GPs are job crafting and it’s having a positive impact

“It’s time to harness the creativity of the workforce and trust people to make change to hit that sweet spot of optimising service delivery, it’s a win win”.”

— Stephen Bevan, Head of HR Research Development at the Institute for Employment Studies.

A new study has uncovered job crafting and flexible work design are having positive benefits for GPs across the UK. The Institute of Employment Studies (IES) has recently carried out a research project, testing this with 6 different GP practices across the UK, and the outcomes were compelling. This blog was informed by chatting with Stephen Bevan, one of the researchers involved in the study.

An important aspect to highlight in this study is that the researchers were keen to explore beyond the conventional methods of job design, for example, changing working days, hours or rotas. Although compressed hours were deemed the most attractive option to most people in the study, researchers were most interested in ideas beyond that. For example, how people can swap tasks with colleagues to suit their individual needs and benefit their own professional development.

What was the purpose of the study?

Originally, the team was asked to look at GP burnout. However, they quickly realised from the research that whilst there was some evidence of job crafting and flexible work design across the NHS, there are very few examples of this in general practice. Hence the desire to do this research.

Why GPs?

The Covid-19 pandemic put a huge strain on the NHS and left GPs feeling exhausted, burned out, and lots of practices saw GPs quitting as a result. It was evident that something needed to change. An underlying theme for GPs was the pressure they felt to continue delivering high quality care.

What did the study do?

With support from NHS England, IES put a call out to see if there were any GP practices in the UK interested in taking part in the study selection process. The institute was looking for 6 practices that met a range of different attributes, with the main criteria being a diverse practice with a variety of ages, races, genders, etc. Several conversations with practice managers took place to ensure that they could collect data without putting additional pressure on their already extremely busy workloads.

How did they carry out the study?

The researchers identified four to five people in each practice who had agreed to take part in the study, and carried out semi-structured interviews before and after their shifts.

A specific example of job crafting in general practice

GP practices often get hundreds of frequent callers for many different reasons. An advanced nurse practitioner took on the role of reaching out to patients before their conditions became acute. This involved monitoring and proactively contacting patients to ensure they felt looked after. As a result, this change in approach was a win-win for GPs and patients - preventing repeat callers, and crowding appointments, as well as ensuring patients didn’t deteriorate in health.

“Evidence tells us that individuals having autonomy and control in their jobs leads to better performance, retention, and wellbeing. ”

— Stephen Bevan

Key outcomes

There were a number of notable outcomes from the project:

• GPs felt empowered to explore ways in which they could get their work done in a different way.

• Transition to working patterns which allowed GPs to deliver care which accommodated flexible working and promoted physical and psychological wellbeing.

• Significant progress to more agile and responsive models of organising work 

• GPs were able to better define the boundaries between job roles and responsibilities 

• More opportunity for professional development, aligning to fulfilling work

Able to deliver their goal that patients would receive the highest level of care, leading to feelings of better job satisfaction.

Conclusion

Overall, this study has had a positive impact on GP surgeries across the UK, leading to a domino effect of benefitting the GP, the practise and of course the patient. The paper concludes: “although this has not created a perfect solution, most GPs would agree that they had made significant progress to more agile and responsive models of organising work”.

You can read the whole research paper here.

If you’re interested in learning more about job crafting or testing this within your organisation, please contact us at [email protected].

Lessons from job crafting at a solo company

“One thing that I’ve learned about job crafting in my role over the years is that there is no failure, only learning opportunities.”

— Gary Butterfield, Co-founder and Director of Everyday Juice Limited

I lead a small business based in the heart of the UK; Yorkshire. We believe that everyone has the right to be healthy and happy at work, connected to a community of people who want to make a positive impact on themselves and their workplace.

We support organisations big and small with their social wellbeing and inclusion work, working towards the goal of reducing the prevalence of loneliness and isolation. After the past few years this kind of work has never been more needed, with a recent study by Benefex citing the 84% of employees surveyed considered social connection to be the key to improving organisational culture. 

One way that we work with organisations is by supporting their employees to share hobbies, interests, and talents with other colleagues, fostering greater connection and belonging across the business. 

I love what I do.

Job crafting doesn’t always come easy as a solo founder working in a one-person company. Despite having complete autonomy and flexibility over your role, there are many processes that have to be done in a certain way and at a certain time, with little room for manoeuvre.

With all that being said, there are a number of things that I allow myself, consciously, to engage with. I find this keeps me in a creative mood more often than not and allows me to not get lost in the detail.

Task crafting

Time is a challenge when working on your own, so I’m always looking for opportunities to streamline my key tasks.

In my role I really like that I’m free to explore and find solutions to problems, and if there is no solution, I try to create it. One of my favourite things to do is to play with new tools that automate the mundane so I can focus on things that are much more exciting, which in itself is exciting. 

I’ve also learned over the years that certain tasks drain me of energy. Some are part of the course of being a director, but others aren’t, so I made an active choice to outsource those tasks to others who have a better skillset than I. 

Skill crafting

I’ve already mentioned that I enjoy exploring new tools to meet a need/problem, and this element of experimentation gives me the opportunity to grow my skillset. I always make sure that I’m working on a side project, and I regularly block out time in my diary to work on it.

One such project was in fact co-created with Rob (Tailored Thinking) during the pandemic; it’s called “Three Good Things”. I created the website using a number of no-code tools and learnt loads in the process. 

Relationship crafting

It’s a surprise to many, but throughout my formative years I was a very shy lad, and putting myself out there in front of people is still relatively new to me. I value the friendships and relationships that I have, and treasure my time with them. 

The pandemic was difficult for me. I’ve been open in the past about my experience with loneliness, particularly in the earlier lockdowns, but the connections that I have remain affected today. 

I make sure that I always reach out to at least one person in my network, professionally or personally, every single day. It’s as much for me as it is for them.

Purpose crafting

I opened this blog post with our company’s belief. This mission to connect people is why we’re here and why we do what we do. It’s the change that we want to see in the world; our purpose. 

Everybody should feel like they belong, and nobody should feel lonely or isolated. 

Our belief and mission statement was written by my own hand, not a marketing agency, and it’s something that I believe in. When it comes to my role and the way that I do it, everything revolves around the company’s purpose, and by extension, my purpose. 

I’m in the privileged position of making my own purpose crafting efforts the company’s purpose crafting efforts. That’s why we’re in the early stages of B Corp accreditation, why we’re building belonging, reflection, and recognition into everything that we do, and the reason behind our net zero ambitions.

Wellbeing crafting

As a self-confessed outdoorsman, it might not shock you to learn that for my wellbeing I spend time outdoors.

I love to run, cycle, wild swim, photograph, walk, hike, wild camp, plus most other things that I can get involved in. Living in Leeds and being so close to green space really helps me to get away in some way, shape, or form, and there’s nothing else that I would rather do.

I also exercise my creativity with Minecraft, which I first got into with my nephews. Admittedly, it does keep me at my desk, but it allows me to switch off from work and enter a world where I can create with no restrictions.

I allow myself to engage in all of these at any time, irrespective of day/time. It’s not unknown for me to look out of my office window one Tuesday midday, see that the sun is shining, pick up my camera and tent, and get the next train out to Ilkley for a night in the hills. 

Finally, I don’t work weekends. When I first created the business I worked every day, every night, every weekend, for 365 days, and didn’t take a week off for the first five years. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t clever, and I feel much better for drawing a line in the sand and giving myself permission to take time away.

Where I can do better

Time and capacity are always barriers when you work on your own. I have the same number of hours in the day as everyone else after all. Whilst we operate a four-day week, I sometimes still find myself working five days. I need to craft myself some more hours in the day!

I think my stint of working every hour under the sun (and every hour under the moon, too) was a failure to job craft when I had complete autonomy over my role, but reacting to it and changing my role to suit is also a job crafting success. 

The next stage

One thing that I’ve learned about job crafting in my role over the years is that there is no failure, only learning opportunities. It’s a grade A cheese statement but there is some truth to it. 

With job crafting there’s never an end point or best practice, it’s something that continually evolves over time to meet ever changing needs. If you want to experiment with something, start small and see if it works, and if it doesn’t, make another small change and give it another whirl.

In the years to come I’m looking forward to experimenting further with my tasks, skills, and relationships, and building upon my own sense of wellbeing and purpose.

The author of this blog is Gary Butterfield, Co-founder and Executive Director of Everyday Juice Limited. Gary creates communities within the workplace, bringing people together through common interests and shared experiences on and offline.

A proper Yorkshire lad with an infatuation for a good Yorkshire brew. 

Connect with Gary on LinkedIn.

The Love and Loathe exercise: Mapping and boosting our energy at work.

An exercise to map and boost your energy at work.

People naturally have a sense of the activities and tasks at work that light them up and those that drain energy away from them.

Despite knowing what shapes our energy we often do very little about this. We just tend to get on with work; because well, we feel we have to.

We have normalised the idea that there are always going to be parts of our work that we don’t enjoy and that we will find draining and mundane.

But what if we changed the way we looked at these tasks and found ways to reduce, shape or reframe them?

And what if we found ways to do more of the things that light us up?

We want to help positively shape your energy at work for a happier and healthier you.

What is the exercise?

Love and loathe is an exercise we use at Tailored Thinking with individuals and teams.

The starting point is to identify 10-15 key activities that are core and important parts of your current roles and to reflect how much energy they give or take. 

Why should you use it?

This mapping exercise enables people to reflect on, and see the interplay between their tasks and their energy load.

You will become more aware of how you’re spending your time at work and what fills you with energy and what does not.

This self awareness may change the way you think about tasks and how you carry them out. It’s a great starting point for job crafting.

Who is it made for?

Everyone! For most people, regardless of which industry you work in there are always going to be tasks we find more enjoyable than others. Likewise, there will be tasks we find that are less enjoyable, that may drain our energy.

If you’re someone who wants to boost your energy at work then this is the exercise for you.

What are the benefits of doing this exercise?

This exercise:

1. Enables you to consider the current allocation of personal resources of time and energy.

2. Highlights opportunities to shape and change your activities to maximise your energy.

3. Allows you to meet your needs for control, positive self-identity and connection with others.

Love and Loathe Exercise Guide

If you’re interested in the love and loathe exercise and would like to find out more around the dynamics, we have produced a short guide on how to use it.

It will also give you the diagrams of the exercise that you could print out and use or simply copy.

You can download it here.

If you have any questions, queries or just fancied a chat about this then please do not hesitate to get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

13 Science-backed tips to setting and achieving goals at work

Ask yourself this.

How often do you set goals for yourself at work? 

And if you do:

How often do these goals stick?

If you are like many (most) people, you will only have achieved a modest success rate when it comes to the targets you have set yourself in the past.

And this is perfectly natural. Normal even. Making goals stick can be hard. 

Humans often find change difficult, yet it constantly happens all around us. Sometimes these changes are small and other times - like the changes we are facing in the pandemic - these are large and significant. 

Do we tend to enjoy change? No. 

If we didn’t find change challenging we would probably all be fit, with model BMIs, well rested and have no bad habits. New Year's resolutions would also have a 100% success rate, when in fact they only have 20% [1]. 

Change can often feel clumsy. When we try new ways of working we have to adopt new routines and approaches. 

Doing anything new introduces the potential of making mistakes and trying something new can make us feel vulnerable.

So how do we make change less challenging?

Making change requires a combination of focus, effort and energy. 

To ensure you make the most of these precious commodities we have combed through behavioural and psychological research to make this the year where we finally start achieving the things that matter.

13 ideas for compelling goal setting 

There is an avalanche of research behind goal setting which identifies ideas and strategies that can be used to maximise the likelihood of making your aims and ambitions stick.

1) Choose the right goals

To start with, it’s important to pick goals and targets that excite and energise us. 

We’re more likely to be motivated to achieve goals which have positive outcomes and benefits rather than those with a focus of mitigating or avoiding a negative activity  (academics distinguish between these as approach and avoidance goals). If in doubt go with the goal that best balances excitement and curiosity with potential impact and achievability. 

If your goal is to eat healthier, try focusing less on the bad foods and more on the good. So, rather than excluding a specific food group out of your diet entirely, why not set yourself a target of eating 10 different types of fruit and veg that week.

2) Start small

Many of us fail to achieve our goals because we bite off more than we can chew when it comes to the targets we are trying to reach. 

To avoid over reaching when it comes to our goals, it can be really effective to break larger ambitions into smaller, micro targets. 

Micro goals or targets tend to be successful for a number of reasons. 

Firstly, people approach these goals with a degree of fun, optimism and curiosity as they may seem more achievable. Also, smaller goals create time for people to do them. `

Setting goals that can be achieved in 5 minutes means they take the same or less time than making our favourite cuppa - something most of us make time for many times each day.

For example, if you want to start expressing gratitude more often, start with writing down 3 good things a day. This will take less than a minute and is an important foot in the right direction. 

3) Plan

Plans are crucial for supporting and enabling behaviour change. Psychological research has consistently found that when people have a plan they are much more likely to follow through with their intentions and achieve their goals [2]. A plan involves being clear on when, where and how you are going to do something. 

If your goal is to run three times a week. Make sure you know exactly when, where and how you are going to do it. For example, I will run on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays at 9am around the park and back. I will set an alarm on my phone and put out my gym gear the night before to ensure I do this.

4) Use anchors, habits and routines

When we do something completely new it requires masses of energy and requires lots of motivation. 

A way to alleviate this energy cost is to incorporate goals into existing routines and behaviours. Linking new goals with existing habits reduces the effort needed, which often puts us off doing them in the first place.

If your goal is to drink more water, put a bottle in your car or your gym bag. Make sure you have a full glass on your work desk or by your bed so that it's readily available for you.

5) Use rewards

Rewards are a positive and potent way of encouraging and consolidating behaviour change [3]. Rewarding ourselves can make us feel good and encourage the release of dopamine the feel good hormone. 

Rewards don’t have to be extravagant or new. They can be part of your existing routine, for example a cup of coffee or checking social media for 10 minutes. See what motivates you best as everyone is different.

6) Involve others

You are more likely to be successful in achieving your goals if you feel accountable to others. When sharing your goals with other people you are immediately setting social expectations which will tap into that innate desire to demonstrate success.

Take Strava for example. This app thrived in lockdown when everyone started posting and sharing their running times and distances on social media. It became a trend and almost a competition between others. Perhaps you are more likely to run that extra mile if you know people will see it.

7) Hold a pre-mortem to identifiable barriers and road blocks

Rather than a post-mortem, try a pre-mortem. This takes place before a project or an initiative and encourages people to explore why they may not achieve their desired outcomes. Consider the barriers you think you may face when trying to achieve your ambitions. How can you overcome these and prevent them from coming between you and your goals.

For example, if your goal is to not eat chocolate throughout the week. What will come between you and this goal? Is it the chocolate aisle in supermarket you need to avoid? Or is it the bakery on the way to work? Being aware of these barriers and how to tackle them will prepare you better to succeed. 

8) Take an experimental approach

At the heart of experimental design is having a hypothesis and then setting out the steps you need to take to test out your predictions. Similarly, when it comes to our goals being clear on our hypothesis can help us gain clarity on the outcome we are trying to achieve. This approach encourages us to reflect and check-in on whether we were successful too. 

So rather than saying you are going to give up on sugary snacks, develop a hypothesis first as part of your goal setting experiment. Your hypothesis might be that eating less sugar will actually make you feel healthier and give you more energy. You can then work out the best way to test this (e.g. giving up sugar for a month) and see if it works (e.g. evaluate energy levels at the end of the month).

9) Use bright lines

One way to increase the clarity of a goal is to apply ‘bright line’ rules. 

From a legal perspective bright-line rules refer to clearly defined laws or standards that are easy to interpret and clear to spot when they have been broken or transgressed. From a goal-setting perspective, bright lines are rules that will be applied and followed in respect of specific targets and ambitions. 

For example, if you wanted to include more time for researching new ideas relating to work, you could say that you will spend the first 15 minutes of work each day reading articles or searching for resources before starting other activities. The bright lines of this goal is that you are going to do it everyday and going to do it first thing.

10) Temptation bundle

Temptation bundling is a twist on rewarding yourself. Rather than getting a reward after you have achieved your goal, temptation bundling involves combining your goal activity with a form of reward itself. Researchers tested this idea with people who wanted to commit to more regular exercise in the gym. They gave participants an enthralling audiobook which they could only listen to when working out. Participants who were only able to access the story when they were exercising were found to visit the gym 51% more than those in a control group [4].

If you wanted to explore this you could for example only let yourself listen to your favourite album or podcast when you take a lunchtime walk; incentivising you to get outside whatever the weather.

11) Shoot for the moon

If you can’t manage to keep your goal small, you may benefit from going big. REALLY BIG. 

Setting ambitious goals encourages us to change our focus and mindset and unlock new ways of thinking about a problem or opportunity. In order to achieve ambitious targets we often need to find and adopt new ways of working as our existing approaches can’t scale to the level that we need.

For example, if you want to feel more connected to people in your large organisation, rather than trying to find every-day opportunities to connect with people, you could set yourself a goal of trying to personally speaking individually with every person in your company over the course of a year. Not only could you approach this task with a sense of novelty and fun, it would give you a logistically challenge of working out the best way to do this 

12) Coach yourself

Most people don’t need, or can ignore, top tips for goal setting [sorry that you’ve got this far in this article and we are telling you this now]. 

The chances are deep down you already know the best way for you to make a goal or new habit stick. 

Researchers have found that self-coaching can be a positive and effective way for people to manage health conditions such as diabetes [5].

Rather than simply launching into setting your next goal, take a step back, and coach yourself the way you might a friend or colleague who came to you for advice about the best way for them to achieve a goal. 

Being self reflective and critical can help you really understand why and whether the goal you are going to set really matters. You can then explore the best way for you personally to achieve this. 

13) Write down your goals

Writing our goals down on paper or noting them on our phone or computer makes them clearer and more tangible. 

Recording our targets is a demonstration of commitment, requires clarity and can help seed our motivation. Researchers have found that we are in fact over 40 percent more likely to achieve our goals if we write them down.[6]  

So rather than just telling yourself or other people about your goal write it down. To help you with this we have produced a goal setting worksheet which you can download here.

Good luck

So what are you waiting for? We hope you can find inspiration in this list of evidence-backed ideas and wish you the best of luck in your future goal setting and goal getting.

References

https://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/articles/2015-12-29/why-80-percent-of-new-years-resolutions-fail [1].

Service, O and Gallagher, R (2017). Think small: The Surprisingly simple ways to reach big goals, Michael O’Mara Books [2].  

Duhigg, C (2013) The power of Habit: Why  do we need do what we do and how to change, Random House [3].

Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A., & Volpp, K. G. (2014). Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management science, 60(2), 283-299 [4].

Alseraty, W.H. and Hamaad, W.A., Impacts of A Healthier Life Style Self Coaching Strategy On; Awareness, Management Practice And Glycemic Control of Diabetic Patients [5].

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-power-of-writing-down_b_12002348?guccounter=1 [6].