In this article, I will discuss the individual benefits of job crafting, and how you go about it.
You have to drive job crafting. It isn’t something that comes down from HR. Job crafting is an individual-led process of making your job better – for you. It involves identifying what you would love to have in your job and then finding ways to bring more of that into it.
Sounds good, right?
The individual benefits of job crafting.
Let’s start with all the reasons job crafting is good for you as an employee.
Greater control
When you start on the process of job crafting, you give yourself a greater level of control over what the job entails. Even if you can’t change everything you would like to, you are still taking control of your own destiny.
You get to do more of what you enjoy
Clever crafting can leave you with more time to do the work you really enjoy. You might even be able to lose some of those tasks that really grind you down. You know, the ones you put in your ‘eat that frog’ session at the start of each day (you do make sure you get the awkward tasks out of the way early, don’t you?).
How would it be if you didn’t have to do those, so you can get into the good stuff right away?
Career development
One of the big individual benefits of job crafting is the opportunity to expose yourself to responsibilities that will look great on your C.V. If there’s an area that’s missing for your next career move, job crafting can be a great way to plug that gap.
Work-life balance
Good job crafting can help you to be more in control of your time. If you’re the one influencing what tasks you get to take on, it will be easier to make sure the peak workloads come at a time that suits you and your lifestyle.
Greater sense of purpose
There’s nothing more soul-destroying in a job than meaningless tasks that don’t seem to make sense. With job crafting you can influence what’s prioritised in your workload. So you get to spend more time on tasks that move the organisation (and you too) towards achieving something worthwhile.
How do you do job crafting?
OK, so we’ve talked about the individual benefits of job crafting, now let’s look at what it is, and how you do it.
Three job crafting approaches
There are three ways in which you can influence your job:
- Task crafting
Changing the actual content of your job is the approach that everyone immediately thinks of. And it’s an important part – doing more of the good stuff and less of the bad is what it’s all about. And it’s actually the hardest part, it’s generally the bit that requires the most permission from your manager. - Relational crafting
This is about who you have to, or get to, interact with. And how and when. It can allow you to better manage your personal energy, to learn, and to create more fulfilling work relationships. And the great thing is, you have more influence over this one. There’s a lot of it that you can just get on and do. - Cognitive crafting
If you thought ‘relational crafting’ sounds a bit of a mouthful, now we’re going fully into psychology speak! Put simply, it’s about how you think about your work. It isn’t about going all happy-clappy and pretending not to be hacked-off about the crappy parts of your job. It’s more about taking some time to understand what matters to you about it, so you can focus on that. And, as I’m sure you’ll have realised, this one is entirely down to you.
Self-Knowledge: the key to the individual benefits of job crafting
Before you can effectively craft your job to better suit you, you need to fully understand what you would love. There are innumerable methods to dig deep into what would make work fun and meaningful for you, so I’m not going to list them all out here. I have my favourites, of course, but you need to find the ones that resonate with you.
A good one will be challenging but enjoyable. You’ll be asked to be brutally honest with yourself, but alongside that will be an opportunity to imagine a world in which work is delightful for you.
I’d be willing to bet that you can remember times when you had great fun at work. Maybe not at this job, but at some work, at some time.
That immediately tells you that work CAN be fun for you. You just need to remember how. And once you do, you can work out how to craft some of that good stuff into this job, or the next.
My favourite for that is called Core Process, a delightful approach I use in my individual VIP days for private clients. It can also be adapted to be used in a team or corporate context.
This kind of personal exploration can obviously be remarkably useful in “cognitive crafting” (how you feel about your work. And it can also tell you a lot about the relationships you would enjoy (“relational crafting”) and the stuff that’s actually fun for you (“task crafting”).
In future posts I’ll be delving deeper into each aspect of job crafting, and the tools and approaches that others before you have found useful. Make sure you don’t miss any, register for updates in the box at the bottom of the page.
