The Importance Of Job Enrichment

The implementation of goals in an organization ensures that there is an understanding of what the company’s objectives are. This is aligned with what is expected by the employee. This is called, job enrichment, when the employee is more challenged and has more responsibility/ownership of their given work. Job enrichment also decreases the amount of similar tasks that’s given to the employee. The main reason of the enrichment of jobs is to, “make the position more satisfying to the employee. Overall goals for the company often include increasing employee job satisfaction, reducing turnover, and improving productivity of employees.” (Job

Enrichment,n.d.). Generally in job enrichment jobs, there are different task that they have to

individually

Goal setting is applied in this case study by applying the SMART method: “specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.”(Carpenter et al, 2013). In the case study, by

Elizabeth Layman, organizational goals are structured at four different levels. “In terms of scope, from most extensive to least extensive, these four levels are re-engineering, restructuring, work redesign, and job redesign. Re-engineering is the process of rethinking the business and systems of an organization or department. Therefore, in re-engineering, leaders scrutinize mission, structure, and policies. Restructuring is changing the organizational structure, such as reporting lines or the composition of functional units. The purpose of restructuring is to increase

2

organizational efficiency and cost effectiveness. Work redesign is the rearrangement of the department 's efforts to produce its major products and services. In work redesign, health information managers and directors rearrange work through task structure, work processes and procedures, and physical layout. In job redesign, the set of tasks of a job is changed through addition, modification, or deletion. Health information managers and directors may effect

In the case study, an example of this was “creating a mechanism that allows coders to work from home” (Layman, 2011). Another factor that ensures employees stay in control of their work is to switch or rotate jobs. This practice not only helps the company fulfill any vacancies during employee vacations or illnesses, but also ensures that employees can complete any task there are assigned, whether it is specific to their job or not.

Although job enrichment created an environment for the employee to have control over his/her work responsibilities, some employees were hesitant with this type of responsibility placed on them. The employees felt that there are too many tasks to deal with, and unsure of what to tackle first. Employees see the adding of more tasks as stressful. Not only is the job redesign difficult for some to comprehend, the responsibility and ownership of tasks are at much higher levels. Also, new hires were a little lost as to what their specific roles would be, and being new to the job, were not acclimated to their environment. Fragmentation, or some parts of a job