Job Crafting - How to alter your job to make work more meaningful
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Explore what you can do to alter your job and daily tasks to find more fulfilment and enjoyment at work - without having to change the job altogether.
In this blog article, you will learn
about the concept of job crafting,
how job crafting benefits both - employees and companies,
and what your next steps towards more meaning in your job could look like.
You might think now: I am not usually a crafty person - how could this be for me? It can, I promise. I am not talking about anything that involves ink stamps, crayons, or anything out of toilet paper rolls. I am talking about crafting your job in a way that you feel renewed energy and increased control over how you spend your working time. Meaningful work means being more engaged and motivated, inspired and challenged in a positive way, meeting at the sweet spot (or rather: area) between boredom and stress.
Job crafting is a term that has been described by Jane E. Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski, two psychologists who performed a study among two groups of hospital cleaners. They discovered through a series of personal interviews about the nature of their work, that while the cleaners had the same prescribed job at the same hospital, they crafted it differently.
Wrzesniewski and Dutton found out that through job crafting, employees can improve the fit between their personal needs and capabilities on the one hand and their job characteristics on the other. According to them, it helps to uncover your true motives, strengths, and potential. It’s about taking proactive action to redesign what someone does at work, essentially changing tasks, relationships, and perceptions of jobs. Employees that successfully performed job crafting make their work feel like “their jobs” vs. the company’s jobs.
Forms of Job Crafting
There are three different forms of job crafting that I will describe here, illustrating with examples from the study on hospital cleaning staff.
Task crafting
This is referring to the type, scope, sequence, or number of tasks that make up your job. Maybe for you, adding tasks is the right approach to make your work more meaningful. But it might also be about reduction of tasks. When an overworked employee reduces the scope and scale of work activities to prevent exhaustion, this is very much an example of successful job crafting.
For example, cleaners in the proactive group of the above-mentioned study added tasks or timed their work to be maximally efficient with regard to the workflow on their unit. By changing their work tasks, or by timing their regular tasks with care, cleaners altered the meaning of their work.
Relational crafting
Who you interact with in your work - colleagues, managers, clients - significantly influences how you feel about your job. It might not be possible to change your team or the people you work with completely. But you could ask yourself: are there people at the company, you would like to learn from? Is there anybody whom you’d love to get to know? What could be common projects that make sense for the both of you to collaborate on which would make a difference on how you feel about your job? Even starting with having regular catch-ups or asking for advise can be something to start with.
The proactive group of cleaners engaged patients and visitors in ways that fundamentally altered their job. Many of the relational interactions the cleaners engaged in were intended to brighten someone's day (e.g., talking to patients, showing visitors around). The proactive group of cleaners also interacted more often with the nurses on their units, resulting in a work unit that functioned more smoothly.
Cognitive crafting
Modify the way you interpret the tasks or work you’re doing. This is about the relationship with your job that can alter the meaning of your work. Connecting to a bigger purpose that serves what is important to you and is in line with your values, gives us a deeper sense of motivation and fulfilment.
In the example of cleaning staff at the hospital, cleaners actively cared for patients and families, and changed the meaning of their jobs as they understood themselves as helpers of the sick, regarding their work on the floor unit as an integrated part of the hospital rather than as a set of discrete tasks (e.g., cleaning rooms).
There is a famous anecdote about John F. Kennedy’s visit to a NASA space center when he was U.S. president. He talked to several people on the site, among them the janitor. When Kennedy asked him: "what do you do?”, the janitor answered "I help people get to the moon”. I think, he was right. But probably not everyone would have described his job in the same way.
The bigger picture and an employers’ perspective
Apart from being able to improve your work experience on a daily basis and find more satisfaction and fulfilment by that, practicing job crafting becomes deeply relevant when you consider how our world has become different in the past years (centuries, actually) and is going to develop in the future.
The world around us, including the working world, is changing faster and faster. This can bring opportunities but also challenges - for businesses and employees: Opportunities to develop new skills and experience more freedom, challenges of increasing complexity and uncertainty.
When job structure is rapidly changing, more and more responsibility is put on the individual for the experience and engagement in their work. This creates the freedom to build the kinds of task, relational and cognitive landscapes that bring meaning to work, while also demands independence and self-organization, and flexibility.
When defining the meaning of work for yourself and constantly and actively think about how you can shape it, it will be easier to adjust to that environment and enjoy your work.
Out of an employer’s perspective, creating opportunities for employees to job craft and encouraging independence can prove valuable as their productivity is supposed to increase. When employees feel that they can personalise their jobs, they have a greater sense of control at work and much needed clarity on where their careers are headed. Engaged employees work harder and are more innovative, perform stronger, and can cope better with demands (Konermann, 2012).
Limits of job crafting
There might be structural constraints in the job that don’t allow to pursue or implement what you imagined. Structural constraints do constrain job crafting possibilities. Also closeness of monitoring or supervision by management may affect whether employees perceive opportunities to job craft. Is this a true barrier or could you seek a conversation on this with your manager?
Also, not every frustration you might be feeling right now with your job can be solved with job crafting. Let me be clear: Engaging in finding more positive perspectives on your tasks or giving them a new meaning does not mean sugarcoating your job, if you’re not happy in it. For me, job crafting is about changing from a passive attitude to a more active attitude to explore what you can do yourself while still maintaining a realistic view on what is helpful and what is not.
What does this mean for you?
How do you find out where you stand yourself and whether job crafting is something worth trying?
Asking yourself some thoughtful questions and being honest in answering them, is often a good first step:
What are tasks that you particularly enjoy or detest?
What would you like to do more or less of? And with whom?
Is it about setting boundaries (task-wise, time-wise), e.g. reducing (or increasing) your working hours; what do you think of traveling for business?
Beyond your plain job description, how does your work serve a bigger purpose? And is this one, you believe in and want to support?
How important is it to you to find meaning in your job, or can you also receive that by activities outside your work? Most people have one of three distinct relations to their work - seeing it as a job, career or calling. What is it for you?
Sort your ideas by whether it can be altered with or without involving someone else inside or outside the organisation or company (team, colleagues, management vs. clients, partner, friends, family).
Figuring out the right questions (and the right answers) can be tricky if you’re doing it alone. Talk it through with a good friend, a trusted colleague or manager, or reach out to a coach.
If you want to contact me, you can do this here.
Sources:
“Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work” by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, 2001
“Fostering employee well being via job crafting intervention” by Jessica van Wingerden et al., 2017
Do you have questions? Leave them in the comment section below.