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