The Art of Job Crafting. Self-Initiated. Change-Oriented. Future-Focused.

Originally Published March 21, 2022

Thank God it's Monday! Yes, you read it right. I said Monday. You might ask, “How can you even say that when we’re about to devour the ever-lurking ‘RTO’ for breakfast?” May I present to you, Job Crafting! To answer you with a question, how do you hire and train people? I’m guessing, you just mouthed: “Go to the Job Description”. What’s ironic is that every job description is already changed when an employee leaves. You might not admit it but you've already customized your work subconsciously based on your strengths and preferences. Nobody’s job is exactly the same.

Job Description is an offspring of The Industrial Revolution. Counterintuitively, we are still using this very controlling and static manner of saying "This is what we want you to do" in a very volatile world. Job Crafting appears disruptive because you don't know what the job is until you know the person. This is what the Agile Mindset brings to a healthy and engaged workforce. A lot of flexible moving parts—which are kind of mutating and adapting to current conditions and problems.

Job Crafting resurfaced at the precipice of virtual and hybrid workplaces 20 years after Wrzesniewski et al published a paper in 2001. To date, over 140 peer-reviewed studies have been conducted by high-profile academics that support this idea. Albeit not encouraged to personalize work, research shows that people value things twice as much when it is personalized. Chances are that everyone is already doing it discreetly.

Being a bottom-up approach for belongingness and autonomy, this tweaks 'managing' to 'leading'. It has to be an employee-initiated exercise, not a manager-dictated action. It showcases a different view to designing jobs for rapid change, innovation, and adaptation which increase employee satisfaction, motivation, and performance. Also, note that a shifting mindset requires changing processes so this would involve a lot of organizational culture and values. Job crafting supports career goals and personal goals outside of work so if you don't know what drives you, it could work against you.

Job crafting might sound simple but it is not an easy short-term initiative. It includes crafting tasks. delegating tasks, taking new tasks, and modifying how tasks are done. Be careful on caching your repertoire to avoid overwork and underpay. It also aims to enhance your skills, networks, and identity to enrich your experience of work. When you learn new skills through engagement, it leads to more competence. Consider things such as training, reflecting, and planning organized by your team with your whole careers collectively in mind. Increasing the levels of resources to develop engagement at work has a positive impact on self-regulation, cognitive reframing, reflective thinking, and proactivity.

In teams that suffer micromanagement, you will feel that you are less often in control of your day. So managers have to know what excites their team. Ask the right questions like what made them feel alive throughout the week. Pushing square pegs in round holes only makes them hardly effective.

In our modern world, working equals spending energy. However, small modifications can lead to a truckload of ramifications in how you spend your energy. Think of what gives you energy versus what drains you. High resources mean less exhaustion even with high demands. This will regulate the waste of time, energy, and human potential. Valuing every second makes it a more reasonable and humane way to work. Job Crafting is a tool for energy management to keep burnout at bay.

Learning that your value will actually help the organization might not sound helpful but it’s the method to see the purpose of a task from a new perspective. Practices such as Ikigai and Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle will guide you when tapping into the meaning or purpose of why you do what you do and when you are struggling with motivation. This doesn’t mean doing less but feeling like you've worked less because you are doing something you are actually passionate about. Focusing on things that are not part of your job but are a part of you so you do it in addition. Having that commitment and attachment to the job develops an extension of you and not just aimlessly working your behind off.

Job crafting though is not always positive. It has benefits and limits. It is not a license to do whatever you want but rather a negotiation. Interdependent works may create a ripple effect, especially for the ones working in power plants and the medicine industry. Never will it be one-size-fits-all but more of tailoring it to fit better. For example, an HR Manager spends more time researching employment laws to fulfill her passion to be a lawyer. Fundamentally, Job Crafting is about resourcefulness. Make sure you’re shaping your job, not letting your job shape you. Spend 12-15 minutes a day to refine your ‘Why’ in a slow burn. Look into Adam Grant’s 5-minute Favor at work. This will Increase impact through ownership—of course, without undermining your role.

Fostering mastery, meaning, and membership, Job Crafting will cultivate cost-effectiveness, loyalty, and retention. It’s not something that you tell people to do. It is, however, something that HR, leaders, and managers can nurture, encourage, and enable. It turns out, people love to learn about themselves so make sure of a safe space for people to speak up and uncover insights.

It is not easy to land your dream job especially if nobody hasn't created it yet. Let’s try to gradually get rid of the old and clunky HR systems like how Silicon Valley organizations, Logitech, and Google practice Job Crafting. Check out the JD-R theory or visit www.jobcrafting.com to learn more.

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