Last reviewed: 22 June 2022
- Inclusive job design benefits both disabled candidates and organisations by ensuring that the right person for the role applies for the job.
- Consider job design at the outset when recruiting for every role – even pre-existing roles.
- Don’t just post the same job advert that the last person in that role would have seen.
- It can be easy to design more inclusive job roles – such as flexible hours, reassigning some tasks to other roles, and preparing for potential workplace adjustments.
What is job design?
Job design involves specifying the remit of an employee’s work, how they should perform their role and how they should work with other areas of the organisation. It also involves establishing the support they can expect to receive in carrying out their job.
When designing a role, keep in mind factors such as:
- Purpose: What does the organisation want to achieve? And how specifically will this role contribute to that?
- Speed: How quickly do you need this role’s outputs to be achieved?
- Quality: What processes are in place to maximise the quality of this role’s outputs? This should include self-checking by the employee and oversight from managers and colleagues.
- Capability: What skills do you already have in your organisation? What is needed from a new or redesigned role to maximise these capabilities and fill in any gaps?
- Sustainability: If there is a change in the organisation, sector or economy, how can this role be best positioned to adapt and continue to contribute to the organisation’s purposes?
- Job quality: How will you ensure that the employee in this role is satisfied, suitably challenged and rewarded by their work? What will you do to mitigate against potential negatives, such as stress or boredom?
Job design should be considered even if you are recruiting to fill an existing role. It is tempting when an employee leaves to recruit to the old job description, but this is an opportunity to think again about what the employee was actually doing (as opposed to what was in their job description), what you need to be done, and how it can be done. This might have changed over time.
How does job design relate to recruitment?
Inclusive job design is the foundation of inclusive recruitment. Disabled people, like everyone else, will only be successful if they apply for a role that they will be able to do. If you want to recruit more disabled people, you need to create jobs that as many disabled people as possible will be able to do.
Therefore, inclusive job design means thinking about how candidates with different disabilities – for example, sight or hearing loss or a neurodiverse condition – would be able to work in this role.
Think about:
- Different ways the outputs of the role could be achieved. Design the job role so that someone who might need to perform these outputs differently because of their disability can do so. Anticipate potential adjustments that might allow this, such as flexible working, working from home, and specialist equipment and technologies that they could use in this role.
- How to build flexibility into the role. Thinking about the different ways of achieving the role’s outputs identified in the above point, can you design the job in a way that allows the candidate as much freedom as possible to decide the best way for them and the team?
- Essential and desirable criteria – are the ‘essential’ criteria genuinely essential to the role? For example, if it is ‘essential’ for the applicant to have a driving license, could they achieve the same outcomes using public transport?
- Are all aspects of the role equally important? Perhaps there are some parts of the role that might be harder for some people to perform that could be separated out into a separate role, allowing a great disabled candidate to perform the other parts of the role that they can do.
When to think about job design
Organisations should think about job design when starting the process of recruitment for any role, even when seeking to fill existing roles. It can be tempting to think that job design is only something to think about when creating new roles, and not when filling existing roles that have opened up.
However, organisations should consider the job design of every role before advertising, as there could be opportunities to make the role more inclusive and potentially widen the pool of potential applicants to include more disabled people. This is an opportunity that you don’t want to miss.
How to start designing a role
Consider the demands you are placing on an employee you are recruiting:
- What is the likely workload?
- What outputs do you require?
- What are the skills and knowledge you are asking for or are needed (are the two the same)?
- What is the remuneration (including benefits) being offered?
- Who will the employee report to?
Another important consideration is how much control over what is to be done and how it is done you can give – and need to give – to the new employee. People are generally happier and more productive if they have a degree of control over how they do their job. However, this does have to be balanced with good management and direction. Every employee needs to know what is expected of them in the role. More senior, experienced, and higher paid employees often expect more responsibility. More junior or less experienced employees may need more direction and closer supervision.
Finally, think about how this role fits with others in the organisation that already exist or are being created. Is there is likely to be any overlap that might need to be managed to reduce the possibility of confusion or conflict?
Scenario
Viktor works as a senior manager at a printing company. Yulia, one of the managers at the warehouse, has recently left for a role at another organisation. He knows that the role needs to be filled quickly so that the output at the warehouse can remain at a steady rate.
However, his organisation recently joined BDF and one of his HR team (who has recently read the Recruitment Toolkit) advised him that they now need to look at job design for every role that they recruit for. Viktor is initially sceptical – why not just leave the role unchanged and get the job ad up quickly? – but he agrees.
After looking at the job, he realises that it would be more efficient to separate out some of the administrative tasks in the role and reassign them to a deputy manager who spends more time on the warehouse floor. This would increase the amount of time the manager could spend on the rest of their duties – and he remembers that a lack of time for these tasks has been a minor bottleneck during especially busy periods before.
This also means that a successful candidate will be required to spend much less time on their feet, walking between different areas of the warehouse floor. As a result, people for whom this requirement would have been a barrier are now able to apply. Perhaps one of them will be the ideal candidate?
More information
For more information and advice about job design, refer to our resource ‘Designing job roles and writing job descriptions’ and the blog in this Toolkit, ‘Co-creating ‘people-shaped’ jobs’.
BDF Members and Partners can also contact our Advice Service for advice about specific situations.
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