Carving your role
- Philip Brophy
- Mar 27
- 3 min read
Crafting jobs we want • 2 min read
Research carried out by Amy Wrzesniewski, Justin M. Berg, Jane E. Dutton, with Fortune 500 companies, revealed that employees (at all levels), who use job crafting, achieve higher levels of work performance, and become more engaged with their work.
Introduction
Some of us love our jobs, while some of us feel that our jobs could be more interesting or challenging.
This week, we’ll look at redefining our roles, bringing more meaning into our professional lives, while reducing stress and burnout.
Why job craft?
Let’s face it, workplace monotony can be commonplace, with our tasks feeling predictable and less and less challenging. As new experiences fill our brains with dopamine, this drives us to seek out rewards, helping us to meet deadlines and enjoy the work we do. Once tasks become routine, these once-exciting experiences lose their sense of novelty.
So, it’s important to reinvent the wheel of our roles once we start sinking into this feeling of familiarity.
Becoming a job entrepreneur
In the modern-day workplace, job structures can quickly evolve, this puts the onus onto how we engage in our work, seeking opportunities to build on our current tasks to bring meaning to our roles.
Let’s take Liu. She feels like she’s stagnating in her role, like she’s going through the daily rigmarole of box ticking.
So, what does she do?
Job crafting in practice
Like many, Liu feels limited in what she can do by a perceived sense of lack of agency over how she can achieve her goals.
However, she fails to recognise two important things, that:
Many jobs today are flexible, meaning that we can adjust their focus to accommodate our skills and preferences.
Many managers, who tend to already be overstretched, appreciate when employees take the reins to seek their workplace satisfaction, without constantly checking in for approval.
Redesign role
With time, Liu begins to redesign aspects of her role through “job crafting,” or more specifically, “task crafting.”
This means changing the scope of tasks within her job, by deciding what she wants to change > looking for a win-win solution (verifying that her manager is happy with the changes) > making the changes > embedding them as habits if they have a positive effect.
Liu uses her savvy for design by making key information stand out more effectively to enhance the different progress reports to clients. In this way, she has shifted the emphasis of her role towards the areas where she can use her strengths and interests, improving the overall level of her work output, while staying motivated in what she does.
Key takeaways
Most job roles are flexible in today’s workplaces, which allows us to adapt their focus to accommodate our interests and skills.
Job crafting allows us to reconfigure elements of our roles to achieve better satisfaction. As part of this, task crafting allows us to visualise our job roles, map their elements, and reorganise them to better suit us.
Shifting the emphasis of our roles towards things that we can do well, creates opportunities to play to our strengths and knowledge.
Think big, act small
Feel like you’re just rollin’ along in a humdrum fashion at work?
How about trying a hand at redefining some of the aspects of your role through “job crafting”?
Next time we’ll look at more ways to subtly redesign our job, playing to our strengths to improve our job satisfaction.
Content sources
Harvard Business Review, 2010, Amy Wrzesniewski, Justin M. Berg, Jane E. Dutton, ‘Managing Yourself: Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want’
Harvard Business Review, 2020, Jane E. Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski, ‘What Job Crafting Looks Like’
Harvard Business Review, 2020, Jennifer Moss, ‘If You’re Burning Out, Carve a New Path’ Mindtools.com,
Mindtools content team, ‘Job Crafting: Shaping Your Job to Fit You Better’
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