Rethinking jobs: towards better inflow and retention of staff in bottleneck occupations in Flanders

Tightness and mismatches in the labour market make it necessary to be creative with available talent and competences. One way of responding to this as an employer is to rethink existing work through job redesign, allowing work to better match available profiles.

With this study, we therefore wanted to gain insight into the benefits, applicability and feasibility of job redesign (i-deals, job crafting, job carving, ...) as a strategy for the inflow and retention of personnel in hard-to-fill vacancies in Flanders.

Components within this study are:

• A literature review on the different concepts of job redesign and the preconditions requiring their application;
• An organised overview of practical examples from Flanders and abroad in which the different concepts of job redesign are applied as a strategy for inflow and retention;
• An analysis of the potential and feasibility of the application of job redesign through case studies within some real work environments, paying attention to possible thresholds and levers;
• A discussion of the representativeness of the results and their implications for policy with representatives and experts from different sectors;
• A final overview of the opportunities to create solutions for bottleneck occupations through job redesign and how this could be shaped in policy.

The insights from the literature review, good practices at home and abroad, and the case studies provide relevant policy recommendations and innovative policy responses around rethinking jobs.