I’ve Seen the Future of Employee Wellbeing. Its Name Is Job Crafting.
Job crafting can enhance employee wellbeing in a manner aligned with organizational goals.
(First published on LinkedIn December 28, 2017. Edited for brevity and an update citation/link.)
What Is Job Crafting?
In job crafting, employees tweak any combination of…
their tasks,
their workplace interactions,
the way they view their jobs.
One of the most commonly cited examples comes from Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton1, who first coined the phrase job crafting in 2001. In their study of hospital housekeepers, some workers distinguished themselves by envisioning their role as part of the care team, taking the initiative to chip in where they could to make the environment more patient-friendly — adjusting a picture on the wall of a patient's room, delivering a glass of water, or spending more time interacting with patients and visitors.
The researchers wrote,
When hospital cleaners integrate themselves into patient care functions, they are able to see their work as being about healing people and to see themselves as a key part of this process, thus enhancing work meaning and creating a more positive work identity.
A variety of workers studied, from machine operators to engineers to sales professionals, have been found to experience greater job satisfaction, better performance, less burnout, and enhanced wellbeing by bringing more meaning to their jobs via self-initiated or intervention-based job crafting.
When I first heard about job crafting, it struck me as a weak alternative employers might fall back on to wash their hands clean of accountability for healthy job design. I lumped it in with resilience trainings that risk giving short shrift to the causes of job stress in favor of implicating employees as the source of their own stress and leaving them on the hook for their own solutions.
My skepticism about job crafting was an ill-informed knee-jerk response.
Having immersed myself in the mounting body of job crafting research, I’ve come to see job crafting as the intervention many of us have sought: An evidence-based, employee-centric methodology that can enhance employee wellbeing in a manner aligned with employers’ priorities.
As a matter of fact, job crafting can fill the gap where resilience programs fall short.
Job crafting is not the solution, but it may be the keystone for employers that have their house in order.
Purposeful job crafting requires certain conditions to be in place. As such, job crafting intervention doesn't run counter to an organizations’ obligation to provide healthy work. It’s one answer to the question, “Okay, we value autonomy, employee engagement, a supportive environment, and the rest… But what do we do about it?”