Defining Job Roles to Build Employee Engagement

job roles engaged employees village people

It's good to be clear about your R-O-L-E. Flickr/Al_HikesAZ

Employee engagement can be a horribly overused phrase in the HR space. Too many suggestions, improvements, and changes are “to increase employee engagement,” when sometimes they do exactly the opposite.

Getting employees engaged and enthusiastic about what they do—and where they do it—involves more than just saying it. To boost engagement, you need to commit to focusing on the employee. If you meet their needs, they’ll meet yours.

Last year SHRM published research findings on factors for employee engagement. Eighteen factors were considered, and the most significant was “the work itself,” closely followed by “opportunities to use skills and abilities,” “contribution of work to organization’s business goals,” and “meaningfulness of job.”

In fact, those four criteria were found to ultimately be responsible for 70% or more of engagement levels in employees.

This research confirms that employee engagement levels aren’t just about the individual—they’re strongly correlated with the job. Properly defining high-quality and desirable jobs, which employees want and will enjoy doing, is a clear way to promote employee engagement. 

In every organization there are vital jobs that people don’t want to do. They may be something above or below a person’s skill-set, or even just plain boring. It can be challenge to make sure that this type of work gets done, without reducing employee engagement.

There’s no quick fix, but you should consider two options. First, look for anyone with an interest in doing these jobs—a good employee survey can quickly find this sort of information (ie. “Would anyone enjoy task X? Reply with your name.”).

Next, try to spread the burden. Don’t make one job take on all of the frustrations, but instead divide them across many roles in the organization. It’s far easier for an employee to enjoy a job with only 2 or 3 hours each week of activity they dislike, than if it has 20 or 30 hours!

It’s crucial that challenges and frustrations are spread evenly across the workforce, with a healthy mix of tasks that people enjoy. Jobs and their expectations need to be clearly defined in order for this to work. 

If you can sugarcoat a bitter pill, the pill will be swallowed. And if you can wrap a challenging job with an enjoyable job, it will be more readily accepted.

To support this acceptance, you need to be transparent when detailing your jobs. Clearly define the requirements, outcomes, and expectations. Do this across the board. 

You should ensure that everyone on your team has the opportunity to stretch themselves. By this I mean the tasks that push the capability of the individual to further their knowledge and/or experience. These may be tasks that are a little bit challenging. The opportunity to develop is a key engagement factor, and having it as part of the job role is a great way to make it happen. 

By building a clear yet comprehensive set of job roles, you’re fulfilling the needs of the employee. They need to know not just what is expected of them, but how their role fits into the organization as a whole, and its business purpose.

Whenc combined, you should have job roles that not only help the business understand what it will achieve, but what each employee will achieve too. Employees who see and accept this will be enthusiastic and engaged.

Meeting employee needs for their jobs, meets your need for improved employee engagement.

 

Define, store, manage, and fill your engaging job roles with HR software from TribeHR. Follow us on Twitter for more.

 


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