Designing high-performing jobs isn’t just about assigning the right tasks to employees. It also requires balancing their responsibilities, autonomy, and engagement to boost performance and retention.
According to research by management consulting firm Gallup, 97 percent of employees plan to stay with their companies when engagement is high; when it’s low, that figure plummets to 21 percent.
Strategy execution requires employee buy-in, making it critical to keep your team engaged through effective job design.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Job Design?
Job design is the process of structuring jobs’ components to enhance employee satisfaction and organizational effectiveness. Understanding job design is crucial because it directly impacts motivation, productivity, and performance.
Job design elements include:
- Task allocation: Assigning clear, achievable tasks, responsibilities, and duties that align with employees’ skills and capabilities.
- Job development: Enhancing jobs by assigning meaningful, challenging tasks and providing opportunities for skill development, autonomy, and decision-making.
- Feedback and communication: Encouraging open communication and feedback between employees and managers to foster a supportive work environment.
By paying attention to these aspects, you can not only create engaging roles but a satisfactory workplace environment. According to management software company Zipdo, a positive workplace culture boosts job satisfaction by an average of 20 percent. In addition, employees with high job satisfaction are 40 percent less likely to leave for new jobs within the next year.
Job design also helps create a culture of strategy execution.
“Job design is a critical part of strategy execution,” says Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons, who teaches the online course Strategy Execution. “If individuals don't have the resources they need and aren’t accountable in the right way, they won’t be able to work to their potential.”
To ensure your organization’s jobs align with its business strategy, Simons recommends using the Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT). With the JDOT, you can design or test any job by analyzing its balance of demands and resources.
If you’re interested in using this tool, here are four factors it prompts you to consider when designing high-performing jobs.
4 Factors to Consider When Designing High-Performing Jobs
1. Span of Control
Span of control refers to resources for which you’re given decision rights and held accountable for performance.
“Span of control answers the question: What resources do I have at my disposal to get the job done?” Simons says in Strategy Execution.
It’s determined by the allocation of resources such as:
- People
- Balance sheet assets
- Intangible resources
Span of control is a function of your position within your business’s hierarchy. For example, if you’re a senior executive, you may have a wide span of control, with hundreds of employees reporting to you and autonomy around pricing decisions and budgeting. If you’re a mid-level manager, you may have a narrower span of control, with fewer team members and limited high-level projects.
Span of control is also a function of strategy as position, one of the four Ps of strategy—a comprehensive framework for creating a shared vocabulary for analyzing and controlling business strategy. It requires considering value creation.
“To adjust this span, you must put on your hat as a commander,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “Imagine you’re directing a military operation. You need to decide which jobs are most important in delivering value to your customers and allocate the maximum possible resources to those jobs.”
For example, retail companies have customer service, inventory management, and product development departments. While each is important, customer service representatives might need larger spans of control if customer retention is down. The same can be said for inventory management if operational inefficiencies cause shipping delays.
2. Span of Accountability
Span of accountability is the range of trade-offs affecting the performance measures you use to evaluate employees’ achievements—defined in financial and non-financial terms.
Examples of performance measures include:
- Market value
- Customer satisfaction
- Operating expenses
When employees understand what they’re accountable for and need to adjust to achieve success, they’re more likely to contribute to another of strategy’s four Ps: Strategy as plans, which comprises formal systems for setting strategic goals, determining action items, and tracking progress.
Depending on an employee’s position within your organization’s hierarchy, their span of accountability can be wide or narrow. For example, while executives’ performance hinges on your organization’s market value, factory-floor workers might only be concerned with keeping operational costs down.
“Span of accountability is also rooted in the nature of the job and its role in strategy execution,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “For jobs where you want lots of creativity and innovation, you want people to make lots of trade-offs. This means you need to hold them accountable for wider measures.”
Creating jobs with wide spans of accountability but narrow spans of control can result in what Simons calls an entrepreneurial gap, where employees are forced to innovate and influence those controlling the resources they need. Alternatively, narrowing employees’ span of accountability and offering ample resources can stunt creative problem-solving but bolster compliance.
These scenarios illustrate how the relationship between the spans of control and accountability determines how innovative your employees can be.
3. Span of Influence
Span of influence is how many people you need to reach out to when collecting data, probing for new information, and attempting to influence others’ work.
To ensure employees have adequate spans of influence, consider who they must influence to achieve the goals they're accountable for. As you adjust their spans, specify how much you want them to engage with others.
“This will determine how that individual will spend their time during the day,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “By adjusting this span, you’re again focusing on one of the four Ps of strategy. This time, it's strategy as patterns of action.”
Strategy as patterns of action entails responding quickly and effectively to changes in the competitive landscape and encouraging learning and development within your organization to ensure employees understand internal dynamics and challenges.
According to Strategy Execution, job attributes that help determine span of influence include:
- Cross-unit task forces: Challenging employees from different departments to collaborate and problem-solve.
- Dotted-line reporting: Finding additional team members an employee can report to for guidance and input.
“The wider the span of influence, the more creative and resourceful an employee will need to be about how he or she will achieve their goals,” Simons says in the course.
For example, software engineers can complete most of their projects with little help or input, but project managers must typically exercise more creativity to accomplish goals by capitalizing on existing relationships, building alliances with influential individuals, and creating compelling presentation materials to garner support for initiatives.
4. Span of Support
Span of support refers to the support you can expect from those in other organizational units. In Strategy Execution, Simons ties it to strategy’s final P: Strategy as perspective, which communicates your business’s overarching direction and helps inspire pride in employees.
By providing employees with a support system, you can encourage them to seek out opportunities and thrive in their roles. However, unlike other job design factors, this span can be challenging to adjust because workplace culture determines how much support employees receive.
“In some organizations, employees may find that others aren’t willing to help them,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “When they ask for support, the response is flat out, ‘That's not my job.’ But in other organizations, people are eager and willing to help when asked.”
According to Strategy Execution, organizations with wide spans of support have four attributes:
- Pride and purpose: Employees inspired by their organization’s mission are more likely to help others achieve its goals.
- Group identity: Selective hiring makes people feel special, fostering a sense of camaraderie and willingness to help others.
- Trust: Individuals must be comfortable with feeling vulnerable when asking for help.
- Fairness and equity: Employees will assist one another if they know recognition and rewards will be shared fairly and equitably.
Related: The Role Core Values Play in Strategy Execution
Not all jobs require a wide span of support, but many organizations prioritize it.
For example, in Strategy Execution, Simons highlights how Southwest Airlines provides a wide span of support to employees through actions like reducing discretionary funds to avoid layoffs.
“Southwest believes if the company treats its employees well, the employees will treat their customers well,” Simons says in the course.
Set Your Employees Up for Success
Job design is integral to strategy execution. When employees have the guidance to succeed, they’re more likely to buy into your organization’s strategic initiatives and make decisions that support its mission.
By enrolling in an online course, such as Strategy Execution, you can discover how to design high-performing jobs that suit your company’s needs, goals, and objectives.
Do you want to learn more about designing high-performing jobs? Explore Strategy Execution—one of our online strategy courses—and download our e-book to take the first step toward creating jobs that align with your organization’s strategy.
