Designed for satisfaction? Then retro fit your job

When looking at the measures of good work, it’s easy to default to big ticket items such as pay levels and work-life balance, but this belies the holistic nature of the measurements of good work and oftentimes we forget some of the more fundamental aspects.

AI tells us with a degree of unchallenged certainty that job design is essentially the process of defining and optimising the roles, responsibilities, and tasks within a job to enhance efficiency, employee satisfaction, and overall organisational effectiveness.

Buried in this definition is employee satisfaction and often we can find ourselves asking how much say do we have in designing our job so that satisfaction is built in? Finding the balance between efficiency and engagement is almost as elusive as resolving the productivity conundrum that has existed for so long.

How many of us have looked at our job from the outside inwards and said: “If I was starting from scratch, I wouldn’t have done it that way”?

When we break it down into its constituent parts, job design has some core components that need to be retro examined with some key questions:

• Skills: have the key skills attached to the job got transferability and the ability to be expanded up and continuously refined and adapted?
• Tasks: are the tasks associated with the job viewed through the lens of the holistic product/service delivery so that staff can see both where their role fits in the process as well as the end value of their function?
• Autonomy: is there enough scope in the role to determine how it is performed in terms of decisions and workload management?
• Feedback: is there provision for giving and getting feedback, not just on performance and progress, but also in terms of how the job is designed and whether it serves a multitude of purposes?

So now, in this post-pandemic environment when there is a feeling generally that people used that negative experience to re-assess their view of work and jobs, they are also engaging in some introspection about not just the ‘why’ of their jobs but also the ‘how’.

And in these days of labour-saving devices what better way to examine the ‘how’ of your job than to ask generative artificial intelligence to design your existing job with some prompt assistance?

Of course, the inherent risk of this retrospective design is the chance that your job may be replaced in part by AI or worse still, deleted due to AI.

Some may say, if you didn’t want to know the answer, don’t ask AI the question. But this is to run away from a potential future reality and often it is essential to look backwards to look forwards and use “tech” to help retro fit your job in a way that you have control over the “how” of work.

These sorts of bold steps put the employee in a place of horizon scanning that allows them to innovate regarding their own roles, because after all who knows their own job better? That’s a question for you, not the computer.

• Mark McAllister is chief executive at the Labour Relations Agency for NI