Job Rotation

This refers to having people do different jobs on a regular basis. This reduces boredom caused by repetitiveness as jobs change on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis as examples.

Job Enlargement

Adds activities to a job that are on the same level as the original job, and also add some variety. For example, instead of an assembly line worker always installing bumpers, they can also mount fenders and install wheels on vehicles.

Job Enrichment

Adding activities that had previously come before (such as planning the work) and after the original job (such as inspecting the work). Job enrichment often involves adding some tasks that were previously part of a supervisor’s responsibility, or working on a short-term project that is completed in addition to the regular job.

Work Modules

Forming natural units of work, sometimes referred to as work modules, involves deciding how work is going to be distributed among the people who do it. In contrast to decisions to break down the work process into highly specialized, routine steps, this approach attempts to improve the probability that employees will view their job as meaningful and important rather than boring and irrelevant by grouping units of work into natural and meaningful categories. By creating a greater sense of completing a whole task, these natural units of work can increase task identity and significance, which are related to the experienced meaningfulness of the task.

Combining Tasks

This contributes to the feeling of completing meaningful work by increasing task identity and the variety of skills required to perform the job. Similar to the rationale underlying the formation of natural units of work, this principle is based on the assumption that hidden costs such as absenteeism, turnover, and extra supervisory time that occur through task specialization can be reduced by combining existing and fractionalized tasks into new and larger modules of work.

Establishing Client Relationships

Here we try to improve things for the worker who has little or no real contact with the actual user of their product or service. Creating client relationships can improve a job by increasing feedback opportunities, the need to develop and use interpersonal skills, and autonomy as individuals are given responsibility for deciding how to manage their relationships with the clients who receive the products of their work. This can be accomplished through a three-step process which involves client identification, establishment of the most direct contact possible between employee and product or service user, and the establishment of procedures and criteria so the client can judge the quality of the product or service and inform the worker directly about these judgments.

Vertical Loading

Attempts to narrow the gap between the doing and controlling aspects of the job. By giving employees responsibility for deciding on work methods, increasing responsibility for time management (e.g., when to start and stop work, when to take breaks, how to assign work priorities), and encouraging workers to do their own troubleshooting, autonomy is inevitably increased.

Feedback

Opening feedback channels facilitates employee knowledge about (and understanding of) their job performance by building feedback mechanisms into the job itself. Since job-providing feedback provides a worker with immediate, private, direct information as the job is being done (compared to supervisor-supplied feedback), it can enhance employee feelings of personal control over their work. Although the specific ways in which job-provided feedback can be developed varies from job to job and organization to organization, some of the ways in which this can be accomplished are to place quality control directly in the hands of the worker rather than a separate quality control department, to establish direct client relationships (see the above discussion), and to provide standard summaries, which are often kept by supervisors, directly to individual workers.