Making work personal - an introduction to job crafting
As a society and in business, people embrace opportunities for the personalisation of products and services. We enjoy and value having our own personal style, beliefs and passions reflected in what we do and how we do it.
Job crafting allows us to bring a personal approach to work. Making work more meaningful, enjoyable and productive.
What is job crafting?
Much in the same way we can personalise our clothes, tins of chocolate or greeting cards online, we can also personalise our jobs, something known as job crafting. Through employee-led activities, jobs can be adapted and shaped outside of their fundamental structure to align with an employee’s strengths, skills or interests. Roles can be redesigned in terms of our tasks, relationships and thoughts about work. Being able to tailor our job in this way encourages us to find our work meaningful and fulfilling.
Why does job crafting matter?
Job crafting model
The impact of job crafting activities can be huge, having a lasting effect on our resilience, engagement and job performance.
Autonomy and taking more control of our tasks and tapping into our unique strengths and experiences helps us thrive at work, boosting feelings of satisfaction, confidence, happiness and meaning, and even having a positive impact on our physical health by buffering stress.
Not only this, but job crafting stimulates growth and development on both a personal and professional level and has been positively linked with skills and knowledge development, career progression and overall productivity.
How can you job craft?
There are 5 main ways that people tend to job craft:
task crafting - tangibly changing aspects of how we undertake our work including designing, adding or removing tasks
relationship crafting - shaping how we relate and engage with others, including building and adapting our relationship with co-workers
purpose crafting - reframing how we think about our work in general including the value and significance it brings to us personally and others
skill crafting - developing, refining and focusing on new skills
wellbeing crafting - boosting our physical and mental health through the work we do
In addition to these core approaches, organisations are exploring how job crafting can be used to help with growth, personal development and career progression.
How can you encourage job crafting?
Job crafting can be brought to life across organisations through several different ways:
Workshops
One to one crafting conversations between managers and employees
Team crafting, with discussions and activities
The Job Canvas (Our digital upgrade to the job description)
Crafting better work
Tailored Thinking run a range of "Crafting better work" workshops specifically designed for people, managers and leaders.
These help people to understand, play with and encourage job crafting individually, in teams and across the organisation.
“The Tailored Thinking workshops were evidence-based, pragmatic, engaging and fun. The impact from the workshops has been clear and we have seen positive results in both hard and soft measures of engagement, job satisfaction and commitment for those who took part.”
“98% of “Crafting better work” workshop participants would recommend them to a colleague. 99% of participants felt able and confident to explore job crafting in their own roles
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“I would have no hesitation in recommending Tailored Thinking for any organisation looking to develop their thinking and challenge their perspectives in terms of wellbeing and overall organisational performance.”
“Rob was a great facilitator. Being engaging and highly interactive allowed us to get the most out of the session. There were some really interesting learnings :) Thank you
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Job Crafting guide
A free guide to encourage your own job crafting, and job crafting in your organisation.
Connect Health Case Study
A case study demonstrating how we implemented job crafting to win the CIPD’s HR consultancy of the year award 2020.
In the UK we spend 84,000 hours at work during our lifetime.
Find out why our Chief Positive Deviant Rob Baker thinks we need to be personalising our work and using job crafting to boost our well-being, employee performance and to create meaningful work.
