Dear Rabia,
Job design and job analysis serve different purposes. Job design involves creating or redesigning a new job profile and establishing the appropriate organizational structure. It utilizes various theoretical approaches to achieve a balance between the creative and routine aspects of a job.
Approaches to Job Design
Job design encompasses several approaches, including:
- Exploring tasks, sorting them, evaluating them, and optimizing them.
- Defining the appropriate set of responsibilities based on tasks to ensure smooth job performance by employees and organizational control.
- Determining the correct job sequence based on task analysis and ensuring employees follow the proper procedures to minimize operational costs.
- Implementing job enlargement and job enrichment alongside job design to prevent employee boredom, foster new ideas, and introduce innovations into daily tasks.
Organizations implement job design to maintain a manageable workforce size, which can lead to significant savings in full-time equivalents (FTEs) and costs. Effective job design can streamline processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and eliminate unnecessary steps.
Understanding Job Analysis
On the other hand, job analysis involves evaluating current job roles and can inform the job design process. It entails categorizing existing employee roles and identifying similarities among them.
Job analysis aids in job evaluation rather than creating new job profiles. It facilitates comparing employee roles and adopting a systematic approach to restructuring job hierarchies within the organization.
The input for job analysis should be based on real employees and actual job duties, rather than theoretical assumptions. Therefore, the question of which process comes first or second may be irrelevant from a practical standpoint.
Regards,
Arun Chopra