Understanding the Process of Job Crafting

Job crafting refers to the process of proactively customising and improving the role of an employee. This is typically done apart from or only in light coordination with a line manager. 

Job crafting was first formally observed in the late 1980s, but the term itself was coined in 2001 by the psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton. 

The concept stands apart from typical top-down organisational thinking in that it allows employees to make decisions about their workflow and processes that best play to their strengths and preferences. 

Numerous studies, including one in the Journal of Vocational Behavior in 2018 and one in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology in 2015, found that job crafting can be beneficial for employees and their well-being.

There’s no right or wrong way for employees to use job crafting, because they can adapt it to fit their work needs. Whether they want to improve their relationships with colleagues or establish more concrete career goals, there’s a type of job crafting for them. 

Below, we’ve provided a non-exhaustive list of several job crafting types that employees can leverage in organisations.

This is the most common type of job crafting related to changes made to the responsibilities of a role without neglecting overall job duties. Task crafting allows employees to make small changes to how they perform their tasks. This may for example involve a more flexible allocation  of time for each employee task.. 

As the name suggests, relationship crafting is when employees focus on improving interactions with colleagues. Generally, the motivation for this type of job crafting is to build a robust support network for productive collaborative work. This may involve a team lunch or co-workers going out to coffee.

Cognitive crafting is a form of job crafting where employees focus on shifting their mindsets in an effort to feel more connected to their work. It helps employees adopt more positive thinking regarding their roles, in turn strengthening their connection to the tasks at hand. Helping workers recognise the importance of their position helps them feel more engaged with their tasks and produce better results. It can help them strengthen their purpose as well, which is why cognitive crafting is also sometimes called ‘purpose crafting’.

Well-being crafting helps an employee shift focus to their mental health. This type of job crafting involves improving work-life balance by taking control over the amount of work done and setting time boundaries. This helps prevent burnout, which can interrupt productivity in more extreme ways over time. This type of job crafting may involve prioritising time for hobbies or taking time for their social life.

Letting employees job craft — and helping them do so — can markedly improve their performance and their overall satisfaction. This is a net gain for your company as a whole. 

Some benefits of job crafting include:

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Several methods are available for HR representatives to support job crafting strategies. Providing these resources to company employees helps ensure they can make necessary changes to do their best work.

One method to promote job crafting within your workforce is holding ‘interventions’ to help employees examine their roles and determine what they want from them. These meetings can encourage your employees to think about more than just their daily responsibilities, something that may not have crossed their minds before. You can shift them from thinking about their role as a concrete list of responsibilities to a moldable series of resources and requirements.

From there, let your employee reflect on their positions under the new framework and determine what they can adjust to excel. This can inspire team members to seek opportunities that alter their typical work processes. However, some participants in the intervention may need more of a guiding hand to affect change. 

Live job crafting exercises help employees visualise the responsibilities and tasks associated with their roles. A physical representation of their roles and place within the organisation can help workers identify all the areas they have control over. They can develop a more thorough understanding of how much effort they put into their work.

With that knowledge, they can brainstorm how to streamline their job to put in less effort while achieving the same or better results. The visualisation also helps employees identify their roles’ most inefficient or stress-inducing parts and seek more specific changes. 

Providing employees with a questionnaire to assess their feelings about their jobs gives HR representatives a starting point to help with job crafting on the administrative side. The employees will have a moment to consider their priorities in the workplace, while you can use the response to develop workplace opportunities that tie into employee needs.

The standard questionnaire includes different queries for each type of job crafting. This allows you to develop holistic solutions for your workforce’s struggles, though it doesn’t provide the more focused interventions that other job crafting options might. 

In practice, every instance of job crafting can look different due to the many forms the process can take between employees. Below are a few hypothetical scenarios where an employee uses job crafting in order to help you better identify and support it within your workplace.

Employee A is increasingly discontent and anxious with her position at her company despite having loved her job in the past. The growing stress is impacting job performance, which is in a steady decline. She’d like to reverse this trend.

The employee takes a step back to examine the current state of her role and assesses if it might have changed recently and how it may have done so. She may find in her assessment that her work-life balance was thrown out of kilter over time. The primary responsibilities of her position are mostly taken care of on-site, but this employee may occasionally have to accept work-related calls once she is at home, which significantly impacts morale. 

This worker didn’t mind dealing with off-hour calls at first, but the longer she worked at the company and proved her expertise, the more frequent those calls became. Thus, the employee sets more firm boundaries when she is not clocked in, limiting the number of calls she has to take home to reestablish a healthy relationship with her work. 

Employee B was recently passed over for a promotion he’d previously expressed interest in. He goes to the manager to ask why and determine how he can improve. The feedback states the employee doesn’t seem to believe in the company’s goals.

After receiving this feedback, the employee reflects on his past behaviour. He concludes that his on-the-job performance has been hampered by an indifferent opinion of the organisation as a whole. As a result, his desire to move up within the company was primarily motivated by a raise, something leadership picked up on.

To shift his position in the company, the employee works to learn more about its overall goals and values. Focusing specifically on aspects of the organisation he relates to helps him foster a deeper connection while making his responsibilities more meaningful.

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Like many initiatives to improve employee performance, job crafting has limitations. Knowing the most appropriate times to employ the process helps ensure it has the desired effect. Some things to remember while implementing resources for job crafting are:

Not every position is flexible enough to accommodate job crafting, but it remains a powerful tool when dealing with roles that are. Embracing it along with other professional development resources can help you create a high-performing workforce that’s deeply engaged with company goals. 

The theory behind job crafting is that employees can make decisions about their day-to-day work that makes them happier and leaves them feeling more fulfilled. Unlike in scenarios where management may tell employees what to do and when, employees are empowered to make choices within their job descriptions to best fit work tasks to their goals and strengths.

Job crafting is driven by employees and focused on improving their work experience. Job design is a top-down model driven by leadership.

There are several forms of job crafting. Four notable ones are:

• Task crafting

• Relationship crafting

• Cognitive crafting, also called purpose crafting

• Well-being crafting

Job crafting aims to improve the employee experience by letting them make small changes to their roles. These changes are meant to better align the position with a worker’s professional needs.