Job Crafting: How I’ve made my job more me

Charlotte’s job crafting model

“Four months into my role I’m pleasantly surprised at how much I have already personalised my job. ”

— Charlotte Axon, Lead People Scientist

I began my journey at Tailored Thinking as a Lead People Scientist. Having realised I’d (unknowingly) crafted every job I’ve ever had, I was keen to understand how I could be more deliberate with it.

(Job crafting is making small and tangible changes to your job to make it a better fit for you).

Sharing my experiences 

Four months into my role I’m pleasantly surprised at how much I have already personalised my job. Much of this is due to the freedom and autonomy Tailored Thinking encourages and enables (how could we not?)

Similar to Chloe (my fellow team member), I grouped my experience against the 5 main ways that we find people tend to job craft. 

Five ways I’ve crafted my job:

1. Purpose crafting

Charlotte working on the flipchart

What is it? Purpose crafting is reframing how we think about our work in general, including the value and significance it brings to us personally and others.

How did I do it? Hearing stories from people who have made seemingly small and simple changes to their roles, but have seen huge impacts from it, reminds me of the power of job crafting and its potential to genuinely improve working lives. Speaking to people about their job crafting experiences is my go-to if I'm ever wondering how my role adds value to people’s working lives."

2. Task crafting 

Notes

What is it? Task crafting is tangibly changing aspects of how we undertake our work including designing, adding or removing tasks.

How did I do it? People who know me well would describe me as super organised, and someone who makes plans happen. Naturally, I quickly adopted this role within the Tailored Thinking team. Those admin tasks that no-one ‘owns’ but someone needs to? That’s me! I’ve loved managing Trello boards, keeping projects on track, and writing proposals. We all have different strengths and interests and I look forward to taking on more responsibility for the finance and data sides of Tailored Thinking (you’re welcome Chloe!) as my role develops.

3. Skill crafting

Yes sign

What is it? Skill crafting is developing, refining and focusing on new skills.

How did I do it? I’m a believer in saying yes to the stuff that scares me - whether that be figuring out the technicalities of delivering large group facilitation online, or getting more comfortable speaking in public. I don’t always say yes immediately, but I know how much I have developed during my career through stretching myself, and trust that that will continue when I embrace opportunities to be vulnerable.

I’ve recently been delivering presentations on new topics and have just recorded a podcast, which I’m pretty proud of.

4. Wellbeing crafting

Charlotte’s Google calendar (not available)

What is it? Wellbeing crafting is boosting our physical and mental health through the work we do.

How did I do it? This is the area I’ve probably done most crafting. For example, most days I block out time for lunch to allow a proper break and eat proper food (not just the beige stuff). I always set an out of office for when I’m not working, which takes away any pressure to be working / responding, and also automatically declines invitations in my calendar - saving me the job of saying no to people. As a 4-day week employer, I also dedicate my non-working day to self-care (you can read more about that here).

5. Relationship crafting

Chloe and Charlotte chatting

What is it? Relationship crafting is shaping how we relate and engage with others, including building and adapting our relationship with co-workers. 

How did I do it? I think it’s really important to allow time for getting to know colleagues, especially in a remote world (but more generally too). Since joining the team I’ve actively tried to make time to collaborate with colleagues, as well as allowing space at the beginning of meetings for chit chat. Some days, connecting with lots of people can be energy depleting, so I try to keep one day a week meeting free. This allows me to indulge my introvert side, and also serves as uninterrupted focus time for larger pieces of work.

If you want to start crafting your job my advice would be:

1. Select an area of job crafting to focus on (1 of the 5 described above).

2. Think about parts of your role that you would like to start doing, stop doing or change. It doesn’t have to be additional work but doing more of the stuff you like or reframing how you approach parts of your role.

3. Treat it as an experiment - it’s OK if it doesn’t go how you expected the first time (we often see unintended benefits too).

4. Start small - it doesn’t have to be massive, just something that will improve your job by just 1% and can take less than 1 hour per week.

You can listen to Charlotte chat more about job crafting on her recent BA Brew podcast appearance.

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Charlotte is the lead people scientist at Tailored Thinking and is passionate about making work better for everyone. Charlotte has a first class masters degree in Occupational Psychology and enjoys understanding what meaningful work looks like and feels like for different people.

Connect with Charlotte on LinkedIn.

3 new Job Crafting articles every people professional should read

We believe that every HR and people professional should know about Job Crafting. In this blog we share 3 articles that we think you should read.

Job Crafting currently remains a fairly niche (and some might say nerdy) topic. However, the evidence behind the associated benefits of job crafting are so compelling in terms of engagement, retention, wellbeing and performance, that we are doing all that we can to raise the profile of the concept.

At its core, job crafting is about positively tweaking and shaping areas of your job to make it a better fit for you as an individual.

So trust us when we say if there is an article about job crafting we have probably read it. It’s great to see more being written about job crafting in academic and more mainstream press.

Here are 3 recent articles we have picked for you (yes, we’re nice like that) which highlight the role that job crafting can have in supporting current and contemporary workplace challenges and opportunities.

1. How to love your job according to science

[Photo: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images]

Website: FastCompany

Author: Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

With the pandemic bringing to light the need for more meaning, purpose and enjoyment in our jobs. This article provides you with 5 ways you can make your job better in areas that you can control.

One of the ways is to embrace job crafting.

“Whatever you do, you always have some autonomy and control to do it better”.

2. How Job Crafting can help digital gig-workers build resilience

Artwork by Franziska Barczyk

Website: Harvard Business Review

Author: Sut I Wong

We’re always interested to hear of different industries and sectors are crafting their jobs. We were even more excited when we heard about gig-workers.

This article suggests several strategies to help gig workers and platforms boost resilience through job crafting.

A supportive and collaborative job crafting culture is key to ensuring both a resilient gig workforce in the near term, and a healthy gig economy in the long term.

3. Leadership To Last: 4 Ways To Keep Employees During The Great Resignation

Website: Forbes

Author: Aliza Knox

There is lots of chatter around the term the ‘The great resignation’ and ‘The great imagination’. This article argues that leaders need to enable people to see how they can get what they need from their existing jobs, before moving on.

Of course, one of the ways you can do this is through encouraging job crafting.

One more tip for keeping employees engaged, and working alongside you: make sure their jobs grow with them.

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If you enjoyed this blog and are curious about job crafting we have some cracking stuff over on our website here. Also, if you want to go really deep into job crafting research you can check out Rob’s book Personalization at Work.

Thank you for reading.

Do we practice Job Crafting subconsciously?

In this guest blog Manahil Syed, Recruitment and HR Officer and MBA student shares her insights and recent findings from her study on job crafting.

This was a fascinating research project sponsored by Tailored Thinking and we were so impressed with it that we convinced Manahil to write a blog on it!

Job crafting sounds self-explanatory, to some extent. Like a sculptor carves a stone, inch by inch, in the same way, we can carve or modify various aspects of our job. But the size of the chisel is limited by our job description defined in HR’s books.

If we closely look at job crafting, we all practice at least some aspects of it. For example, we all have had that one annoying repetitive task at our jobs that we just want to get done with as soon as we can. Our pursuit of streamlining such tasks would fall under the ambit of job crafting.

Job crafting is generally divided into three types of activities, task, relational, and cognitive.

Task Crafting:

We can practice task crafting subconsciously by adjusting our routine tasks to our preferences in order to make them enjoyable. Moreover, a significant portion of task crafting is based on new tasks that you partake in or new approaches for routine tasks.

For example, your task is to arrange quotations from suppliers for required material. You must present all these quotations in a comparable form to the decision-making body, after removing all ifs and buts from quotations. Instead of manually doing all this, you decide to change the process and develop a standardised form which each vendor has to complete as part of their quotation. Needless to say, this is being done with the consultation of your supervisor. 

Relational Crafting:

Once done, you visit a colleague that you are on friendly terms within the IT department and ask him to provide consultation regarding uploading this form on the company’s portal so that you can download it in the desired format. Your colleague/friend does not directly deal with such stuff and he invites you for a cup of tea at the company’s cafeteria so that he can introduce the relevant person to you. All three of you discuss the feasibility, in terms of cost, time, and resources, of doing this exercise. Somehow, you manage to execute your plan and the new portal is up and running. Now you simply have to download the worksheet from the portal and review it for any bugs and present it to the decision-making body.

Cognitive Crafting:

After a successful presentation, you feel relaxed and elevated as you have brought in a structural change to your job description. You imagine positive word-of-mouth about your contribution to the company and how other departments will try to follow the lead of digitization.

This hyper-simplified example was presented to highlight aspects of job crafting. The whole thing starts with your overt motivation to improve your work and save yourself some extra time. A gap was identified, which even left unattended would not have affected your performance, when looked at from the supervisor’s point of view. The mere act of kicking off this project would come under the umbrella of task crafting, whereas approaching your supervisor and other colleagues for executing it comes under relational crafting. When the project is completed, your accomplishment-based gloating stems from your contribution to the company. Anything, that is out of the scope of your pre-defined work might come under job crafting. It is unlikely that anyone would make such a claim, that he/she does not work over and beyond the pre-defined scope.

If this is the case, then why do we need to know about job crafting?

My research at the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with Tailored Thinking, suggests people who knowingly practice job crafting have a greater level of workplace well-being as compared to people who obliviously practice it. This is related to the dynamics of awareness, cognition, and perception. A person using a smartphone of a prestigious and renowned brand is likely to have a better experience as compared to a person who uses a smartphone of an unknown brand. 

At the end of the day, we are all trying to do our best at balancing various aspects of our lives; get comfortable with whatever we have. Job crafting helps us by activating various primitive motivators to get the job done. Its benefits have the potential to go beyond one’s workspace.

Task crafting stimulates your creative problem-solving skills, relational crafting can help you develop relations that become long-term, even when you leave the job. Cognitive crafting helps in picturing yourself as an integral cog in the wider system.

It is better to practice job crafting knowingly as its benefits are much greater than the meagre cost of simply equipping yourself with its rudimentary knowledge.

If you want to find out more you can download our job crafting guide here.

Also, you can connect with Manahil on LinkedIn here.

How to stimulate job crafting - an exercise for individuals and teams.

An exercise to stimulate job crafting.

Numerous people want to improve their work. A challenge for many is knowing where to start. This blog shares a simple exercise starting point. It is focused on encouraging you to identify the elements of your job that you want to change and improve.

We created this small, practical exercise to demonstrate how you can make small changes that can have a big impact.

Stage 1 - Identifying what you want to change.

We encourage people to consider 5 questions around 5 themes to identify opportunities and areas for change, personalisation and improvement (displayed on the image above).

• What do you want to grow / promote?

• What do you want to takeaway / reduce?

• What can you change / improve?

• What do you want to maintain / persist and keep doing?

• What do you want to pause / stop?

Stage 2 - Identifying the how.

Having identified the areas you want to change, the next step in the activity is to identify how you might do this.

To make the change sustainable and manageable we recommend you make one small change at a time. Approach any changes with curiosity and a mindset of experimentation.

The activity can be found here.

Why personalising work matters

Personalising your work around your personal strengths and preferences is called job crafting.

You can job craft by making small changes to your job to adapt and align your role with you as an individual.

Job crafting is a science backed concept. It helps you to thrive in your work, boosting engagement, wellbeing and overall happiness.

The idea is around boosting, growing and promoting the areas of your work that you enjoy and that give you energy.

For example, in Rob’s TED talk (5.45 - 6.48) he shared the example of a marketing director called Joanne. Having done this exercise, she identified that she wanted to grow and find more opportunities to informally connect with her colleagues. She did this (the How) by informally finding opportunities to connect with different members of her team each day.

Taking action

Three things you can do are:

• click this link to access the exercise

• identify what you want to change

• set a specific goal which captures the change you are going to make

Stay in touch

We’d love to hear about your experiences with this exercise so please connect with us and let us know.

If you found this exercise of value then you may also enjoy our ‘Love and Loathe’ exercise.

Job Crafting on Purpose.

A sense of purpose is a defining human need for us all. Yet, despite this universal personal requirement, the ‘why’ of work and the power of purpose is often overlooked when it comes to our jobs.

As lockdown eases and the way we work is transitioning, there has never been a better, or arguably more important, time to focus attention and discussions about the value and purpose of what we do.

How can organisations and HR leaders revive or recalibrate a sense of purpose and amplify engagement and performance along the way?

One evidence-based and practical way to do this is by purpose crafting. Purpose, or cognitive, crafting is a type of job crafting that involves shaping and reframing how we think about the value and purpose of our work.

The 4 key types of purpose crafting.

There are four key types of purpose crafting; broadening, narrowing, finding; and personalising purpose. 

Broadening

We can connect to the wider purpose of our work by looking at the bigger picture in terms of who benefits from the work that we’re doing.

An example of broadening is a customer service operator in a bank reframing their daily tasks from dealing with individual issues, to providing a key service to customers to support their financial welfare.

Narrowing

We can create a sense of purpose by focusing in on and recognising specific elements of our work which we find particularly meaningful and enjoyable.

Rather than broadening their focus, other employees may find value in focusing in on a specific aspect of their work they find particularly meaningful and enjoyable (narrowing purpose) – such as an HR business partner creating opportunities to contribute to wider business strategy.

Finding

We can connect to the purpose of our work by intentionally searching and creating opportunities to understand the impact of the work that we’re doing.

A project manager’s job crafting experiment to check in with projects they had delivered a year ago is an example of someone finding the purpose of their work. These check-ins allow them to not only hear stories about the benefits (and possible failings) of their work, but also give them other insights that will shape how they lead future projects.

Personalising

People can purpose craft by personalising elements of the work they do with the passions and interests that are important to them, which may traditionally only be displayed and showcased outside of work.

People can also ignite a sense of purpose by finding ways to connect their work with values, activities or beliefs that are meaningful and important to them on a personal rather than strictly professional basis. For example, getting involved in, or leading, sustainability or mental health initiatives or starting a weekly running group may allow people to bring outside interests into the organisation.

Bringing purpose crafting to life

Rather than giving or telling people what purpose is, leaders and HR should be concerned with creating opportunities for people to find and shape it for themselves. Here are three ways we’ve seen organisations help people find and join their personal purpose dots:

• Encourage people to connect with, and directly hear from, the benefactors of their work – through focus groups, testimonials, or simple feedback.

• Be explicit about discussing and defining the purpose and value of work – by defining purpose and value in job descriptions and in one-to-one discussions.

• Actively invite people to bring their passions to work – by introducing employee-led skill share workshops or encouraging people to involve.

Other case studies and examples of how organisations have brought job crafting to life can be found here.

We hope that we have inspired you to make a small change to your job that will make your work more tailored to you.

By writing this blog we (Tailored Thinking) are bringing our purpose to life by inspiring and enabling people to make positive changes to their work.

To learn more on the ‘why’ of work and connecting with the meaning and purpose then you can read more here.

Also, you can click here to learn more about job crafting.

The Love and Loathe exercise: Mapping and boosting our energy at work.

An exercise to map and boost your energy at work.

People naturally have a sense of the activities and tasks at work that light them up and those that drain energy away from them.

Despite knowing what shapes our energy we often do very little about this. We just tend to get on with work; because well, we feel we have to.

We have normalised the idea that there are always going to be parts of our work that we don’t enjoy and that we will find draining and mundane.

But what if we changed the way we looked at these tasks and found ways to reduce, shape or reframe them?

And what if we found ways to do more of the things that light us up?

We want to help positively shape your energy at work for a happier and healthier you.

What is the exercise?

Love and loathe is an exercise we use at Tailored Thinking with individuals and teams.

The starting point is to identify 10-15 key activities that are core and important parts of your current roles and to reflect how much energy they give or take. 

Why should you use it?

This mapping exercise enables people to reflect on, and see the interplay between their tasks and their energy load.

You will become more aware of how you’re spending your time at work and what fills you with energy and what does not.

This self awareness may change the way you think about tasks and how you carry them out. It’s a great starting point for job crafting.

Who is it made for?

Everyone! For most people, regardless of which industry you work in there are always going to be tasks we find more enjoyable than others. Likewise, there will be tasks we find that are less enjoyable, that may drain our energy.

If you’re someone who wants to boost your energy at work then this is the exercise for you.

What are the benefits of doing this exercise?

This exercise:

1. Enables you to consider the current allocation of personal resources of time and energy.

2. Highlights opportunities to shape and change your activities to maximise your energy.

3. Allows you to meet your needs for control, positive self-identity and connection with others.

Love and Loathe Exercise Guide

If you’re interested in the love and loathe exercise and would like to find out more around the dynamics, we have produced a short guide on how to use it.

It will also give you the diagrams of the exercise that you could print out and use or simply copy.

You can download it here.

If you have any questions, queries or just fancied a chat about this then please do not hesitate to get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.