How to make your job work for you!

Job crafting. Sounds a bit wanky, but done properly can provide you with great pleasure.

Some great advice I got when I was young worker and living in some share houses was spend as much money on you can on your bed, because you spend a lot of time there. The same is true for work. We spend a lot of time working, so let's we need to make it as comfortable and fit our needs as we can. Both Tim and myself have had various jobs that when we started, we had that creeping feeling this job doesn't fit quite right, and the days dragged, the clock moved slowly and the weekends went past way too fast. However, sometimes, for all sorts of reasons we can't pick and choose our jobs. But we can, try to craft the job to suit our strengths, our likes and our values.

So, what is job crafting?

An official sort of definition goes something like this:

“an employee-initiated approach which enables employees to shape their own work environment such that it fits their individual needs by adjusting the prevailing job demands and resources”

(Tims & Bakker, 2010)

Sounds great - but how do you make it happen without annoying the boss who just want yo to do the job! Well there are a myriad of ways but a couple of suggestions might be:

* Task crafting - Changing up your responsibilities: shaping or molding your responsibilities, adding or dropping responsibilities. A simple example might be that a bus driver might decide to add commentary to the drive to make the trip a bit more interesting. This might lead the driver to do some research about the route to find out interesting facts.

* Relationship Crafting - Changing up your interactions: reshaping how and who you interact with, who and how we communicate with others. This can be a change as simple as doing meetings differently - a walking meeting, rather than around the board table, or asking the bus driver about how they might market their trip, thus putting that person in a different place, and you gaining a different insight, and changing the dynamics of your relationship.

*Cognitive Crafting - changing up your mindset; changing how you think about and altering the perspective on what you do. If your change sheets at a hotel , reframe it to the fact that your are a significant part of ensuring the guests have a great sleep and great holiday!

And when you can craft your job everyone can win; better outcomes personally and organisationally, more challenge = more mastery, the role feels right, and everyone is happier!

Makes sense.