January 25 Discussion Topic - Chapter 4

It's kind of amazing to me that there is a field of study for making a job better, yet most jobs still blow chunks and contain redundancies right and left. Industrial Engineering is the study of jobs to find the simplest way to structure work in order to maximize efficiency. The authors of the book are smart enough to realize that as important as that is it's not the most important aspect of the workplace. Employees need to find their jobs interesting and satisfying and should be able to see aspects of the job motivating to do their jobs the best they can.

For one company that produces artery stents the maker of the products invited production workers to an annual party where they get to meet patients whose lives were actually saved by the product they helped produce. That is an amazing motivator. A tangible motivator. A lot of times we feel that our jobs are meaningless or we're so low on the totem pole no one would notice we weren't working at all if it weren't for that monkey on our shoulder (i.e. our boss or cameras).

The five characteristics listed in the book as a way to make a job more motivating seems pretty basic; skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback. How many times have we worked a job where we went into work and did the same mindless task for hours and hours and had no idea why were doing it or if there was an easier or better way of doing that task, knowing full well your boss couldn't care less about what you thought?

How can we make sure that this time of lax thinking about the empowerment of employees doesn't occur in the workplace when we are in HR? We have a say, in fact it's an important aspect of our jobs, so what would you do if you saw employees so bored their eyes are glazing? Or that turnover is high because people can't handle doing the job for long because of exhaustion, boredom, or because they wish they could make the job more interesting but don't feel they can speak to their supervisor.