For many of us, the job we do is a significant element of our identities. We spend a great deal of our weekly time and energy engaging with the responsibilities and features of our work—the good and bad—as our roles require. For better or for worse, how we feel about our jobs can have a large impact on our lives—and on our work itself.
When roles are not challenging, meaningful, or even interesting enough, that can be bad news for both the employee and the organization. If an employee struggles to feel connected and engaged with their work, they will be less productive, less effective, and, in general, they will be less satisfied. Even employees who are normally top performers can find themselves slogging through the bare minimum when confronted with a boring job.
How to Re-tool a Boring Job
Thankfully, research suggests the employees who tend to have the highest engagement with their work (and, therefore, tend to be better employees) also tend to tweak and alter certain details of their job to ensure that their needs are always met. This process of altering details about one’s job to be more fulfilling is called job crafting.
Job crafting is often an individual, proactive process taken by an employee who identifies specific aspects of their job they feel don’t serve their needs and goals. For example, you may be a member of a marketing team who is particularly passionate about engaging with the public, but you tend to find meetings and communicating internally with your company a bit dull. Rather than keeping your head down and silently hoping you get assigned more public-facing tasks in the future, you could proactively ask your manager to give you assignments that better suit your passions. You could even ask a teammate who enjoys the internal work to swap certain tasks with you, serving both your interests.
For a happier, more effective workforce, job crafting may appear like a simple solution. However, for some managers, the idea of allowing employees the freedom to make these decisions on their own could be intimidating. They may worry that allowing people to change up their jobs to better suit their personal goals could ultimately hinder the organization’s goals.
It is true that implementing successful job crafting requires collaboration between managers and employees. And it may not always be as straightforward as trading tasks and asking for specific kinds of work assignments. However, organizations who wish to retain their top employees should consider not only allowing employees to job craft, but might also benefit from actively encouraging it.
Otherwise, the organization risks losing its most engaged employees. It is worth it for leaders to understand job crafting, and to learn how to best support beneficial crafting behaviors.
Types of Job Crafting
Researchers Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) highlight three major forms of job crafting:
Task crafting is the process of changing the actual details of the work you do. This type of crafting involves altering the types and frequency of tasks you perform, and the manner in which you perform them. As in the above marketing team example, it could look like taking on more of a certain type of assignment (like being more directly involved with customers during the market research process). It could also look like taking a differing approach to the way marketing research is done (like conducting more focus groups rather than relying on formal surveys).
Interpersonal, or relational crafting is the process of changing how you interact with other people at work. This could be spending more or less time with certain colleagues, choosing to attend work-related social events more or less often (or even choosing to organize such events yourself), and, sometimes, working to change the nature of a relationship (such as taking the time to repair an adverse relationship with a teammate).
And, finally, cognitive crafting is a mental process of reforming your perceptions and feelings about the purpose of your work. To do this, you may spend time reevaluating the true impact your work has, and examining what that impact means to you. For example, you could interact with customers to learn more about how what you and your organization have done for them have affected them. Ultimately, this type of crafting is a process of storytelling—why does your work matter to others and to you?
All three types of crafting can have a positive impact on how you experience your job. Any form may lead to you feeling more engaged with work, have more fun doing it, and find it more personally fulfilling.
How to help employees job craft
There are degrees to which an individual can craft their job. For example, there is only so much a surgeon can do to adjust what tasks they do and how they do them. And, as a leader who wants to support their employees' desire to job craft, the idea of allowing people to decide what they do at work may seem daunting. How can you be sure everything that needs to get done will get done? What if everyone on your team unanimously decides they find a certain task too dull, and it gets ignored?
As a leader, ensuring job crafting aligns with organizational strategy is an essential ingredient to successful job crafting.
Here are some ways to help your team job craft well:
- Align tasks with potential. Although an employee may choose to direct their job towards tasks they enjoy, they may not always recognize opportunities to develop in their career. Leaders are in a unique position to identify areas of potential growth, and guide their team members in directions that are beneficial both to the employee and to the organization.
- Allow for flexibility when possible. Sometimes, things absolutely need to get done by certain people and in certain ways. It probably isn’t a good idea to let employees with no scientific training work in your chemistry labs, for instance. However, holding employees hostage by their official role descriptions isn’t always helpful. Allow employees to branch out, to learn new skills—they may discover talents, and you may find the team is more effective for it. And, in situations where job requirements simply cannot be changed, encourage employees to use relational and cognitive crafting instead.
- Use lots of communication. Have conversations with employees about what they need from their job. Figure out if you can reasonably fulfill their requests without hurting the organization’s overall goals (and, ideally, in the vast majority of these cases this process will support those goals!). And be sure you don’t overlook employees who like to keep their heads down and muddle through unfulfilling work. Engage with them first, and find ways you can help them improve their satisfaction with their role.
- Offer job crafting training, or help identifying strengths. Research provides evidence that job crafting training (training that helps employees learn specific methods to use to tailor their job to better suit them) shows that it’s most effective for employees who are more aware of their strengths. For employees without as much personal awareness (younger employees, perhaps), providing systematized, scientifically-based assessments to evaluate job-related strengths may be a more effective alternative.
You Don't Have to Do it Alone
While it may seem like a daunting task, leaders and the organization will benefit in the long run from taking the time to ensure the most engaged employees stay engaged. If you need help getting started, we’d love to talk. We have helped our clients navigate their most difficult challenges. We can help you identify ways to simplify the job crafting process and implement proactive strategies to create a healthier work environment that helps reduce risks of disengagement and promote employee engagement and well-being. Contact us for a no-obligation, free consultation by clicking this link: Innovative Connections or calling us at 970-279-3330.
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