Job Crafting for Happier Work Life Balance!

This video is on job crafting, what it is, and how to do it. It’s based on a theory-to-practice briefing, a white paper from the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship. This is a really important topic, and it’s going to be interactive. We’re going to actually walk you through how to do job crafting. It’s important because it’s been shown to be an essential practice for a happier work life, a better work life, kind of satisfaction with work life balance, and ultimately being more effective. As international public speakers and best-selling authors, stay tuned to hear Paul Krismer and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success.

So let’s start with the definition. What is job crafting? And this comes straight from the researchers at Michigan. Job crafting captures what employees do to redesign their own jobs in ways that can foster job satisfaction as well as engagement, resilience, and thriving at work. So, basically, job crafting is when you, as an individual, are empowered to customize your work in order to enjoy it more and, importantly, this should be in a way that is aligned to the benefit of your team, your department, your organization.

So how can an individual, like how can you get started, actually doing this, like crafting your job so that it feels more fulfilling and you enjoy the work you’re doing a little bit more? Well, there’s three paths we could say to job crafting: there’s task crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting. So let’s touch on each of those. Task crafting, that’s when you expand the boundaries of your work, or kind of adjust the boundaries of your work to either do more of the tasks that you enjoy, or eliminate some of the tasks that you don’t enjoy. So again, you have to kind of not totally throw out your own job description here, there are certain things that you have to do.

An example of this might be someone who works in marketing who really enjoys elements of event planning. So, he decides to take on this thread of planning company events. You think about relational crafting, how can you change the way that you relate to your peers or the people you manage or your clients themselves? So one example from this paper was a hairstylist who really enjoys teaching. He would give some helpful tips and tricks and kind of how-to info to the clients he worked with. Another one was a maintenance technician who really enjoyed teaching people, and so he started training the new hires. Those both, that one’s particularly kind of a mix of task crafting and relational crafting.

Third, cognitive crafting. That’s when you reframe your perceptions of the work you’re doing. So maybe you’re a lawyer, and you do kind of marriage and custody work, and so you reflect on how your work is improving the lives of children and families. It’s important to understand that this can be formally sanctioned by management, and if you are in a leadership role, this is something that you can encourage the people you work with, or that you manage, to do for themselves. But this also tends to happen a lot of times just informally and intuitively, with people gravitating towards doing more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.

There are really three phases, and that’s where we’re gonna start to walk you through how to actually do job crafting for yourself. So, phase one is having a motivation to change. So, you have a need or desire to kind of control your work, get more of a sense of meaning and purpose, and kind of positively identify with the work you’re doing. You may also want to kind of fulfill your passion for either a skill set that’s not totally related to your current occupation or a relatively different occupation. Finally, you may just want to have more meaningful interactions with the people that you work with and the customers and clients that benefit from your work. So this, phase one, is motivation.

Next, those crafting techniques that I talked about: task, relational, and cognitive. When you think about task crafting, think about the number, the type, or nature of the tasks. Can I spend more time and energy on the ones that I really enjoy? And maybe there are some periphery tasks that I can work with my team to delegate out to people who enjoy doing those more. Interacting with others: how can I improve my relationship to my customers? Can I tailor things to fit their specific preferences? Maybe with my team, can we change our approach to work so that each person is doing things that they enjoy a little bit more?

Or finally, can I just reframe how I think of the people that I work with, right? Maybe becoming a little more intimate, or investing in some of those friendships and team-building type things that can seem a little cliche, I know sometimes, but ultimately contribute to your working life satisfaction. And then finally, on the cognitive side, some approaches you can take. How can you reframe the work you’re doing to tie it to the kind of social purpose and impact it’s having on the world? Can you change your view of adversity or stress? Maybe thinking about the elements of your work that you don’t like so much and thinking of them maybe in terms of challenges or areas to grow in, or just a more positive, again, kind of cognitive reframe.

What I’ll invite you to do now, and as we wrap up this video, you can take a few minutes after, is maybe start to list out, maybe in two columns, under task crafting: What are things I want to do more of? What are things I want to try to do less of? Under the interactions with others and the relational crafting, maybe you think of colleagues, and then you think of customers. You think, well, what are ways that I can change and improve my relationships with either my clients and customers or the people I work with?

And then finally, under this cognitive perception of work, you might reflect on, you know, what are some things I can change from maybe things I don’t like so much to maybe challenges or areas to grow in. And also, can you reflect on the real-world impact your work’s having, and can you do things at your work that would bring you closer to that and have more of a positive impact? So, we talk about phase one as motivation, phase two is actually doing the crafting, then phase three is kind of actually experiencing the outcomes. So maybe you’re going to change, feel it kind of change in your relationship to your work, and how it fits in with your identity. Maybe you’re going to have some positive experiences and maybe, importantly, they’re going to be some unintended negative consequences. Maybe you decide to take on some extra tasks and it got too stressful, or maybe you wanted to do a certain change, and it kind of actually went against what was best for your team.

An example of this is like if you say, “Oh, I want to do more creative work,” but you really have to do a lot of analytical work, like you don’t want to have that sort of oppositional tension, right? So as this kind of third phase is where it becomes this process of refining and iterating and seeing what’s working. Because job crafting, it’s great to do a one-time formal exercise like this, but ultimately it’s going to be an ongoing process where you kind of check and adjust and see what’s working.

So, this is important because this will help you improve your work-life satisfaction, and it will help you to improve your performance. And if you’re thinking about this more as a leader, you can use job crafting to support your frontline folks, especially but also the people in management that you might work with, and help them to develop their skills. So overall, you can expect to be happier at work and create a happier workplace for everyone around you. Thank you.