The ever-changing business environment in Singapore presents companies with ongoing challenges, such as ageing workforce, changing labour market demands, and rapid technological advancements. The crucial question arises: How can SMEs proactively adapt to avoid falling behind in this business landscape? The solution is job redesign. Read on to understand the process and how it benefits SMEs.
What is job redesign?
Job redesign refers to the restructuring of tasks and responsibilities to effectively align job roles with the changing environment inside and outside the organisation. The modern landscape is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (often termed as “VUCA”), impacting some SMEs by rending certain jobs or industries obsolete. Job roles are also being negatively affected due to digitisation and automation.
As such, all companies must adapt and restructure employees’ tasks and responsibilities, optimizing employees job roles and ensuring that the organisation can keep up with the competition and maintain relevance throughout the years.
The process of job redesign may involve:
● Shifting employees to different roles.
● Adding or removing specific tasks.
● Introducing autonomy and authority.
Common approaches within job redesign include job enlargement, job sharing, and job enhancement.
Job redesign comes with numerous benefits, including:
Effective utilisation of employees
Effective and efficient job redesign ensures that the business fully optimise its employees. By analysing the various job dimensions between employees, SMEs can streamline roles, remove redundancy and introduce new position that align with the evolving environment, while unlocking the employees’ full potential. This process ensures that businesses leverage the agility of the workforce to the fullest extent.
Increased employee accountability
Job redesign can increase employees' sense of accountability by ensuring the a proper job fit between individuals, offering opportunities that recognise their talent, and entrusting them with greater autonomy. Such changes encourage employees to invest more effort into their work and increases their likelihood of going the extra mile.
Increased employee retention
Through the implementation of job redesign, companies can provide employees with fresh challenges and responsibilities that encourage deeper engagement. Employees will see access to career advancement opportunities that develop their abilities and skills as a key retention factor.
Additionally, job redesign provides employees more control over their work as they can take on more meaningful tasks. The shift in responsibility and authority helps to reduce stress and improve job satisfaction, consequently reducing turnover rates.
Boost productivity
Common occurrences of job overlaps often cause problems like task duplication resulting in inefficiencies that can be passed onto the consumer. This cause delays in project, product, or service delivery.
Job redesign eliminates these problems by removing redundant layers of approval and inefficient processes. Therefore, companies experience improved productivity. Consequently, this reduces consumers’ waiting time, which enhances their experience.
Reduced extra processing time
Job redesign can eliminate unnecessary steps and improve communication between departments. This process can help companies to lower their operating costs and improve their bottom line.
PSG Job Redesign Grant in Singapore
In navigating the competitive business landscape, it is imperative that SMEs undergo job redesign to stay ahead of the competition. As a strategic move, SMEs are encouraged to explore the PSG Job Redesign grant in Singapore. The grant offers eligible enterprises to receive up to receive up to 70% subsidies for consultancy services (capped at $30,000 per enterprise). If deemed eligible, SMEs can leverage financial support to enhance their job redesign efforts to increase efficiency and competitiveness in the market.
Conclusion
The ever-changing business world makes job redesign crucial today. The practice ensures not only a better person-job alignment, but also contributes to increase job satisfaction and employee retention. Moreover, job redesign boosts productivity, and foster an improved consumer experience and heightened satisfaction.
For those seeking support in job redesign, LiT Strategy stands ready for assistance. Positioned as a business consultancy firm in Singapore, LiT Strategy offers top-notch strategy consulting services, including expertise in EDG grant consultancy and PSG Job Redesign advisory services. Feel free to explore our services for strategic guidance and consultation.