Edition 5 of the Happier People in Tech newsletter series explores the positive psychology concept of job crafting - or: how to make your job work for you.

What is job crafting?

Job crafting is the process of altering elements of your job in order for it to better suit your personal preferences, strengths, skills and talents. Often, we do a bit of job crafting automatically and are not necessarily aware of doing it. According to Wrzesniewski's and Dutton's (2001) theory, job crafting can be done across 3 distinct dimensions:

Task Crafting: changing your responsibilities. This type of crafting happens when you change the process of your job and the tasks related to it. You might alter how you do parts of your job to better match your preferences. You might even add extra challenges or seek out additional projects to add, expand or reduce your responsibility around certain tasks.

Relational Crafting: changing your social interactions. This type of crafting involves the people and relationships you work with as part of your job. You might naturally limit interactions with toxic or unproductive relationships, and invest more into strengthening positive relationships. This in turn might change the way you fulfil your role.

Cognitive Crafting: changing your mindset. This type of crafting happens in your mind and the way you think about your job. Cognitive crafting is about how you assign meaning and significance to the tasks that form your role. Crafting in this area could mean you are changing the way you think about your job over time. Often, this is connected to greater self-determination, a drive to work more autonomous over time.

So why is job crafting important for employees, teams and organisations?

1 Research Highlight

The benefits of job crafting

Job crafting research highlights a number of benefits, including overall performance increase on organisational level. On individual level, people who job craft report greater job satisfaction, general career satisfaction and overall wellbeing. But most importantly, employees who job craft achieve higher engagement at work, promoting a higher degree of dedication, vigour and flow at work.

Engaged employees are happy employees. And happiness pays off - quite literally. A recent meta-analysis (Oprea et al., 2019) shows that job crafting interventions can achieve a 14% increase in employee engagement in a relatively short time frame of just 3 months.

Take that 14% increase in employee engagement and translate that into reduced labour cost (a more engaged employee gets more things done) and an increase in output (a more engaged employee achieves more in terms of revenue).

And that's your business case for investing in happier people in tech!

So let's get crafting:

1 Positive Strategy

Your recipe to start job crafting

Observe. Start your job crafting process by putting your Sherlock Holmes hat on. Observe your day-to-day at work and write a list with activities that energise you, make you feel happy or get you totally absorbed in.

Find Patterns. When you have your list complete, analyse it for potential patterns. Do you prefer to work alone or with others? What is your main driver and motivation?

Start Crafting. To start crafting areas of your job, ask yourself how you could improve your workflow to do more of the things you have on your list. How many opportunities do you currently get to perform the activities on your list? What can you do more of? What can you do less of?

Balance. Plan your tasks in line with your natural energy levels. Schedule energy-consuming activities during your high-productivity time. Move re-energising tasks to a time when you are a bit tired and need a boost in energy.

Job crafting is an ongoing process that works best when you regularly review where you are at and where you want to get to. Leaders can support this process by adding a job crafting check-in to regular 1:1's with your team members.

1 Random Wisdom

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosopher

You can book me for a job crafting masterclass to help your teams get more engaged. Let's have a chat and discuss your needs.

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References

Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. (2001). Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work. Academy Of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201. doi: 10.5465/amr.2001.4378011

Oprea, B., Barzin, L., Vîrgă, D., Iliescu, D., & Rusu, A. (2019). Effectiveness of job crafting interventions: a meta-analysis and utility analysis. European Journal Of Work And Organizational Psychology, 28(6), 723-741. doi: 10.1080/1359432x.2019.1646728