Job Crafting Could Bring In Innovation & Progress To Employees And Firms

Employees redesigning their jobs to better suit their strengths and interests would be able to boost their happiness and creativity while benefiting the company, says Professor Justin Berg at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The process, known as ‘job crafting’, virtually stands on its head the traditional practice of managers assigning duties and giving directions on how to perform them by granting employees flexibility to innovate ways and means not only to increase their productivity but also in a beneficial manner to their colleagues as well as the company.

Prof Berg, who researched the concept with Amy Wrzesniewski at the Yale School of Management and Jane Dutton of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, spoke to Insights by Stanford Business about various aspects of job crafting.

The process, known as ‘job crafting’, virtually stands on its head the traditional practice of managers assigning duties and giving directions on how to perform them by granting employees flexibility to innovate ways and means not only to increase their productivity but also in a beneficial manner to their colleagues as well as the company.

The researchers found three aspects that define the concept. The first is Task crafting, retooling the activities included in the job, the second, relational crafting, is about revamping the employees interactions with others and the third, cognitive crafting , on reframing how the employee views tasks and relationships.

For best results, all three forms should be used together. Thus, a corporate attorney interested in teaching could start an intern program (task crafting), get colleagues involved in it (relational crafting), and mentally frame the program as an opportunity to fulfil and spread the passion for teaching (cognitive crafting).

Job design research had started in the 1970s with a focus on how managers should design jobs for employees from the top down, revealing the benefit of managers’ autonomy, feedback and significance of the job. However, employees could also shape their own jobs over time.

Berg and his research colleagues developed the theory of job crafting to capture this notion that employees can and do redesign their own jobs from the bottom up. Since the publication of the theory in 2001, there has been an explosion of research on job crafting.

Based on the research, Berg and his team has come up with what they termed the Job Crafting Exercise, to help people discover opportunities for crafting their jobs in a beneficial manner.

They even created a workbook to help those who get stuck in the daily grind, creating the impression that the job is more fixed than it may actually be. The Job Crafting Exercise breaks down the job into a flexible set of building blocks, rather than a fixed list of duties. Thus employees could identify creative ways to redesign the job.

The first step in the workbook is to have a “before sketch,” breaking up the job into “task blocks”. Then it could be grouped on the basis of the time and energy spent on them.

Then an “after diagram,” is created, defined as a more ideal but still realistic version of your job, a vision of something to work toward. To build the after diagram, the employee carries out revision of the set of task blocks from the before sketch to better match the skills, values, strengths, and passions, the three key traits that our research suggests are helpful drivers of job crafting.

“We’ve found that going through this process can be really eye-opening for people — they often see opportunities for job crafting they never thought about before,” says Berg.

While a total transformation of the job would be unrealistic to expect, even a few small changes could make a big difference.

In fact, job crafting is most effective when an entire work group or team is doing the exercise together with the manager’s support. Such a situation allows for interaction with others while framing the job crafting plan and their inputs and help in executing the plan.

Likewise, each employee could help the others. Even the tasks that one would like to spend less time on could be swapped with any other person who would like to do it.

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Usually, while employees have the freedom to suggest changes in the job to the manager, job crafting exercise would help in not only identifying the changes but also communicating these changes in concrete terms to others. If the manager is also involved in the exercise, it would provide a common language and framework to discuss how the job could be changed in ways that are good for both the employee and the company.

Berg and team also tested the effects of the Job Crafting Exercise in an experiment at Google, in partnership with Wharton Professor Adam Grant, Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle of Google People & Innovation Lab (PiLab).

Six weeks later, based on ratings from peers and managers, the team reached the conclusion that employees were significantly happier and more effective in their jobs. On an average, job craft was found to be good for both the employee as well as the employer.

Yet another plus point is Job crafting spurring creativity and innovation. A company with fixed roles and structures tend to become bureaucratic and resistant to changes in the long run.

Job crafting could inspire the employees and companies to bring in appropriate innovations instead of remaining static and stagnant thereby impeding progress.