In this guest blog Manahil Syed, Recruitment and HR Officer and MBA student shares her insights and recent findings from her study on job crafting.
This was a fascinating research project sponsored by Tailored Thinking and we were so impressed with it that we convinced Manahil to write a blog on it!
Job crafting sounds self-explanatory, to some extent. Like a sculptor carves a stone, inch by inch, in the same way, we can carve or modify various aspects of our job. But the size of the chisel is limited by our job description defined in HR’s books.
If we closely look at job crafting, we all practice at least some aspects of it. For example, we all have had that one annoying repetitive task at our jobs that we just want to get done with as soon as we can. Our pursuit of streamlining such tasks would fall under the ambit of job crafting.
Job crafting is generally divided into three types of activities, task, relational, and cognitive.
Task Crafting:
We can practice task crafting subconsciously by adjusting our routine tasks to our preferences in order to make them enjoyable. Moreover, a significant portion of task crafting is based on new tasks that you partake in or new approaches for routine tasks.
For example, your task is to arrange quotations from suppliers for required material. You must present all these quotations in a comparable form to the decision-making body, after removing all ifs and buts from quotations. Instead of manually doing all this, you decide to change the process and develop a standardised form which each vendor has to complete as part of their quotation. Needless to say, this is being done with the consultation of your supervisor.
Relational Crafting:
Once done, you visit a colleague that you are on friendly terms within the IT department and ask him to provide consultation regarding uploading this form on the company’s portal so that you can download it in the desired format. Your colleague/friend does not directly deal with such stuff and he invites you for a cup of tea at the company’s cafeteria so that he can introduce the relevant person to you. All three of you discuss the feasibility, in terms of cost, time, and resources, of doing this exercise. Somehow, you manage to execute your plan and the new portal is up and running. Now you simply have to download the worksheet from the portal and review it for any bugs and present it to the decision-making body.
Cognitive Crafting:
After a successful presentation, you feel relaxed and elevated as you have brought in a structural change to your job description. You imagine positive word-of-mouth about your contribution to the company and how other departments will try to follow the lead of digitization.
This hyper-simplified example was presented to highlight aspects of job crafting. The whole thing starts with your overt motivation to improve your work and save yourself some extra time. A gap was identified, which even left unattended would not have affected your performance, when looked at from the supervisor’s point of view. The mere act of kicking off this project would come under the umbrella of task crafting, whereas approaching your supervisor and other colleagues for executing it comes under relational crafting. When the project is completed, your accomplishment-based gloating stems from your contribution to the company. Anything, that is out of the scope of your pre-defined work might come under job crafting. It is unlikely that anyone would make such a claim, that he/she does not work over and beyond the pre-defined scope.
If this is the case, then why do we need to know about job crafting?
My research at the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with Tailored Thinking, suggests people who knowingly practice job crafting have a greater level of workplace well-being as compared to people who obliviously practice it. This is related to the dynamics of awareness, cognition, and perception. A person using a smartphone of a prestigious and renowned brand is likely to have a better experience as compared to a person who uses a smartphone of an unknown brand.
At the end of the day, we are all trying to do our best at balancing various aspects of our lives; get comfortable with whatever we have. Job crafting helps us by activating various primitive motivators to get the job done. Its benefits have the potential to go beyond one’s workspace.
Task crafting stimulates your creative problem-solving skills, relational crafting can help you develop relations that become long-term, even when you leave the job. Cognitive crafting helps in picturing yourself as an integral cog in the wider system.
It is better to practice job crafting knowingly as its benefits are much greater than the meagre cost of simply equipping yourself with its rudimentary knowledge.
If you want to find out more you can download our job crafting guide here.
Also, you can connect with Manahil on LinkedIn here.
