Job Crafting The Power of Personalising Our Work

[Music]

how many hours do you spend

at work how many hours did you spend

this week what about this month

this year i asked because in the uk we

spend

84 000 hours at work during our lifetime

just think about that time that’s a

third of our waking hours during

adulthood

and yet the sad reality is that for the

majority of us we’re not fully engaged

immersed

in the work that we do in fact global

studies of job satisfaction show the

majority of people on this planet

aren’t energized or engaged by the work

that they do they do

and i just think this is a terrible

waste a waste of people’s time a waste

of people’s energy

and ultimately just a waste of our human

potential i mean just imagine what you

could achieve if you’re able to bring

your

best ideas your best self to work each

day

as an hr professional business

psychologist i’ve spent my entire career

trying to

find ways to make work better i want

people to

thrive rather than simply survive in

their jobs

and it was about six years ago that i

was sat

in a classroom at the university of

melbourne at the center of positive

psychology

where i was presented with an idea an

idea that i feel can fundamentally

change the world of work

the wonderful doctor gavin schlemter

shared this concept with the class

and shared that this had been studied

for over 14 years at the time

and subject to over 100 academic

rigorous peer-reviewed studies

these studies have shown positive

outcomes when it came to things such as

happiness engagement fulfillment

and performance and i was sitting there

and listening to this because these are

the holy grail of outcomes we want as hr

professionals as

business leaders yet to my utter

amazement i’d never heard of this idea

before

the idea that i was gifted that day the

day the idea that i want to share with

you

is job crafting job crafting refers to

personalizing and customizing our jobs

to make it a better fit to us as

individuals

it’s a way to bring our passions our

strengths our interests to the workplace

and there’s no one fixed way to job

craft people do this in lots of

different ways but they tend to

come from five different core

motivations so one’s around changing

your tasks

your skills your relationships your

well-being

or connecting to your meaning and

purpose of what you do

and i was in a shop in newcastle where i

spotted a badge that i feel perfectly

sums up job crafting

the badge had been attached to it to the

jacket at the sleeve of the jacket

and the badge said tailor me to make me

more you he was advertising the fact

that you could tailor the final fit of

the jacket

um around your individual dimensions to

make it a better more comfortable

better looking fit you weren’t changing

the the fabric

or the color of the jacket this was

fixed we were making it more personal to

you

as an individual and you can bring this

personalized approach the semi-tailored

approach to the workplace through job

crafting

with job crafting you’re not designing

your job from scratch

but you are tailoring the final fit

around you as an individual

you’re changing this by how you think

acts and interacts within your

within your job and we can bring this

personalized approach to pretty much any

and every aspect of our lives my cars to

our clothes to our

cups of coffee you name it we can pretty

much personalize it these days

and research shows that when we

personalize our goods and services we

value them up to twice as much

compared with those that we buy off the

shelf and we perform better too using

personalized goods and services

and we can bring this performance

advantage this personalization advantage

to our jobs through job crafting when we

personalize our jobs we feel more in

control of what we do we have more

enjoyment engagement

and satisfaction yeah the sad reality

for majority of us we seldom have this

opportunity

we seldom have this opportunity to

personalize our jobs

in fact if our jobs were an item of

clothing for many of us there would be a

straight jacket

constraining rather than celebrating our

strengths and passions

and interests and

pretty much ever since i learned about

job crafting i’ve been

exploring studying and trying to find

ways to bring this to life within

organizations and workplaces i’ve

collected hundreds of stories

stories ranging from ceos to

cabin crew to computer technicians

to clean us

and today i wanted to share with you

three short stories of

people who brought job crafting to

action so the first

story involves paul and paul worked on

the

help desk at a the it help desk at the

university of melbourne

and paul attended one of my first ever

job crafting workshops

paul wanted to find ways to volunteer to

test new applications and

tech before they went live and he said

he wanted to do this for three reasons

firstly he recognized in terms of the

calls he received

that people often had problems with new

software a new tech

secondly he loved the problem solving

involved in trying to find

bugs in the system and thirdly he told

me just love trying to break things

excitingly paul caught up with me about

a month later and told me that not only

had his colleagues really appreciated

the opportunity for them to test

their tech and code before we went live

but his manager recognised this too

and so testing had become a small but

established part of his role

the second story involves joanna and

joanna worked at the global bank

in marketing communications as you might

imagine joanna’s role was really

demanding

she spent a lot of time doing meetings

with people but in a job crafting

session she

explained to me that she didn’t spend um

time connecting with people she felt

that this was missing from her job

so she decided to make a small job

crafting goal

to once a day spontaneously catch up and

meet

um with one of her teammates she’d do

this by phone

by video chat or in person if the

opportunity presented itself

and joanne told me that every time she

did this not only did she feel

a little bit more in control of her job

but she felt a little bit more in

control of her day

and a month later one of her colleagues

actually mentioned

to joanne that she’d valued having more

of a chance to see her and connect with

her recently

so this change that took joanna maybe 10

minutes a day

was something that actually her

colleagues had noticed

and she had noticed too

and the third job crafting example i

want to share with you

involves someone i know really well in

fact it’s it’s me

you’re watching a kind of job crafting

in action right now

speaking on stages speaking through

screens

is not something that i naturally enjoy

it doesn’t fill me with energy in fact

at times i find it

really draining and like today a bit

terrifying

yet i find the motivation to do this by

tapping into the meaning and purpose of

doing this i’m

passionate about sharing ideas that i

feel can make people’s work and by

extension their their lives better

it really matters to me and so

when i’m struggling with motivation i

tap into my meaning and purpose

i tap into why i’m doing these things

it gives me the confidence and

conviction to speak to you today

and these are three of literally

hundreds of stories i could have shared

with you across different industries and

professions

and i want you to comment to note from

these stories three common attributes

that i see time and again when i

study job crafting in action the first

is that the changes were driven by the

individuals

these were changes that individuals

wanted to make for themselves

in pursuit of making their work better

it wasn’t something that was imposed

upon them if

you can’t force job crafting on people

it has to come from within

the second thing i’d like to note is

that the job crafting changes were small

they were tiny in fact it would be

tempting always to dismiss them as

unimportant or insignificant but that

would be

a mistake in fact one of the things that

i feel gives job crafting its strength

is the fact that it’s simplicity it’s

something we can all do

in fact i believe any person on any job

can jog craft their role in some way

another way to think about it perhaps is

that job crafting gives you great bang

for your buck

and small changes to your job can lead

to big changes in your energy and

enjoyment in terms of the work that you

do

and the third thing to note in terms of

the job crafting stories

is that people do them in different ways

like people job crafting comes in lots

of different shapes

and sizes so paul craft his tasks joanne

craft her

relationships and her connections with

others and i tapped into the meaning and

purpose of my role

and i know what you’re thinking i know

you’re skeptical and that’s good for me

because if you’re skeptical

and it means you’re listening and

engaging with what i’m saying to you

you may be thinking rob there’s no way

that i will be able to craft my job

there’s no way my manager or my leader

would allow me to do this

and i get it a lot of people

are frankly afraid of what will happen

if they

allow people to personalize their roles

i find that leaders may be a little

scared about

just what might happen might there be

anarchy might there be chaos if people

were able to

tailor their jobs and around their

strengths their passions their interests

would it lead to people tearing up their

job descriptions or setting fire to

their role profiles

disappointingly and maybe and excitingly

this doesn’t happen in practice

i reassure managers you can reassure

your leaders and your managers

that this doesn’t happen in practice in

fact research

and my experience shows that when people

job craft they do it in

positive and responsible and responsive

ways

ways that make a difference not only to

the individual

but makes a difference to their their

colleagues their team workers

and their customers they serve too

if you’re curious about job crafting my

advice is to

try it for yourself one way to do this

is through

an exercise i call the love and loathe

exercise

for this exercise you’ll need three

things you’ll need some post-it notes

a piece of paper and a pen so to start

with on your

post-it notes write down your 10 to 15

key tasks in your job

now i know what you’re thinking and rob

i’ve got thousands of tasks but trust me

just

start with 10 to 15 to start with

next get your piece of paper on the

bottom of the page write a horizontal

line draw a horizontal line

which represents energy in your job on

one side you want to have the things

that drain you of energy that you love

doing

and the others you the other side of the

line are things that give you energy

then fill you up

the things you love doing in your job in

the middle of the page you want to put a

vertical line that represents time

and then you get your post-it notes and

plot them on this

graph and there’s two areas you want to

look at

that i feel a fertile ground for job

crafting the first are things that

you spend a lot of time doing that

actually drain your energy

think about other ways of reframing

changing

or reducing these activities or maybe

you can change how you think about them

in the way that i do when i’m presenting

so

i try and think about this not as an

opportunity to sweat and feel a little

bit embarrassed

but as a way to connect to my meaning

and purpose to share ideas that i hope

will make a difference

the other area you want to look at are

the things that give you energy that

fill you up

and are there ways to amplify these

activities are there ways to bring more

of this to your work in the way that

paul did and joanne did through our

stories

the secret to job crafting is to start

small find the tiniest

most positive change you can make to

your job and then just go for

it and there never has been a better

more important time to jobcraft than now

if the pandemic has taught us anything

is that we need to make every second

every minute every hour count

rather than being a cog in the machine

job crafting enables us to make our work

an extension of who we are

and the values we hold it’s simply a

more human way to work

so i hope i’ve encouraged you to bring

the personal touch to your job

and so i end with an invitation an

invitation for you to place

a badge on your job which says tailor me

to make me more you

i wonder what positive change you can

make

so i’d like to thank you all for

watching and i wish you all happy

crafting

you