Job Crafting - a fresh way to encourage engagement

The work of the world is common as mud
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident
...
The pitcher cries out for water to carry
and a person for work that is real

~ from "To be of use" by Marge Piercy

Job Crafting is a relatively new approach for workers to make their jobs more satisfying. Developed by researchers at the University of Michigan (see Useful Resources below), it generally involves working through some questionnaires/ exercises in order to gain a greater sense of what you like or don't like about your job and how you can better deploy your strengths and motivators in order to enjoy your work more.

It is something that some people do instinctively. They take on a new role and then modify that role and the way they perform the related tasks to put their own stamp on it, often creating little efficiencies, job aids, systems and shortcuts that can be usefully employed by others doing similar work. Instead of passively complaining, they take the raw material with which they have to work and turn it into something that they are better able to live with.

What can workers do?

While job-crafting may be undertaken as a a formal structured process, you can accomplish pretty much the same result as follows:

• Identify wriggle room - There may be some things you have to do, but you may have a fair amount of flexibility in how you do them and there may be scope for doing them in a way that best suits your personal style, without adversely affecting the required outputs.
• Identify what you yourself bring to the job - your strengths, your passions and the things that motivate you. See how you can tailor the job in a way that makes the best use of who you are as an individual.
• Work out what you love and hate about the job - If you can, it may be possible to swap a hated task with a co-worker for something that you love and they hate, creating a win-win. Or you may be able to develop a way to make the hated task take less time or to do it more quickly or in some other way make it more bearable.
• Don't just think about modifying your job, go ahead and do it - Most managers won't mind so long as you are providing the required outcomes. A lot of the time changes are made under the radar anyway and a happy productive employee is unlikely to be disturbed, after all: why mess with success?

In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmialyi recounts the experience of an assembly line worker Rico Medelin:

Most people would grow tired of this work very soon. But Rico has been at this job for over five years and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches the task in the same way as an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like a runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves.

In other words, he has become totally engaged in a game of his own making. This is something almost all of us can aim for.

What can managers do?

If you are a manager, you can help your staff craft their jobs in a number of ways:

• Support them in their efforts - they may find better ways to do things that can be used by other staff
• Make it clear what outcomes you expect, but allow flexibility in how they are achieved
• Don't get in the way by interfering
• If it is possible, assist them in negotiating task swaps

Managers are always looking for ways to engage employees. But a lot of these methods assume that the job is unpleasant in some way and that as a result there need to be external incentives of some kind added, or that they need to create fun or social activities in the workplace to compensate. But these efforts, which often seem contrived and manipulative, only serve to reinforce the view that work is drudgery.

The job-crafting approach on the other hand assumes that the job itself can become fulfilling if the worker is permitted the flexibility to make adjustments that suit their strengths, passions and motives. And no small part of this is the experience of control that it yields. But the only way this will work is if the manager gives up some control and focuses on outcomes instead.

Through job-crafting we can increase the intrinsic satisfaction in the job making workers happier while maintaining engagement and productivity.

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Useful Resources

• Hate Your Job? Here's How to Reshape It (Jeremy Caplan, Time Magazine)
• Help Your Best People Do a Better Job (Nick Tasler, Business Week) 
• What is Job Crafting and Why does it matter (Justin Berg, Jane Dutton & Amy Wrzesniewski, UMich)