Job Study and Its Impact

Business- Management

Job Study & Its Impact

Reference Organization

The reference organization that I have chosen is that of Humana Inc. Humana is a fortune 500 health insurance company. They offer a range of products and services in addition to group health insurance. Their lines of business serve the military, individuals, seniors, and many others. They also offer specialty products, and other innovative consumer initiative products, services, and partnerships that are focused on consumers. Humana is headquartered in Louisville, KY and employees almost 35,000 people across the country (Corporate Press Kit, 2011). This is a lot of jobs and employees that their human resource department has to manage.

HR Department

Each site within the company has a human resource representative that is stationed at that site. This person reports to the corporate human resource department in Louisville. Each site has their own positions and most are site specific. This means that a job or its function has no consistency across the company. A job in one location named customer service representative can have a very different look from the same named job in a different location. This can make things very hectic for the corporate human resource manager.

Job Study Activities

At least once a year a job analysis is done on all positions within each site. This is the responsibility of the onsite human resource representative. A job analysis is a systematic process used to collect data about work activities; equipment; context; and the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA's) that are required of the job. It looks at a job's mental and physical requirements; the KSA's necessary for job success; the environment where work is carried out; and the job's primary and secondary functions. This process is usually done by way of interviews and questionnaires (Dwyer, n.d.). Humana does job analysis by developing a questionnaire that is given to each employee within a particular job category. Then from there a certain number of people are randomly selected to go through an interview. Typically this process is done in order to gain knowledge as to what employees actually do on a daily basis and what things might be done to help them do a better job. The knowledge that the HR representative gains from doing this process is then used to reevaluate the job designs and update the current job descriptions if needed.

Job design is the procedure of shaping the specific tasks to be performed, the methods used in performing these tasks, and how the job relates to other work in the organization (Dwyer, n.d.). Humana is constantly looking at jobs in order to make sure that things are being done as efficiently as possible. The primary reason that they do this is to make sure that the working culture of the company is the best that it can be. This is particularly important for those roles in which the employees are working with the public. Because of the nature of these types of roles there is a lot of burn out and therefore a lot of turnover in these types of positions. In order to help keep the turnover cost down these assessments are done regularly. The goal is to identify any problems there are with the jobs themselves or with the tools that the employees are given to do their jobs. This helps the company to head off any potential problems before they occur and try to keep the employees as happy as possible.

Another activity that is done every year is that of updating the job descriptions. This again is done by each sites local human resources representative. This is usually done right before yearly employee appraisal time. This allows for each job descriptions to be current and up-to-date as possible. These updated job description are then given to each employee during their annual reviews in order the employees to be current on what is expected of them during their day-to-day activities.

A job description is characteristically made up of six major elements: 1) necessary job functions; 2) knowledge and critical skills; 3) physical demands; 4) environmental factors; 5) the roles of the ADA and other federal laws and 6) any explanatory information that may be essential to clarify job duties or responsibilities (Dwyer, n.d.). Not only does Humana use their job descriptions during annual review times they are also kept current in case the company should need to hire employees. These descriptions are used then to base hiring decisions on in order to make sure that the right people are being hired for the right jobs.