So we know why job crafting is beneficial for employees and organisations. We know what the different types of job crafting are. But what about the How of job crafting? How do we make job crafting a reality in our working day-to-day? And how do we measure this and the outcomes of job crafting?
A beneficial way of encouraging personal reflection on how work is being carried out is by asking yourself the following six question themes. These questions are designed to stimulate thought, energy and excitement about the aspects of your work you are interested in personalising and crafting further, as well as helping identify opportunities to shift and change.
1. How well do you feel at work? Are there opportunities to increase your wellbeing through the way you do and approach your job?
Reflecting on how your job impacts your health both physically and mentally presents scope for exploring more positive ways to carry out your work, both structurally and how you approach your tasks, and how you perceive your role. This reflection could take the form of contemplating what aspects of your job positively and negatively influence your wellbeing, considering opportunities to increase your levels of physical activity during your working day or thinking about how to create a more effective work-life balance.
2. Who do you interact and connect with during the course of your work?
Using the question theme of “who” to think about your colleagues and the quality of the relationship you have with them encourages thought about where connections with others can be strengthened, altered or limited. Those who you find particularly inspiring or who you enjoy spending time with the most may be individuals you wish to deepen your connection with, whilst identifying more challenging relationships may motivate you to consider how you might improve such relationships, and even foster a greater sense of belonging within your team.
3. What are the different tasks and activities involved in your work?
Task crafting can be encouraged by focusing on the different tasks that make up your role; which aspects you enjoy the most, any elements you dislike, and how to adapt the structure of your role to create more fulfilling and meaningful work for yourself. Perhaps you could think about how you could play on some of your strengths in certain aspects of your job, possible ways of experimenting with making a change to your routine, or what opportunities there are to reduce the challenges you face in your role.
4. When do you do different elements of your work? Are there opportunities to change these?
Feel more creative in the mornings than in the afternoons? Our cognitive abilities fluctuate throughout the day and when we are at our peak performance differs from one person to the next. We might find ourselves feeling much more alert and high energy at certain points during the day than others. If your job allows flexibility in terms of when specific tasks or activities are carried out, experimenting with the structure of your day and which timings work best for your productivity is a way of task crafting. Reflecting on when you get your best ideas, the times of day that you disturbed the most and least and when you currently take breaks during the day are all good starting places to consider your capacity to make any changes to tailor your job to suit you more.
5. Why does your job exist? What is its purpose?
The question theme of “why” encourages you to purpose craft by asking you to consider why you do things, to understand the value and meaning of your work and how this aligns with your personal beliefs. Questions such as why your job is important to you, how your work benefits others, both inside the organisation and outside, and which aspects of your role you are most proud of you can all help achieve this aim of finding ways to think about your work as significant and meaningful.
6. Where do you perform your work? Would there be any possibility of or benefit from doing elements of your work in different locations?
With many of us currently working from home as a result of Covid-19, the opportunity to alter the location in which we work when we do return to the workplace is looking more likely, with increasing technology and an understanding this crisis has brought about in terms of allowing for effective flexible working. Think about where you feel most energised, focused and have your best ideas with colleagues. Are there opportunities available to you to be able to do all, or core, aspects of your work in different locations? It may be alternative spaces in the office, working from home, or working from other external locations.
Bringing Job Crafting to Life
Generally the above question themes help encourage personal reflection on how you carry out your work. When it comes to bringing job crafting to life in organisations, there are a number of different ways that organisations ranging from tech giants to universities have done this. There are three main ways in which job crafting can be encouraged.
Workshops - During which, employees are introduced to job crafting, encouraged to reflect on job crafting in relation to their own work and actively set job crafting goals.
Team crafting activities - Where teams discuss the areas of work they need to collectively deliver and decide whether they are able to craft or reframe these in ways to leverage the individual strengths within the team.
One-to-one crafting conversations - Exploring ideas for personalising work and making it better during check-ins between team leaders and employees. These discussions may be prompted by considering the different forms of job crafting.
Job crafting rarely results in the complete transformation of a job. The majority of job crafting is achieved through small frequent actions. In fact, 77% of 63 different job crafting example activities were estimated to take less than 12 minutes a day or an hour a week [4] and the majority of these job crafting examples did not lead to an increase in workload or the demands of the job. That is not to say however that people cannot develop entirely new roles as a result of job crafting. Following your interests and identifying opportunities to carry out your passions can lead to the recognition of the importance of specific roles and the subsequent creation of such roles. For example, a team leader who identified possible ways to push the sustainable agenda at a university found that greater significance was placed on her work by the university after she had begun doing this and eventually, a Head of Sustainability role was created which that individual was then appointed to.
Despite job crafting generally involving activities on a small scale, the impact of these activities can be huge, having a lasting effect on our resilience, engagement and performance in the workplace. Job crafting is employee led and a concept designed for you to get the most out of your work and to make work, work better for you. So have fun with it! Experiment with ways of crafting that you find most enjoyable, interesting and try doing more of those activities that come naturally to you. By leveraging your existing interests, you’re more likely to be stimulated, engaged and enjoy job crafting, finding it worthwhile and ultimately creating positive and successful changes in how you work.
Rob’s book, Personalization at Work, offers a deeper insight into job crafting and how to bring this to life in the workplace.
References
1 Slemp, G S and Vella-Brodrick, D A (2013) The job crafting questionnaire: A new scale to measure the extent to which employees engage in job crafting, International Journal of Wellbeing, 3, 126–46
2 Bindl, U K et al (2018) Job crafting revisited: implications of an extended framework for active changes at work, Journal of Applied Psychology, 104 (5), pp 605–28
