Personalization at Work

Work is broken. If our work was an item of clothing, for many of us, it would be a straight-jacket. Or at best an ill-fitting suit. Modern working practices are failing us - constraining rather than amplifying our diverse skills, strengths, passions and interests. No wonder globally over 90% of us aren’t engaged, excited and energised about our jobs.

We customise all aspects of our lives - our cars, our clothes, our coffees - yet one area of our lives we don’t proactively personalise is our work.

What if we started to tailor work around people, rather than expecting people to tailor themselves around their jobs? What if we took a more personalised approach?

About the book

Personalization at Work calls for a new approach to working called job crafting that enables people to customise, shape and design work around their individual talents, strengths and passions . The research into job crafting is compelling. It boosts innovation and agility, nurtures health and wellbeing and amplifies meaning, purpose and productivity.

Full of practical advice and case studies from companies who have already seen the benefits of a personalized approach to work including Virgin money, Widerøe airlines, Logitech, Google and Connect Health, Personalization at Work is essential reading for all HR professionals and people leaders wanting to improve staff engagement, retention, productivity and the overall people experience. With expert guidance on how to encourage job crafting and a personalized approach to work for employees through everything from job titles, role descriptions and benefits packages through to working patterns, flexibility and work environment, this is a book that HR and people professionals can't afford to be without.

A personalised approach to work supports key HR and people priorities including: enabling performance; embracing diversity and inclusion; lifting engagement; boosting wellbeing and nurturing agility and creativity.

Personalization at Work shares:

• How to enable people to bring their whole and best selves to work each day to help organisations thrive

• How to create a closer fit between the work people do and their purpose, passions and strengths

• How to boost creativity, curiosity and nurture a job crafting mindset within workplaces

• How to reframe, amplify and enrich social connections and build high quality relationships

• How to build a personalised people experience

It’s unusual to land a job that was designed for you, but it’s possible to tailor that job into one that suits you. Job crafting is a skill that every employee needs and every manager should value, and this is the first book to bring the research and practice together in an engaging and accessible way for HR professionals.”

Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of ORIGINALS and GIVE AND TAKE, and host of the chart-topping TED podcast WorkLife

Personalization at Work through job crafting is a unique and innovative book. For too long we have heard HR professionals say ‘our most valuable resource is our human resource’, but that should translate into helping employees personalize their work to enable them to get good balance in their lives—but hasn’t in the past. This is a must read for those concerned about enabling their people to thrive

Professor Sir Cary Cooper, ALLIANCE Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

The world of work is in a more dissatisfied place than in any previous generation. Job crafting represents a massive opportunity for any of us to achieve a personalisation revolution in our work. Finally this could be the way to make our jobs more rewarding and joyful than ever before.

Bruce Daisley, author of The Joy of Work and former VP - Europe, Twitter.

This book is a valuable asset to Human Resource Managers, workplace leaders, organisational scholars, and, most importantly, to anyone who wants to have a thriving career. Rob Baker provides us with a compelling reason to personalise our work and helps us to more clearly understand the factors that prevent us from doing so. The chapters on job crafting offer practical ideas for how workplaces can organise jobs to provide choice, opportunity and energy. Given the amount of time people spend at work, Baker’s invitation to craft jobs in ways that foster thriving is powerful. His book will herald a new way to work and it couldn’t come soon enough. This is a must read!

Professor Lea Waters (PhD), Organisational Psychologist, Positive Psychology Expert and author of The Strength Switch.

Rob Baker has written an important, progressive and practical book. I recommend it to anyone aspiring to working lives that are both more productive and more fulfilling

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA

Job crafting is a validated process for enhancing the meaningfulness of work, and evidence is strong that performance increases markedly when job crafting is implemented.  Rob Baker has written the best book yet on what job crafting entails, how to implement it, and what results can be expected. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in helping employees and organizations flourish.

Professor Kim Cameron, William Russell Professor of Management & Organizations, Ross School of Business

This is an important and fascinating account of a key issue in contemporary workplaces – how to customise our jobs so that they meet our changing needs. Drawing on dated principles of scientific management, many jobs are inflexible and adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Baker presents a compelling argument as to why this is no longer fit for purpose and takes us through how to explore, experiment with, encourage and embed job crafting in ways that meet individual and organisational needs. Resulting in improved engagement, well-being and performance, job crafting is widely relevant and explored in depth in this book.

Professor Carol Atkinson, Professor of HRM, Centre for Decent Work and Productivity, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School

This book makes a compelling case for the need to personalize HR and management practices to enhance employee wellbeing and performance. It is a much needed antidote to the naive assumption that universal solutions can be found in the world of work or beyond. People are unique, so it’s our task to find the right unique approach for dealing with them and unlocking their potential

Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Professor of Business Psychology, UCL and Columbia and Chief Talent Scientist, manpowergroup

For many of us, work has become more than just a way to earn a living. Rob has created a handbook for those yearning for more meaning and purpose at work.

Our work has never defined us more than it does today and the future of work has never been more uncertain. Rather than striving to work for the best companies, maybe it’s time we strived to be the best employees. This book will help you do just that. Job and skills crafting is part of our future that many of us have yet to concentrate on.

This book challenges the old way we think about work and teaches us to build better careers for us and our teams. A must read book for the future of the work and what it means to us.

Gethin Nadin, Director of Wellbeing, Benefex, Author of “A World of Good: Lessons from Around the World in Improving the Employee Experience

In ‘Personalization at Work’, Rob Baker has created a handbook for success and wellbeing in the modern workplace. The message is clear: the future of work is personal. This is THE definitive guide to job crafting and the many benefits it can bring to you and your business.

 Mark Gilroy, Managing Director, TMS Development International Ltd

Rob Baker has put forth something that all organizations have been longing for – a way to stay relevant, viable and attractive to both employees and the marketplace. I agree with him that job crafting and personalization is needed in today’s workplace and the workplace of the future. I will be using the concepts from this book as an essential part of my on-going HR/Business library.

Steve Browne, SHRM-SCP, VP of Human Resources LaRosa’s, Inc., Author of “HR on Purpose !!”

This book is compelling, informative and thought provoking. It is very timely as the next generation of employees are more demanding of meaning and purpose and job crafting is a key part of the solution to providing a more rewarding experience for all of us.

Many of us will be working later in life than our predecessors so this book is a must read to ensure we do that in as enjoyable and productive a way as possible. As a concept it is a win win all round.

Roisin Currie, People and Retail Director, Greggs plc.

So much has been attempted by organisations to instil a sense of purpose in the working lives of employees at a macro-level. Have we been missing a trick all-along? Supported by some eye-opening insights, Personalization at Work provides a practical guide into how organisations can help individuals find greater purpose in their work at a personalised level, through Job Crafting. Surely, a worthwhile pursuit for any organisation that truely values it's people.

 John Ryder Founder & CEO Hive

Rob Baker has given me, and the profession I've come to love working in (HR), a huge step into the true future of work. Not the hype we get presented via media soundbites, but in the personalization of work and need to bring job crafting into people's working lives.

Job and role design have been mechanised, work-by-numbers approaches, way past its sell-by date, but no-one has conceived the next stage in designing roles until now. Whilst I'm a huge believer in self-managed enterprises, Rob gives us an alternative: Self-designed jobs. This really IS the future of work - people designing in harmony with HR professionals to build roles that play to their strengths, stretch them to learn and deliver value to the organisations they work with.

It's not that the future of work is human - it already is that. The future of work is personalization.

Perry Timms, Founder and Chief Energy Officer, People and Transformational HR Ltd, Author of “Transformational HR”

About Rob

Rob is a specialist in bringing positive psychology to work and brings zest and curiosity to all that he does. He is the founder and Chief Positive Deviant of Tailored Thinking, a leading evidence-based positive psychology, wellbeing and HR consultancy.

Rob is world-leading when it comes to bringing job crafting to life within organisations. His work, ideas and research on how people can personalise work and bring their whole and best selves to the workplace have been presented at academic and professional conferences around the globe.

As a senior HR leader and consultant, Rob has delivered sector-leading and award-winning people initiatives and business transformation projects working with companies across sectors ranging from multi-national banks to digital start-ups.

Rob is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and a Chartered Fellow of the Australian HR Institute. He has a first-class Masters in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Melbourne and continues to research and collaborate with academics from the University’s Centre of Positive Psychology.

An avid runner, Rob has previously competed on the international stage, having represented Great Britain in mountain running and orienteering. These days, Rob runs and cycles purely for fun and reflection and enjoys outdoor (mis)adventures with his family in Durham.

About Job Crafting

Job crafting enables individuals and teams to actively shape and personalise their work. It is an evidence-based approach to encourage people to bring their diverse, whole and best selves to work each day. People job craft by tailoring how they act, interact and think about their work based on their strengths, passions, values and interests.

The evidence into the benefits of job crafting is substantive with over 130 empirical and peer reviewed research papers being published from around the world by the end of 2019. Job crafting has been positively linked to increased levels of resilience, wellbeing, performance, career progression, personal development and engagement.

The impact of job crafting has been investigated with employees from the Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Vietnam. In total, studies of job crafting to date have
included the combined investigation of over 46,750 employees.

 Job crafting has been empirically explored in a variety of different contexts, settings and industries ranging from cleaners and call centre operatives to change architects and chief executives, public to private sectors and from automotive manufacturers to zoos.

Further information about job crafting is available here.