7
Job Design
Introduction
I'm going to start by being blunt: We are universally terrible at job design.
Most jobs aren't actually designed at all—we're lucky if they are a list of loosely connected tasks and we rarely, if ever, think about how the person doing them will feel. As a result, we end up with boring, repetitive jobs; frustrating jobs; and jobs where the person can't tell if they've had a good day or a bad one.
To make matters worse, we then document these positions with job descriptions—some of the most awful documents to come out of HR, which I often think have a primary aim of being waved at someone as we fire them, saying, “See, you didn't do any of these things.” And then, as if this weren't enough, we convert the descriptions into job advertisements that paper over the cracks and make the key responsibilities even less intelligible or understandable.
The tragedy here is that job design is an area where HR could really lead, if only the HR specialty Organizational Development got more attention. There's less written about job design than any other part of engagement—interestingly, many people we spoke to hadn't even considered it an engagement driver, and a few hadn't even heard of it.
To put things right, we have to start asking some simple questions:
- How will someone feel when doing this job?
- Can I imagine a person who will enjoy it and find it fulfilling?
- Where can I see this job developing?
- How does this role connect to our mission?
If we can't answer these questions positively, it's a clear marker that we may need to rethink the role. If we want engagement in our organizations, we need to first eliminate the disengaging job.
The attributes of a good job are not complex. People need to deploy and develop skills, believe they are producing something meaningful, have enough challenge and demand to be stimulated over the long term, and have enough freedom and autonomy not to feel part of a machine. Most leadership and HR jobs will tick many of those boxes, which might be why we've become so bad at this area: Maybe all the people with power have decent job designs and can't empathize with the people who don't.
It Wasn't Always Like This
Barry Schwartz is a psychologist and professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. In his book Why We Work, he asks the question, “Is Job Design, and in particular the factory production system, the root of employee disengagement?”1 He shares the idea that the factory system swapped pride and purpose for efficiency and increased production.
Most of us have been accustomed to the factory system of production for all of our working lives. Many jobs are organized for efficiency, not personal fulfillment; the roles were created to manage or be part of a process, rather than allow someone to feel satisfaction by achieving a goal.
But it wasn't always like this. The factory system was created by Adam Smith, often considered the first theorist of capitalism. Smith believed that men would seek the easiest life possible, and must be made to work by associating money with the completion of tasks. He saw efficiencies by breaking a job into small components and allocating them separately, inventing the modern production line. He knew this would result in the elimination of any sense of job satisfaction, but since he believed the average man didn't enjoy working anyway, the only thing of any importance was the payoff or reward that work produced.
In the early days of Reward Gateway, we had jobs like this in parts of our back office. There was an acceptance that some roles just had no joy in them and would best suit someone who was unambitious and just wanted to turn up, do their tasks and leave. I still feel a twinge of shame now in thinking back to those days—at the thought that we'd just accept that whole sections of our own workforce should be resigned to jobs with no inherent fulfillment.
Job Design Has a Wide and Often‐Overlooked Impact
The issue of job design is so poorly understood it is missed by some of our best thinkers. In his TED Talk “Why good leaders make you feel safe” and the book Leaders Eat Last, management consultant Simon Sinek discusses a gate agent at an airport who was yelling at a man attempting to board an aircraft before his number was called. When he asked the agent why she treated the man poorly, her response was, “Sir, if I don’t follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job.” His conclusion is that a lack of safety and trust in her leaders is why she behaved badly to the passenger.
I think, though, there is an alternative explanation. The issue with the gate agent's behavior wasn't what she was doing; it was how she was doing it. She could have gently explained to the customer that it wasn't his turn, rather than shouting and making him feel small; that would still be following the rules. But she didn't; she was mean and aggressive, and the reason isn't a lack of safety. The reason is that she was stressed, frustrated and angry with her role.
Being a gate agent at an airport is a tough job with high demands and low control.2 Agents drive the jet way, open the door, check in crew, board hundreds of passengers in increasingly complex sequences and deal with reactions to over‐booking, all while using archaic systems. But they have almost no control: The rules are there to be followed, it's a safety‐ and security‐critical job, and there is no autonomy. Even the freedom to pick which passenger is deserving of an upgrade if there is a spare seat in business class has been long given up to automation, based on frequent flyer status. As far as job design goes, being a gate agent sucks.
Designing High‐Engagement Jobs
The good news is that we do know how to design great jobs. We know what makes a job fulfilling or frustrating. And it is possible to apply the key principles to make even the most entry‐level job more complete and satisfying.
A starting point is to look at a job in two ways: (1) How demanding is the job for the person? and (2) How much control does the person have over how a goal is achieved, where it is achieved and when the work is done?
Jobs that are not demanding or challenging enough lead to boredom, frustration and even depression. Jobs that are very demanding but give the person no control lead to burnout. Jobs that are demanding, challenging and exciting, combined with high degrees of autonomy and control, are the magic ones, the “sweet spot”—the jobs that people love and that drive high engagement.
When we think of roles in our organizations or teams that need some TLC, three of the questions we can ask ourselves are:
- How can I build more freedom into this role?
How can I give this person some power to make decisions, even small ones, based on their judgment? Can I improve flexibility in how, when or where the job is done?
- What output or result could employees actually own themselves?
How can I change the role or team so people own a completely visible product, outcome or end‐to‐end process? This can be the difference between going home on a Friday and saying, “That was awful; we had too much to do” and “What an amazing week; we achieved so much.”
- How will this role develop?
Development is really a function of job design rather than training—to be able to develop, you actually need room to grow, space and freedom built into the role. That means asking “How can this role grow as the person's skills develop?” That's different from asking what role the individual could get next.
“All too often, when someone starts a job, we slap a rule book on their desk, with a strong warning to never step out of bounds. We almost never help them define a playground.”
—Lindsay McGregor, co‐author of Primed to Perform
In Practice
In many ways, job design goes to the heart of a culture. Designing great jobs means creating a culture of trust over approval, of freedom over process. It means accepting the missteps and mistakes that will happen and resisting the urge to knee‐jerk into creating a process or restriction of autonomy whenever something goes wrong.
Key Outcomes Rebels Strive For
Jobs with Autonomy and Accountability Highly engaged people thrive with freedom and accountability. They are self‐motivated, figure out what is best for themselves and the organization, and can be left on their own and trusted to perform with minimal supervision and minimal processes.
Culture where People are Responsible for Outputs Rather than Tasks When roles are well‐designed, people feel they are responsible for results that connect to the mission, they see the product of what they do as the goal and they understand how it connects to the organization's success. This contrasts with a more traditional view, based on tasks and actions.
Acceptance of Flexibility and Change In the best companies, you never hear people say, “That's not my job.” People understand that their organizations are constantly learning and changing, and that their roles will be evolving and growing along with the organization. Adding “other duties as assigned” to the end of a job description just doesn't cut it anymore!
Key Rebel Behaviors
Rebels design roles and teams with several common characteristics.
- Freedom to fail and develop
Rebels design roles that have enough freedom for people to fail, because this provides freedom to develop. They realize that most things that go wrong in business can be fixed or reversed at moderate cost, and that this cost is less than the hidden cost of preventing growth, development and innovation by too much process.
- Accountability and visibility
Rebels understand that accountability and visibility are fundamental to great jobs that people love. They develop roles that have clear results that can be seen, and they work to expose those results so people can see and share their achievements.
- Jobs designed around mission
Rebels understand that the only way they can achieve their company's mission is by making it part of each and every employee's role. They design jobs with this single ultimate objective in mind, and this creates focus and gives meaning to all roles.
- Focused, nimble teams
Rebels think about the individual and the team when designing jobs. They think about how teams will work together, operate together and succeed together. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos has the two‐pizza rule: No team should be larger than two pizzas can feed, which limits teams to six or seven people. This keeps communication manageable. With a team of six, there are 15 links between everyone—15 possible conversations—but with a team of 12, the number of links shoots to 66.3
- Jobs that are meant to evolve
Rebels create looser role definitions that focus on responsibilities and outcomes, rather than tasks and consistency. This allows them to stay fluid as process and technology improve and allows people to grow, develop and move forward in their roles.
Making a Start
Overhaul the Job Description The first step in moving toward these goals is to focus on the job description—and overhaul it. Whether you produce job descriptions, job ads or both, eliminate anything that can't be written on the back of a small pad or explained at a dinner party. Say what the person is responsible for, not what they should do, and strip it right back so the accountability is really clear.
We know that the receptionist has to answer the phone, open the door and perhaps put out the trash. But surely what they're really responsible for is creating and executing a world‐class visitor experience that leaves guests thinking they've just been to the most incredible place.
When you have a job description right, the job‐holder should be proud to summarize it from memory, not scramble to find where it might be filed.
When it comes to job ads, focus sharply on the real attributes and skills that will make someone shine in this role. Don't be afraid to be radical. This was how we stripped back the ad for an internal communications assistant at Reward Gateway:
Increase Autonomy and Accountability Overcome your fear of what people will do by making them accountable for clear, visible results. Then give them the freedom to innovate, iterate and pioneer new ways of doing better. Unless you are in a heavily regulated industry or a safety‐critical one, you should look to increase freedom every single day. You'll probably be battling decades of work that reduced freedom, but this will make a real difference.
Create Meaningful Job Titles Change any titles that don't clearly show accountability, so the rest of the business knows exactly who does what and whom to thank. “Software Engineer—Reporting Database” is a much better title than “Mid‐level Engineer” because it helps everyone in the company know what that person actually does, and makes sure that the person wakes up every day with a reminder of what they are responsible and accountable for.
THE PLAYS
Building Innovation Into Jobs and Working Practices: Atlassian
Situation
Atlassian, which makes software that helps engineers collaborate, believes that when talented individuals team up and work together, they make great things happen. It should be no surprise that they follow the “make your people the geniuses” model, for as Dominic Price,4 Head of R&D & Work Futurist, says, “We don't believe in the lone genius. We believe that innovation exists in everyone and needs to be part of the entire company's culture—not concentrated in a single person, or tucked away in a dedicated room. It is our job as leaders to create the right environment for them to express that innovation.”
That's just what Atlassian's done: created an environment for innovation by designing a mindset and space to innovate into jobs and work practices. Since then, it's seen amazing results—for the company, with many new product ideas coming from these innovation practices, and for its employees, by having more rewarding and engaging jobs, proven by Atlassian winning “Great Places to Work” awards at many company locations over many years.
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Atlassian has created three “rituals” that form its culture of innovation. The first is to innovate every day, as evident in its value of “be the change you seek.” “Our values are behaviors that we live every day, not just posters on walls. This gives us incremental innovation, and keeps us aware of our environment and variables in it,” says Price.
The second is structured innovation, otherwise known as “20% time”, where teams plan one day a week or one week in every five to seven to focus on innovation. It's done by department or function, working on something related to their team or work, but not from their backlog of work or jobs. It's a chance to try a pet project that relates to someone's area of work, driving continual improvement as a ritual: Prevention instead of a cure; fire‐proofing instead of fire‐fighting.
The third, and what Price calls the most disruptive, is called “ShipIt”. Every quarter, for 24 hours, employees work to innovate whatever inspires them the most. “It's like 20% time on steroids or speed dating for hacking,” says Price. Employees get ideas from all corners of the globe, from all disciplines and on a variety of problems and opportunities, with prizes being a small trophy and bragging rights. “The first ShipIt was 14 people in one living room. A few ShipIts ago, we had over 400 teams in eight locations participating,” says Price.
Anything can be a ShipIt. The company has seen everything from practical to inspiring, simple to insane, technical to non‐technical. One example is of a team suggesting replacing hot, energy‐inefficient light bulbs with better bulbs. Another example is of a team hacking together a simpler portal to report JIRA (Atlassian's tracking software) issues, which was the start of their JIRA service desk.
“When you truly build an environment and adopt practices that support a culture of innovation, your teams start to take on the impossible. Your business starts to feel like a laboratory that celebrates experiments, generates new ideas, seeks constant feedback and nimbly evolves to delight your customers and squash your competitors,” says Price.
Making Transformational Change Through Job Design: Crawford & Company
Situation
Crawford & Company, the world's largest insurance claims management company, was in a challenging situation—it was losing market share, losing clients, and both staff retention and engagement were low. Recognizing this, the UK CEO asked the HR team to conduct an organizational transformation project, using an approach called “systems thinking.” According to Pauline Holroyd,5 previously EVP Human Resources at Crawford & Company and now Managing Partner at Quo‐change Consulting Ltd., “Systems thinking looks at and changes the customer journey based on what really matters to the customer. It focuses on having the right expertise at the right place at the right time.” For a company like Crawford, whose workforce is dedicated to helping people, this was the perfect approach, as it put the focus where it needed to be to achieve its mission and purpose.
The outcome of the project has been the creation of jobs designed to align with the new customer journey, achieving a wide range of positive results. These include reduced operating costs by eliminating activity that adds no value to the customer, decreased settlement times, as well as increased employee and customer satisfaction.
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The “systems thinking” method Holroyd and team used throughout the project includes four key steps, the 4Ds:
- Diagnose. Work with key leaders to understand the current situation, looking at potential opportunities and agreeing the way forward.
- Design. Analyze cases and data, both historical and current, along with observations to thoroughly understand performance in service and financial terms. Develop and test versions of the new work design, looking for step‐change improvements.
- Deploy. Roll out a new operating model to include workflows, tasks and roles.
- Develop. Implement ways to sustain the new model and embed change, which includes building measures that help leaders understand how their service is performing so they know where to action to fix problems and drive continuous improvements.
The results achieved by using this method across the business were absolutely staggering. From a company perspective, customer satisfaction increased by 70% due to settlement times reducing by 40%, and settlement resolutions increasing by 25%. From an employee perspective, job satisfaction increased as work was now more interesting and employees were having more positive interactions with customers. This led to reduced absences, decreased attrition and employee engagement increasing from 40% to 80%. These results show the transformation achieved through this strategic approach to job design.
Welcome to Flatland: Valve Corporation
Situation
Imagine working with super‐smart, super‐talented colleagues in a freewheeling, innovative environment: no bosses, no middle management, no bureaucracy; just highly motivated peers coming together to make cool stuff. Sound interesting? Well, it should, since this is exactly how Valve Corporation, the video game developer, describes the company and its workforce. Why do they do this? As it says on the website, “When you give smart, talented people the freedom to create without fear of failure, amazing things happen.”
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I can explain how Valve delivered against company objectives in one word: Flatland. This is how it's defined and described in the employee handbook:
Welcome to Flatland: no one tells you what to do
Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you're an entertainment company that's spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they're told obliterates 99% of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they'll flourish. That's why Valve is flat. It's our shorthand way of saying that we don't have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn't your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to greenlight projects. You have the power to ship products. A flat structure removes every organizational barrier.
The company is so committed to this concept of no organizational barriers that desks have wheels, as symbolic reminders that employees can/should move themselves to be more valuable. As the handbook says, “There is no organizational structure keeping you from being in close proximity to the people who you'd help or be helped by most.”
It may be a bit radical to have a completely flat structure and desks on wheels, but it's worked for them, delivering results year after year that have helped the business innovate and succeed.
Creating Autonomy and Accountability through Job Design: Drift
Situation
When David Cancel,6 former Chief Product Officer at HubSpot and now CEO of Drift, rebuilt his product team at HubSpot, he wanted to see “if we could get beyond slogans and mantras to structure it in a way that intrinsically placed the customer ahead of everything else.”
“Every company in the world will tell you they are customer‐driven. They'll believe in the principle. They'll have framed posters on the wall about it: ‘Solve for the Customer.’ But none of that means anything unless you actually make the structural decisions to ensure it. I made a few decisions, in form, process and culture, that were designed to safeguard the team against misdirection and ensure that customers remained central,” says Cancel.
Using this new model and approach, he grew his team from about 50 people to around 200 by the time he left to start his new company, Drift, which writes software that helps sales teams. It was so successful that it set internal records for employee engagement, employee retention, customer happiness and team performance, and is shared in Cancel's book Hypergrowth.
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The new model involves two fundamental changes from traditional models and approaches. The first involves decreasing the size of teams. As Cancel said, “One of the highest impact decisions we made at HubSpot was to constrain both the size of the teams working on a product and the scope of work they undertook. Small teams mean fewer distractions and a singular shared focus on the customer problem at hand.”
Teams are made up of three members. Why three? “Because I made it up. It's a starting point. We can refine from there,” says Cancel. The company tested teams of all sizes, but in the end came back to a three‐person team as the most manageable for the tech lead. It gave them enough time to get their work done and meant that everyone on a team could sit together. As a result, most teams did away with traditional meetings and daily standups, since they were already working together and communicating on an ongoing basis.
The second change was increasing the amount of ownership, freedom and autonomy that teams have. This meant letting the teams decide what they were working on, when they were working on it, etc. “It allowed the people closest to the problem to come up with the solutions and test those solutions with the actual customer. After all, those are the people who are spending more time with the customer than anyone else in the company—more than the executive team, more than the CEO. They have the right perspective in solving this problem and measuring whether they solved the problem or not,” says Cancel.
These changes not only improved the overall effectiveness of the teams and the company as a whole, but provided greater job satisfaction and overall engagement of team members.