Usually, organizations have systems and positions that need to be staffed from time to time, depending on the employee flow in any organization. Job analysis arises out of a need to know the requirements of a specific job entirely as well as the persons hired for it. Job analysis is, therefore, defined as that procedure or process by which the duties and requirements of job positions get determined. In addition, there is a need to agreeing on the characteristics of the people who get hired for these positions. The major purpose of a job analysis is to provide crucial information used in the writing of job descriptions (a list of what the job involves). It also entails job specifications (that is, the kind of people that should be hired for a specific job).
There are diverse approaches employed when collecting information (job analysis). The most recommended approaches of carrying out a successful job analysis - especially for such a company – would be through: The Interview, Questionnaire, and Observation techniques. When using the above techniques, a job analysis requires availability of concerted efforts amongst the HR specialist, workers, and the employees’ supervisor. As a result, this ensures that every individual involved has been allocated a specific role in the job analysis process so that there is clear and viable information received. Usually, the HR specialist – this could be HR manager, consultant, or even a job analyst – observes and analyzes the specific job. The specialist later goes forward to give a job specification and description in the process. On the other hand, the supervisor links up with the employees (just a few) in filling out such questionnaires and listing the subordinate’s duties. They may later engage in the review and verification of the HR specialist’s conclusions on the job’s duties and requirements. Mostly, companies use interviews and questionnaires when collecting data from subject matter specialists (most of them being the job incumbents). They later do an averaging of data from several of their employees in different departments. It helps the company in determining how much time it takes for a typical employee on every task mentioned.
The Interview Approach
In the interview approach, most of the companies advocate three major types of interviews in the collection of job analysis data. These include; individual, group, and supervisor interviews. Individual interviews happen at the level of employee-manager category, which is one employee at a time. Group interviews happen at the level of a group of employees who perform the same tasks (or job) in a company. On the other hand, supervisor interviews are conducted with one or more supervisors who have absolute knowledge in the job being analyzed.
Usually, group interviews are conducted when a large number of employees perform identical work (Judge and Bretz, 1992). Thus, it is easier and inexpensive to gather a lot of information than achievements by a single employee interview technique. In this group interview, the employees’ direct supervisor ought to be present and if not, the supervisor may be interviewed separately so that their perspective gets sought on the job’s responsibilities and duties. The interview approach is much quicker and simple in its approach of job analysis. Indeed, it has been appreciated as a form of approach that yields information that would never be found in any written form since it entails verbal communication. That is why virtually all skilled interviewers can extract very important information in a short time during an interview. Such information may relate to job activities that occur occasionally or rarely. It may also be about informal contacts not outlined in the organizational charts. The interview approach also gives a chance for explanation of the need of job analysis. Moreover, certain attitudes regarded as negative by the management may be released in such a place and still go unnoticed by the management. However, the same interview approach has got real problems, especially the distortion of information. It may happen either due to direct falsification or a genuine misunderstanding of questions.
The Questionnaire Approach
The approach entails having the employees fill out the questionnaires in a sequence that will be analyzed to describe their responsibilities and duties in their job. In designing a questionnaire, the job analyst or HR specialist ought to first decide on the structure as well as the questions asked. It is because every form of the questionnaire is designed to extract certain information that the other may leave out or briefly include. For instance, some questionnaires are in the form of structured checklists. In this type, every employee gets an account of approximately a hundred specific responsibilities and duties. On such a questionnaire, the employee may be asked to tick against the tasks that they perform and to indicate how much time they spend on each task.
On the other hand, a questionnaire may come as open-ended and simply ask an employee or worker to describe the major responsibilities and duties of their job. However, it has been practical that the best questionnaire for job analysis is that which falls between the above-stated extremes. It usually comprises several open-ended questions as well as structured ones. On their advantages, questionnaires – whether structured or open-ended – are a very quick and effective way of extracting useful information, especially from a large number of employees. It is indeed more inexpensive to administer questionnaires lo large number of employees than interviewing groups of employees. However, its major setback comes in developing the questionnaire and in testing it. Hence, it tends to be expensive in terms of resources and also time-consuming.
The Observation Approach
Most of the HR specialists decide this approach, especially when jobs have observable characteristics in them. Such characteristics include handling customer requests, handling calls from customers and the like. However, a large number of job analysts consider using this approach with the interview approach. In this case, the analyst observes the employee while at work and notes the time it takes an employee to complete the most important tasks, as well as other occasional duties. Later, the analyst invites the employee for an interview to learn from them what other tasks they do that went unobserved. The analyst may also decide to observe while interviewing at the same time. It is done by asking questions while the employee executes his duties and responsibilities.
Direct observation becomes useful when the job being analyzed has some physical attributes or characteristics that are observable. Conversely, it is not a good approach when the job being analyzed requires a lot of mental activities, for example, an engineer or lawyer. In addition, it is not the approach of choice when the job in analysis comprises extremely important activities or emergencies, for instance, a doctor or a nurse. Moreover, the worker may feel uneasy when being observed and tend to change what they normally do. Thus, it may then give a negative impression of the desired goals.
Of the above approaches utilized in job analysis, the interview approach seems to be the most effective of ll. For that reason, it gives the job analysts the chance to communicate verbally with the employees or supervisors who may understand the job more than the company specialists. In a one-on-one interview, the employees and supervisors tend to be honest and give a lot of information unachievable in any form of communication.
Job Design
In a job designing, there are about four approaches that stand the test of time. However, two of these approaches are regarded as the best in a job designing process, and often give positive effects any time they get utilized. These job design approaches are: human and the job characteristic approaches. The human relations approach viewed as that process that aims at designing jobs in an interesting manner. It does this by enhancing need fulfillment in employees via what is referred to as job improvement. It has two major factors that fulfill its sole purpose of job enrichment (Judge and Bretz, 1992). These includes (i) motivating elements like accomplishments, responsibilities, job growth and advancement. Secondly, hygienic conditions or factors in the workplace, including job security; working conditions, pay, and inter-personal relations, among others. The challenge, however, lies in the execution of this approach. Often, the job designer has to be extremely careful when designing a job since without carefully including these factors into the job, the employee may feel dissatisfied. It may in turn lead to under-performance in the company to the point of making losses. For instance, the omission of hygienic factors in the job design process may serve to make the employees shy away from such a job. However, the company tries to integrate such factors, the employee seem to have the upper hand on whether it has provided the factors to the adequate degree.
On the second approach – the job characteristics approach – an employee feels motivated to perform further when they get rewarded. Also, when they feel that the job gives them the satisfaction they need (Bowen et al., 1991). Therefore, the approach seems to suggest that encouragement, performance and satisfaction should be at the core of the job designing process. The approach describes any job in terms of:
- Skills: that is the requirement of a job that an employee should employ more than one skill in different activities and talents so that the job gets completed successfully.
- Identification of task: that is the extent to which the specific job enables employees to complete entire duties without disorderly portions.
- Significance of tasks: that is the level to which the specific job touches on the lives of other employees and non-employees.
- Autonomy: that is the freedom accorded to the employees by the specific job in planning and scheduling of tasks.
- Feedback: that is the level to which the specific job relays information on the employees’ knowledge and performance. The challenge in the execution of this approach lies in its major feature – psychological motivation. Hence, it is because job designers as well as HR specialists who may attempt to apply the above principles come to the conclusion that the said psychological motivation is insignificant to the majority of the employees. Research indicates that the psychological motivation in the job characteristics approach has no tangible impact on some employees.
The second strategy is the person-organization match. Most often than not, organizations will endeavor to know how perfect the incumbent fits the organization in addition to the matching the skills required for a specific job. The reason as to why this gets sought, it’s important in further confirming the retention capacity of the organization. It also gives insight into the incumbents’ extra skills that may be essential in the future or in new jobs that may arise. A person-organizational match offers the greatly desired checkpoint of ascertaining the level of concern and knowledge that the applicant may possess, especially concerning the organizational values. Such values may include integrity, fairness, hard work, achievement, and superior customer service. Matching these values to the applicant, therefore, becomes an important issue to consider. It will help in knowing which applicant is part of the larger organizational values. The result is the attraction of best fit job applicants and selection of the finest amongst them (Bowen et al., 1991).
The information collected from a job analysis finds use in a variety of ways. One of the channels of using such information is measuring performance of employees, for instance, customer care representatives. Three ways in which one can use such information to measure the performance of these representatives is through: performance appraisals, training patterns and discovering unassigned or occasional but unperformed duties. Usually, a performance appraisal tends to give a comprehensive comparison of every employee’s real performance with the stipulated performance standards. In determining these performance standards, HR managers utilize the job’s activities and responsibilities which further gets collected through a job analysis. Training patterns give an idea of the competency of the customer care representative in handling various tasks as demanded by the job. If the training patterns give a negative picture, the representative will most likely have under-performed. It is because training is an integral part of the performance process and link up at the job execution levels. The third way is by discovering certain occasional duties that may arise in the performance of the customer service representative job. Usually, there are those occasional tasks that do arise in any job. These tasks mostly go unnoticed or unperformed. In measuring customer representative job performance, it would be prudent to consider such tasks in giving a clearer picture of what ought to get performed or not performed by a representative.
References
Bowen, D. E., Ledford Jr, G. E., and Nathan, B. R. “Hiring for the Organization and Not the Job.” Academy of Management Executive. 1991, 5(4), pp. 35–51.
Judge, T. A., and Bretz Jr, R. D. “Effects of Work Values on Job Choice Decisions.” Journal of Applied Psychology. 1992, 77, pp. 1–11.
Kortmann, S. (2012). The relationship between organizational structure and organizational ambidexterity: A comparison between manufacturing and service firms. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler.
O’Reilly III, C. A., Chatman, J., and Caldwell, D. F. “People and Organizational Culture: A Profile Comparison Approach to Assessing Person-Organization Fit.” Academy of Management Journal. 1991, 34, pp. 487–51.
