A familiar HR problem looks like a performance issue at first. Good people still turn up, still complete tasks, and still meet the minimum standard, but the energy has gone. Managers start talking about attitude. Employees start talking about workload, poor systems, unclear priorities, or feeling like a cog in a machine.
In many organisations, the issue isn't capability. It's job design. When work is fragmented, tightly controlled, and disconnected from visible outcomes, motivation fades even in strong teams. That's why the Hackman and Oldham model still matters. It gives HR leaders a practical way to diagnose why a role feels deadening and how to redesign it so work becomes more meaningful, more accountable, and easier to sustain.
Why Good People Become Disengaged at Work
You can see disengagement before it appears in any formal survey. People stop suggesting improvements. Handoffs become mechanical. Managers chase progress because no one feels true ownership. Teams become busy but oddly flat.
That pattern matters because disengagement isn't just a cultural irritation. According to Gallup, disengaged employees can cost UK businesses an estimated £340 billion every year due to lost productivity, higher staff turnover, and increased absenteeism (Gallup workplace research). For HR leaders, that makes motivation a business design issue, not a soft topic.
The problem is often in the role, not the person
A capable employee can become disengaged in a badly designed job. That's common when a role has:
- Too much repetition without enough variety
- Little ownership over a complete piece of work
- Weak line of sight to customers, colleagues, or outcomes
- Constant approvals that remove judgement
- Poor feedback loops so effort and results never connect
When those conditions persist, managers often respond with the wrong fix. They add perks, launch engagement campaigns, or ask line managers to be more encouraging. Those things can help, but they rarely repair a role that is structurally demotivating.
Badly designed work can make a motivated employee look indifferent.
The Hackman and Oldham model gives you a cleaner diagnosis. It starts from a simple premise. Jobs shape motivation. If the work itself lacks meaning, discretion, and clear results, morale will erode no matter how committed the employee was at the start.
Why the model still holds up
The model came from an earlier era of work design, but the underlying problem hasn't changed. In fact, digital workplaces often intensify it. Automated workflows can reduce friction, but they can also strip out judgement. Shared service structures can improve consistency, but they can also leave people performing isolated fragments of work all day.
That's why many HR teams now revisit job design alongside engagement planning. If you want a useful primer on the broader issue, this overview of employee engagement in practice is a helpful companion.
The value of the Hackman and Oldham model is that it doesn't ask vague questions like “Are people happy?” It asks whether the role itself gives people enough variety, significance, autonomy, and feedback to stay engaged.
The Five Core Characteristics of a Motivating Job
The Hackman and Oldham model centres on five job characteristics. These are not abstract leadership ideals. They are practical features of a role that you can assess, redesign, and improve.
What the five characteristics mean in practice
| Characteristic | What it means | Simple workplace example |
|---|---|---|
| Skill Variety | The job uses different skills and abilities | A coordinator who handles scheduling, stakeholder updates, reporting, and process checks |
| Task Identity | The person completes a whole piece of work | A recruiter who manages a vacancy from briefing to offer, not just interview booking |
| Task Significance | The employee sees how the work affects others | A payroll officer who understands the impact of accuracy on employees’ financial wellbeing |
| Autonomy | The role includes discretion over method, timing, or decisions | A team member who can resolve routine issues without waiting for multiple approvals |
| Feedback | The work gives clear information on effectiveness | A service adviser who can see resolution quality and customer outcomes quickly |
Each characteristic matters on its own, but the primary strength of the model is how they combine.
Why these characteristics influence motivation
Skill Variety prevents the role from becoming numbingly repetitive. That doesn't mean every job should become chaotic or overloaded. It means the work should ask for different capabilities often enough to keep attention and judgement alive.
Task Identity gives people the satisfaction of finishing something recognisable. Compare two finance roles. One only checks coding lines on invoices. The other handles a supplier query from receipt through to resolution. The second role usually creates more ownership because the person can see the whole job.
Task Significance answers the question many employees never ask aloud. “Does what I do matter?” In support, admin, finance, payroll, and compliance roles, significance often exists already, but the organisation hides it behind process language.
Practical rule: If employees can't explain who benefits from their work, task significance is probably too low.
The three psychological states behind the model
The five characteristics feed into three psychological states.
- Experienced meaningfulness of the work comes from skill variety, task identity, and task significance.
- Experienced responsibility for outcomes comes mainly from autonomy.
- Knowledge of results comes from feedback.
These states matter because they explain why one role feels energising and another feels draining, even when the job title looks similar on paper.
A simple way to think about it
If a job lets someone use different abilities, complete something whole, and see why it matters, the work feels worthwhile. If the role also gives them discretion, they feel accountable. If the role then shows them whether they did it well, they can improve and stay invested.
That chain is the heart of the Hackman and Oldham model. It's also why poor redesign efforts fail when they only add tasks. More activity isn't the same as better design. A broader role without meaning, control, or visible results often just creates more fatigue.
Measuring Motivation with the MPS Formula
The model also includes a diagnostic tool called the Motivating Potential Score, usually shortened to MPS. The formula is:
MPS = [(Skill Variety + Task Identity + Task Significance) / 3] × Autonomy × Feedback
This isn't most useful as an academic scorecard. It's useful because it forces HR and managers to look at the design of a role in a disciplined way.
What the formula tells you
The structure matters more than the arithmetic. Skill variety, task identity, and task significance are averaged together because they combine to create meaningfulness. Autonomy and feedback are then multiplied, which tells you something important. If either is weak, the role's motivational potential falls sharply.
A role can feel important and still frustrate people if they have no room to exercise judgement. The opposite is also true. A role with plenty of freedom can still feel directionless if employees don't know whether they are succeeding.
When autonomy or feedback is missing, motivation usually stalls, even if the purpose of the job is clear.
Where HR leaders should focus first
In practice, I've found MPS most valuable as a prioritisation tool. If a role feels flat, don't redesign everything at once. Look for the weakest dimensions first.
A simple review might ask:
- Is the work fragmented? That usually points to low task identity.
- Is every decision escalated? That usually points to low autonomy.
- Do employees wait for annual reviews to know how they are doing? That points to poor feedback.
- Does the role sound important only to leadership? That suggests weak task significance in day-to-day experience.
Use MPS directionally, not rigidly
You don't need a perfect survey architecture to use this idea well. Workshop discussions, role-mapping sessions, manager interviews, and employee listening groups can all surface the same pattern. The score helps frame the conversation, but the primary value is identifying where redesign will have the strongest effect.
For teams reviewing this alongside service and people data, this guide to employee engagement metrics is worth reading. The main point is simple. Measure what people experience in the role, then redesign the parts of the job that are suppressing motivation.
Practical Job Redesign Strategies You Can Use
The most effective redesign work is usually modest and specific. You don't need to rewrite every job family. You need to change how work is structured so people can see meaning, exercise judgement, and receive faster feedback.
Enrich the role, don't just add more tasks
Job enrichment means adding responsibility and judgement. Job enlargement means adding more tasks at the same level. Organisations often confuse the two.
- Before a team administrator logs requests and passes everything to a manager.
- After the administrator can resolve standard requests within agreed rules and only escalates exceptions.
That change lifts autonomy and feedback because the employee makes decisions and sees the result.
Combine fragmented steps into a whole
Low task identity is common in shared services, finance, HR operations, and customer support. The role gets split for efficiency, but ownership disappears.
Consider this shift:
- Before one employee validates data, another raises the case, and another closes it.
- After one named owner handles the request from intake to completion for a defined case type.
The work becomes easier to follow, quality issues become clearer, and people take more pride in what they complete.
Increase skill variety carefully
More variety helps when the role has become too narrow. It hurts when leaders pile on unrelated work without support.
A better approach is targeted cross-skilling:
- Before a people administrator only updates records.
- After the same person also supports onboarding tasks, prepares simple management reports, and joins process improvement reviews.
That broadens skill variety while keeping the role coherent.
Strengthen task significance with direct exposure
Many back-office roles matter a great deal, but employees rarely hear that from the people affected by their work.
A practical fix is to create direct lines of sight:
- Internal client ownership for a small group of departments
- Short feedback notes from managers who rely on the service
- Service outcome reviews that show where the work prevented delays or errors
This is one reason flexible design often supports retention as well as motivation. For a broader perspective, these effective staff retention strategies are useful because they connect working arrangements with the everyday employee experience.
If you want people to care more, show them who their work helps.
Open feedback loops inside the job
The strongest feedback doesn't always come from a manager. It often comes from the work itself when results are visible.
| Weak feedback design | Better feedback design |
|---|---|
| Annual appraisal only | Weekly workflow review |
| Generic manager comments | Specific quality or completion signals |
| No visibility after handoff | Outcome visible to the person doing the work |
Set guardrails instead of approvals
This is one of the most practical redesign moves available. If approvals dominate a role, ask whether a policy limit or decision rule could replace them.
- Before every minor exception needs managerial sign-off.
- After the employee can act within agreed boundaries and document the rationale in the system.
That preserves control where it matters, but it removes the deadening effect of asking permission for routine work.
Implementing Job Design with Dynamics 365 and Hubdrive
The Hackman and Oldham model becomes much easier to apply when the underlying HR and workflow platform supports it. Without that support, redesign lives in process maps and workshop notes. With the right tools, job design becomes visible, repeatable, and manageable across teams.
A practical starting point is to look at how modern HR platforms connect role data, workflows, self-service, performance conversations, and reporting. In Microsoft environments, that usually means combining Dynamics 365, Dataverse, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint with a dedicated HR layer. For organisations assessing the HR application environment, this overview of Dynamics 365 HR options gives useful background.
Mapping the model to system capabilities
The most effective implementations treat each job characteristic as something the platform can support.
Skill variety through skills and workflow design
Skill variety improves when employees can take on adjacent work with clarity and support. In a Dynamics 365 environment, that often means using skills records, role-based workflows, and structured development plans to broaden a role sensibly.
Examples include:
- Skills management to identify adjacent capabilities an employee can develop
- Power Apps to support lightweight process steps that sit alongside the main role
- Integrated records across HR, projects, service, or operations so people can work across connected tasks rather than a single isolated step
The persistence of many narrow jobs is often a direct result of siloed systems.
Task identity through end-to-end ownership
Task identity gets stronger when the employee can see and manage a complete workflow. Dataverse-based HR and operational processes make that easier because the same case, request, or employee journey can be tracked across stages rather than split across disconnected tools.
Good design here often includes:
- Named ownership fields for a request, onboarding process, or employee case
- Stage tracking so people can see start, progress, blockers, and completion
- Linked documents and communications through Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint
That gives the role a beginning, middle, and end. It also makes handoffs visible instead of invisible.
Task significance through visibility of impact
Task significance often fails because people don't see who benefits from accurate or timely work. In such cases, dashboards and service context help.
A payroll, HR operations, or finance employee can often see significance more clearly when the system shows:
- The employee or manager affected by the process
- The service outcome connected to the task
- The downstream dependency if the work is delayed
This is also where practical IT support matters. If your wider Microsoft estate is under strain, these notes on Microsoft 365 support for UK businesses are useful because weak support can undermine even well-designed workflows.
Autonomy and feedback need deliberate system design
Autonomy doesn't come from removing all controls. It comes from setting the right controls in the right place.
Autonomy through self-service and guardrails
Self-service can reduce frustration, but only if it's designed around meaningful decisions. In Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, autonomy often improves when employees and managers can complete routine tasks directly, while Power Automate handles exceptions and approvals only where needed.
That can include:
- Manager self-service for standard people actions
- Employee self-service for updates, requests, and workflow inputs
- Power Automate rules that route only exceptions, not every routine step
- Decision boundaries embedded in the process rather than kept in someone's inbox
When teams get this right, managers spend less time acting as human routers and more time coaching.
Feedback through continuous performance and operational signals
Feedback is often the weakest dimension in job design because organisations rely on formal review cycles. Better practice is to build feedback into the role itself.
Here's where system support changes the game:
- Continuous performance records allow regular check-ins, goals, and notes
- Power BI dashboards show progress, quality, turnaround, backlog, or service outcomes
- Teams notifications can surface completed stages, exceptions, or acknowledgements quickly
A useful way to see this in action is the product workflow shown below.
The practical point is this. Feedback becomes normal when people don't have to wait for a manager's memory. They can see what happened, what changed, and where to improve.
Well-designed technology doesn't motivate people by itself. It supports motivating work by making ownership, judgement, and results easier to see.
Case Study Redesigning a Finance Assistant Role
David is a fictional Finance Assistant, but the role pattern is familiar. He spends most of his day processing supplier invoices, checking coding, and passing exceptions to a manager. He does one part of the process well, but he rarely sees the wider procure-to-pay cycle. When suppliers chase updates, someone else responds. When payments run smoothly, David doesn't see the outcome. His role has low task identity, limited autonomy, and weak feedback.
Before the redesign
The original role looked efficient on paper. It was standardised, tightly controlled, and easy to monitor. In practice, it encouraged passivity.
David's day involved:
- Inputting and validating invoice details
- Escalating exceptions rather than resolving them
- Working without context on supplier relationships or budget impact
- Waiting for feedback until a problem surfaced
His manager spent too much time checking routine issues because the role had been designed around control rather than ownership.
After the redesign
The redesigned version gave David responsibility for a defined group of suppliers across a broader stretch of the process. Using Dynamics 365 workflows, he could manage the case record, follow approvals, handle routine supplier queries, and monitor his portfolio through a Power BI view.
The practical changes were straightforward:
- Task identity improved because David owned an identifiable supplier portfolio
- Skill variety increased because the role now included communication, issue handling, and monitoring
- Autonomy improved because routine decisions sat within agreed guardrails, including approvals for lower-value items within policy
- Feedback improved because the dashboard showed payment status, exception patterns, and unresolved items
The finance manager still retained oversight, but the oversight moved into the system instead of sitting in constant manual supervision. David's role became more engaging because the work now formed a whole, visible piece of value.
Build a More Motivated Workforce Today
The Hackman and Oldham model lasts because it deals with the actual source of motivation. Not slogans. Not office perks. Not another engagement campaign detached from daily work. It asks whether the role itself gives people variety, ownership, significance, discretion, and feedback.
That's why it remains useful for UK HR leaders working in Microsoft environments. The theory gives you the diagnostic lens. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform give you the operating model to make those changes stick. If you're reviewing broader people practices alongside redesign, these strategies for lowering employee turnover offer useful context on where structure, flexibility, and management practice intersect.
We are DynamicsHub.co.uk. Experience HR transformation built around your business. Hubdrive's HR Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the premier hire‑to‑retire solution, more powerful, more flexible, and more future‑ready than Microsoft Dynamics 365 HR.
If you want better engagement, start with the work. Diagnose one role. Fix the weak points. Build the changes into the systems people use every day. That's how motivation becomes operational, not aspirational.
Talk to DynamicsHub about redesigning roles with Microsoft technology that supports real ownership, feedback, and better employee experience. Phone 01522 508096 today, or send us a message.
