask someone who needs some encouragement “How’s it going?” ”What are you working on now?” “What progress have you made?” Giving encouragement can boost that person’s motivation, which in turn leads to actions and finally results.
Are Your Expectations…….To High Or To Low?
A message from Sandy. Have you given up on any hopes and dreams you once had?
Sadly, we all have at one time or another.
It can be a struggle to keep them alive throughout the ups and downs of our lives.
Think back to when you were 10. As a kid, perhaps you wanted to be a superhero or a superstar, a princess or a prince. Whoever it was you were going to grow up as, it would be someone spectacular !
Those were the days when the only limits on what you could become were beyond the boundaries of your own imagination.
You weren’t born with low expectations of what you could achieve in life.
Then, one day, you started to expect less.
Anything was no longer possible for you. Or, so you began to believe.
Expecting Less
It’s only natural that many of our childhood hopes and dreams wither away. After all, not everyone is destined to become an astronaut and walk on the moon!
Some people say that we simply have to lower our expectations because that’s what ‘real life’ is all about. They argue that hopes and dreams are warm, fuzzy ideas that vanish in the cold light of reality.
Of course, we’ve all experienced the pain of being let down when something we’d hoped for never comes to pass. And, very few of us have escaped the shattering effects of a broken dream. These feelings can leave us devastated.
We prefer to protect ourselves from disappointment by not raising our hopes and not daring to dream. It saves us from being hurt.
We stop hoping for so much.
We don’t dream as often.
We expect less.
When You Give Up
Your hopes and dreams can come true. It happens to other people all the time so, why not to you?
If you no longer expect them to become real, you give up on making them happen.
Unlike in fairy tales, hopes and dreams don’t just magically appear out of thin air. They take planning and plenty of action. Nothing worthwhile is created without effort. Sometimes, it takes an entire life’s workload.
But – when you lower your expectations of what is possible – those things you once thought you could do now seem impossible to achieve.
So, you give up and don’t even try.
Like that 10-year old kid you once knew who dreamt of becoming someone spectacular.
We all know someone who gave up on their hopes and dreams far too soon.
Don’t abandon yours without giving it your very best shot.
What hopes and dreams do you have that need revisiting? Let’s hear about them!
Expectations
A message from Sandy. Our expectations can get us in trouble, cause some upset, and may leave us scratching our heads wondering why people don’t behave the way we expect.
In some cases, basically normal people may get angry, due to how they assessed or evaluated what happened, disappointed or upset over unmet expectations.
Disappointment or anger can result from comparing the behavior of others to our expectations.
Sometimes that may seem like a reasonable thing to do, but more often it’s not, because we have unreasonably high, and sometimes just plain wrong, expectations of ourselves and those around us. You could say that disappointment or anger may be caused by the discrepancy between what we expect and what we get.
The Goal
It’s important to figure out exactly what “reasonable” means in terms of expectations of yourself and others. If your expectations are too low, you’ll feel cheated in life – or worse – that you are “settling.”
On the other hand, if your expectations are too high, then reality will suffer from comparisons to expectation – and you may experience disappointment or anger.
Adjusting Your Expectations
Step 1: Decide what is reasonable. This may be tricky because different people have different ideas of this. One way to do it is to think about it when you are calm and cool. Many things that seem “reasonable” when you are worked up, later seem ridiculous and petty.
Step 2: Eliminate the word “should.” None of us can control other people.( try as we might) People behave the way they behave for their own reasons.
Instead of “should-ing” others, state needs from your own perspective, i.e., “I’d prefer if…” instead of “They should…”
Step 3: Recognize limitations. People often behave badly toward us because of their limitations or problems, not because they are purposefully trying to make us miserable. People are fallible and may not be able to live up to our expectations, or they may have a different agenda other than meeting your expectations. (Shocking!)
Remember, relationships have their limitations. Marital research shows that 69% of relationship issues are basically unsolvable and perpetual. Wise couples accept this and find ways to live around the issues, rather than engaging in constant conflict.
Step 4: Be tolerant of other views. Rather than convincing yourself that others are “wrong.” Tell yourself they simply see things differently than you do. No need to get angry over this – they may be as convinced of their “truth” as you are of yours!
Step 5: Explore ways to get needs met. The underlying reason we often get angry at others is because our basic needs are not being met as a result of the situation or the behavior of the other.
Rather than getting angry, we need to consider two more effective ways to deal with the situation:
1. Honestly communicate your unsatisfied needs to others.
2. Explore alternative ways to satisfy your needs. Take responsibility for your own needs and find workable and acceptable ways of satisfying them.
Time to access your expectations and the impact they are having on your life.
Improving Staff Morale
A message from Sandy. In stressful times (of which there have been many in the last few years) staff morale may suffer. The team may be worried about their jobs, or if hours were cut, just making ends meet. The pressure of trying to hold everything together takes its toll on everyone—–perhaps in different ways—but still some major stress to deal with.
Here are a few suggestions to improve morale:
1. Listen. The first and most important way to boost morale is to listen. Listening can give your employees a sense of empowerment——–if you really listen–it can help the team feel they are not alone and powerless. Keep in mind that it probably isn’t the low morale that is causing productivity to slump, but the other way around. Your team wants to do well. They want the practice to succeed. Your team is the one who does the work, and have a pretty good handle on what and where the problems are. They may have some valuable information and insights into resolving the problems your practice is facing.
2. Be Fair. Fairness is an instinctive code we all have. Make sure everyone is held to the same standards, expectations and accountability. If you are trying to resolve a problem, be sure to look at all sides, set a criteria, or follow your team agreement, (no judging) remember that indecision is a form of judgement, and that won’t make anyone happy.
3. Trust Them. Listening is great, but let your employees define the problem and come up with solutions. Nothing kills morale, like micromanaging. (it appears that most micro-managers have not idea they are micromanaging) The key is trust. Give your team the power to do their jobs. Provide them with support and feedback, but let them do the work.
4.Look For Easy Successes. Any kind of success will improve staff morale. Look around for something that your team can deal with quickly and easily. Very often, employees will ignore small issues because they are small, but those are the issues that chip away at employee morale and build an atmosphere of background stress that saps your team’s productivity. When you start to clear up the little problems–suddenly there is energy available for other tasks.
5. Give Credit–Promote Your Employees To The World. Make sure your employees know when they have done a good job, and make sure others know it too. Giving credit is a way of improving productivity, employees will want to keep going.
6. Celebrate Successes. A small celebration reinforces any small successes and recognition the team gets. Take the time to acknowledge that something good just happened.
Keep listening, even after things get better. Make it part of the work flow. That way you can stay ahead of any morale issues that may crop up.
Factors That Affect Employee Morale
A message from Sandy. Employee morale is a huge factor in determining productivity. There are many factors that can affect employee morale, both positively and negatively, and it is important to be aware of them. Here are a few factors that have been known to have an impact:
The Office Environment. Is your office well-kept and clean? Office surroundings definitely affect employee morale. It is also important to have good lighting, and lots of windows will make a difference, we all like to see what’s going on outside. Making your office area pleasant and inviting, by using well placed plants, art work, and allowing the employees to personalize their work areas will help establish the office as a warm place to be, making employees feel more comfortable getting down to work.
Feedback, or Lack Of It. No one likes to work in a vacuum. If an employee is doing a good job and never hears from you one way or the other, they will eventually slow down. Employees need to feel appreciated, feeling appreciated is a fundamental human need. On the other hand, if an employee is NOT doing a good job, you would be doing a disservice to the employee, yourself, and the whole team, by not giving the proper guidance or help to get them back on track. This is a way to enhance morale by creating alignment with the needs of the business. Employee recognition programs or rewards for completing difficult tasks can go a long way toward establishing morale and keeping good employees.
Work Load. Employees working under impossible deadlines or with work loads that would be best done by two employees, are not going to make for a happy camper. Re-examine job descriptions and consider delegating tasks to different people—rather than that “go to person.” Make sure that each team member is being held accountable for their duties and others aren’t continually completing half done tasks for them.
Teamwork or Lack Of It. Employees are happiest when working as a team. When co-workers are all contributing and working well together, morale is high. When teams are dysfunctional (call Terry & Janis) then you’ve got a problem. Pay attention during team meetings to see who is engaged and contributing and who has zoned out or seems disinterested.
Employee Benefits. Employees are happy when they have security— benefits such as medical insurance, family leave, vacation time, or perhaps disability etc. are all morale boosters, they remove a degree of uncertainty from the employee’s life which allows them to focus more fully on work.
Check in with your team, see what suggestions they have to boost morale.
