Job Crafting

Lesson 1.2 – Job Crafting

“Job Crafting” refers to the act of changing one’s job in a personalized way, with an intention of improving performance for the organization and quality of work life. Many organizations have already incorporated training and opportunities for Job Crafting into their personnel policies (although not always in ways that build and support broader workplace innovation capability).

In other words, Job Crafting can be defined as “taking proactive steps and actions to redesign what we do at work, essentially changing tasks, relationships, and perceptions of our jobs (Berg et al., 2007). The main premise is that we can stay in the same role, getting more meaning out of our jobs simply by changing what we do and the ‘whole point’ behind it.” (Moore, 2020)

Tims and Bakker (2010) definition of Job Crafting is “an employee-initiated approach which enables employees to shape their own work environment such that it fits their individual needs by adjusting the prevailing job demands and resources.” (p. 2)

The importance of Job Crafting for workplace innovation lies in the fact that “as employees craft their own jobs, they create scope to be more innovative at work (e.g., incorporating work tasks that will prompt innovative thoughts; crafting relationships with colleagues who can champion innovative ideas; focusing on skills that can be applied to a creative outlook on new products and processes in the organization; and adopting a view of one’s work role that will spur the
engagement in innovation for the organization, overall).” (Bindl, Unsworth, Gibson, & Stride, 2019, p. 609)

Watch this YouTube video for an introduction to Job Crafting. As depicted in the video there are various skills you can apply in Job Crafting: task crafting, relational crafting and cognitive crafting, and the additional approach of skill crafting (recently documented by Bindl et al. (2019)):

• task crafting takes place when an employee deviates from work tasks as formally outlined and makes changes to the scope, number or type of the task they are required to carry out
• relational crafting takes place when an employee makes changes to the way they interact with others
• cognitive crafting takes place when an employee rethinks their position; i.e., changes their perception of the job they carry out
• skill crafting takes place when an employee tries to broaden or improve their skill set so as to better their performance and prepare themselves for broader job responsibilities

Please note that job crafting can only take place where management is supportive of employee-led improvements and that job crafting should always be undertaken in dialogue with management.

Exercise: Read the two stories below from employees of a local company located in North Bay. Then, answer a question about each story before moving forward in the module.

An Example of Job Crafting by a New Employee

Many people, when they hear of a career in accounting, they think “boring and stagnant.” The industry is very systematic and rigid with rules, regulations and reporting standards, which can be very daunting for industry professionals. As a recent accounting graduate, Sarah, who had very little experience in the industry outside her degree, started in her new role as a public accountant. Here is a summary of how she transformed some aspects of her work:

• Sarah is a person who enjoys connections with people and helps out in any way she can. Every time she felt negative about her new job, she started to re-examine the purpose of her work, how she can help businesses to correctly file taxes. She started to realize how her job can make an impact on others. She began to craft her job to see it as an opportunity to rise to the occasion and use her files as a way to help her clients and fulfill her desire to help people in her everyday life. Further, through her interactions with clients, Sarah began to appreciate how her clients depended on her to finish their year-end and corporate taxes for their businesses.
• Sarah also began to make more connections with her coworkers which allowed her to learn from them to broaden her knowledge and experience through multiple projects. This made her see how she could enjoy and appreciate the way she chooses to carry out her work, and this further impacted her productivity and engagement at work.
• Finally, Sarah began to take it upon herself to help her firm in their hiring and recruiting process because she enjoys creating connections with others. She used these connections from her past to recruit new hires and gain attention from the local university during the process. This created a new path and another aspect of her job that made her feel fulfilled by helping her firm to connect with new opportunities.

An example of Job Crafting in a Highly-Regulated Profession

Ariana is a Chartered Professional Accountant currently thriving in the public sector of accounting at a local firm in North Bay. Over the last 5 years, Ariana has crafted her role considerably while finding herself improving the firm’s workplace processes along the way. She is well-respected and valued at her firm by clients, coworkers, and the partners themselves.

Ariana has heard others in the accounting profession state that accounting is too rigid and systematic to allow space for workplace innovation, including job crafting. For example, there is a general impression that work on organizational financial audits has little variation from year to year. However, in Ariana’s view “you do what you need to do to get the job done while confirming that the financials are reasonable and fairly stated and abide by the regulations”. For her, this means that there can be some room for different processes, templates, and methods but with a similar purpose and end result. Read through Ariana’s crafting efforts (listed below) and identify what type of job crafting she has instigated.

• Ariana has taken her strengths and applied them to this concept. She has crafted tasks and opportunities outside the requirements of her job to satisfy her needs and play to her strengths. For example, she found that by adjusting firm-standard spreadsheets to include more detail, the status of the work items on her projected job schedule can be better monitored within each project. This also helps to better allocate resources within each project for future years, which is not a requirement of her job but is something she has crafted to incorporate her own strengths.

• Ariana also created a template for electronic notes that help her coordinate through the client files she is working on. She colour-coordinates the notes by section, importance, communication, and completion. This reminds her, or the next person who works on that client file, of tasks or issues that can be avoided or need to be dealt with in the future, with solutions and time allocation. This streamlined work process has improved productivity within the workplace.

• One of her other strengths is her relationships and connections with others. Ariana took it upon herself to manage the productivity of client files and provide updated templates, notes, spreadsheets, and material to help her coworkers and to support the training of new staff. This gave her the satisfaction that she was making a difference by helping others around her with what she found to be a better practice of work. With time, people looked to her for advice and followed in her footsteps of crafting their positions to fill their needs while still completing the requirements of their job as well.

By integrating aspects of the strengths she appreciates, Ariana had made her job more enjoyable. What she has implemented has been a model for others to follow and she continues to be greatly respected in her office. With increasing productivity and more precise projections for allocation of resources and files, the firm can better understand and achieve goals and increase profits for the future.