Redesigning Work Without Losing Efficiency: Is It Possible?

Marcela Peterson

Many organizations try to redesign jobs to make them more motivating, but often face a common dilemma: won't more autonomy and variety also lead to more mistakes, more training, and higher costs? The good news is that rethinking jobs intelligently can indeed boost engagement without sacrificing efficiency.

Research shows that expanding a job — by combining previously fragmented tasks — tends to increase motivation, ownership, and even service quality. Professionals begin to see the work as a whole rather than just executing isolated parts. This leads to greater satisfaction, less boredom, and a higher likelihood of detecting and correcting errors. At the same time, challenges arise: increased complexity may require more training time, new skills, and higher pay.

The key lies in balance. Data suggests that not all potential costs of an expanded job materialize. In some cases, even with increased complexity, workers are able to adapt their methods and maintain — or even improve — efficiency. This opens the door to strategically rethinking jobs, aiming for the best of both worlds: engagement and productivity.

Another interesting point is that when placed in broader roles, many individuals tend to redesign their own work. Some prefer to repeat parts of the process to create flow and efficiency, while others rely on predictability for safety and control. In other words, how people experience redesign also shapes the outcomes it produces. Ignoring this can undermine the entire initiative.

This broader, interdisciplinary view of job design helps connect people, processes, and outcomes. When leaders and HR professionals understand that different approaches (motivational, mechanistic, ergonomic, perceptual-motor) have distinct impacts on work, decision-making becomes more grounded and consistent. Job redesign shifts from being an intuitive gamble to a technical decision aligned with the organization’s culture and goals.

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