4.6 Contemporary Issues in Job Design

In this section we look at certain trends that have emerged in the design of jobs in organizations. These trends are:

1. Telecommuting
2. Team-based work
3. Flexible working hours
4. Alternative work patterns
5. Artificial intelligence

Telecommuting

Almost overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic has made telecommuting, or working from home, the normal way of working. While the concept of a virtual office was slowly becoming more and more popular in the years before this crisis, there was still much resistance from organizations and workers because of the perceived lack of control and supervision that this mode of work entails. However, this resistance has now mostly disappeared and organizations will now consider telecommuting as a normal alternative for many jobs. In the near future, the rise of telecommuting will have enormous effects on organizations and society in general.

Team-Based Work

Due to the complexity of tasks, the need to integrate multiple perspectives and disciplines into work products and services, or the sheer volume of work, organizations are increasingly structuring work around teams. Teamwork involves a set of tasks and activities performed by individuals who collaborate with each other to achieve a common objective. That objective can be creating a product, delivering a service, writing a report, or making a decision. Teamwork differs from individual work in that it involves shared responsibility for a final outcome.

Teamwork requires certain conditions to be in place that will increase the likelihood that each member’s contributions—and the effort of the group as a whole—will lead to success. Effective teams share five characteristics:

• Shared values: a common set of beliefs and principles about how and why the team members will work together
• Mutual trust: confidence between team members that each puts the best interest of the team ahead of individual priorities
• Inspiring vision: a clear direction that motivates commitment to a collective effort
• Skill/talent: the combined abilities and expertise to accomplish the required tasks and work productively with others
• Rewards: recognition of achievement toward objectives and reinforcement of behaviour that supports the team’s work

Effective teamwork requires that people work as a cohesive unit. These five characteristics can help individuals collaborate with others by focusing their efforts in a common direction and achieving an outcome that can only be reached by working together. There are many enabling collaborative technologies that support and enhance team-based work models – regardless of the physical locations of team members..

Flex Time

Flex time allows employees to choose when they will start their work day, and when it will end. They need to work a required number of hours per day or for the week. Employees there is likely a standard of time when all employees need to be at the workplace. This would generally be later in the morning or early in the afternoon. The advantages for the employee allows them to be flexible in scheduling their work around life activities. Some employees function better early morning, or later in the afternoon. Therefore, they would be more productive at work. Advantages for the employer is a longer working day for production. An example might be the company is open from 8:30am-4:30pm or eight hours. It adopts a flexible work day and opens at 6:30am and closes at 6:30pm or a twelve hour day of operation. This increases the company production by four hours or a 1/3 longer day of operation. Employees would be allowed to come to work anywhere from 6:30am-8:30am and leave anytime from 2:30pm-6:30pm. The core hours would be 8:30am-2:30pm when all employees are expected to be at work.

Compressed Work Week

An employee’s work week is shortened by the number of days worked per week, and maintains the same hours. This trend has become popular within organizations. Employees have a set schedule when they work. Other employees may need a day off during the week. In this case, they may work longer hours on other days in the week. Examples might include working 4 days a week at 10 hours per day to equal a 40 hour work week. Another example is working a nine hour day, and having an extra day off every other week. This is often called Happy Fridays as people take the Friday off after working their 40 hours in nine days. A compressed work week allows employees a better work-life balance.

Artificial Intelligence  (AI)

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is having major implications in how work is performed. Just like the advent of robotics has allowed for the replacement of physical tasks by machines, AI can be used to support or even replace mental tasks. For instance, a call centre employee could get instant intelligence about what the caller needs in order to do their work faster and better. Voice prompted questions of the caller and corresponding answers can be analyzed to determine the reason for the call, selection of the appropriate service area and representative, including synthesized data converted to text, and made available to the service representative. AI can easily perform the heavy lifting of these reports – and associated steps – could be generated in a fraction of the time, allowing the accountants to focus on more value-added tasks such as client management and validation.

You can hear Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, describe how AI will influence jobs in the future. According to him, “accountants, factory workers, truckers, paralegals, and radiologists — just to name a few — will be confronted by a disruption akin to that faced by farmers during the Industrial Revolution”. “As research suggests, the pace in which AI will replace jobs will only accelerate, impacting the highly trained and poorly educated alike.”

“Job Design” from Human Resources Management – 2nd Ontario Edition by Elizabeth Cameron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.