Today’s job market is booming, which means that if people are unhappy at work, it is not hard to find something else. However, while leaving may sometimes be the right thing, it is not the only option.
Humans have a deep need for autonomy and feeling a sense of control over their work and lives. In fact, autonomy is a core human motivator and a crucial component of well-being and health. Despite its importance, autonomy is hard to come by in healthcare. In other industries, many people have the freedom to work when, where and how they want as long as the work gets done. In healthcare, we often have rigid protocols and must be located with the patient.
Job crafting offers an alternative path to staying in the job and getting more autonomy at work. Job crafting is a follower-initiated effort to adjust the demands and resources of the job to better align what the employee is good at and passionate about with what the organization needs. Slemp and Colleagues suggest this can take many forms, including:
- Task crafting: Changing the scope or nature of job tasks. This might mean training a lower-level employee to do simpler parts of the job (which is a growth opportunity for them), so you can take on a bigger or more challenging project.
- Relational crafting: Altering how you interact with others at work. This might look like seeking out a mentor or joining an affinity group.
- Cognitive crafting: Reframing how you perceive the job and its purpose. This might be a deliberate choice to reflect on how the role ultimately helps patients. Instead of “I am a scheduler” you might say “I help patients get access to lifesaving care.”
How to Increase the Odds of Yes
Effective job crafting requires open communication with supervisors to get them on board with what you’re proposing. That means:
- Being clear about your goals and how they align with organizational objectives.
- Coming prepared with specific suggestions for changes, highlighting how these changes can benefit the organization, and being open to feedback and compromise.
- If you plan to delegate a task that you have mastered and now find boring, coming up with a solution of who could take it on and how it would benefit that person.
- Explaining how it could free up some of your time to make a bigger impact on a more challenging task or project.
- Making sure you’re framing things in a way that showcases first and foremost how it will benefit the organization, and as a bonus, make better use of your skills.
How to Encourage Job Crafting Among Employees
Encouraging employees to engage in micro job crafting can be a powerful retention strategy. By allowing team members to make small adjustments to their roles, managers can prevent the need for "macro job crafting," which often means leaving the organization altogether. This approach benefits both the employee and the employer, fostering a more engaged and stable workforce.
In your conversations with employees, ask these questions:
What do you do at work that energizes you, and would excite you to do more of it?
What do you do at work that sucks the life out of you and drains your energy?
You may be surprised to find that what energizes some team members depletes others. This represents a great opportunity for task switching with no net impact on the organization.
An employee may be ready for a new challenge if they have already mastered their role, which can lead to boredom and disengagement. You can find out by asking:
“When was the last time you felt you used every bit of your skills and expertise to do something in your job?
When was the last time you did something really hard but satisfying at work?”
If it’s been a long time, this is an opportunity to assign a new challenge, and perhaps let the employee teach a less experienced team member how to do some parts of their job. Both people get the chance to grow.
Life isn't static, so our jobs shouldn’t be either. People go through different seasons in their personal and professional lives, sometimes needing to dial up their involvement and other times needing to scale back. Job crafting allows for this flexibility, enabling employees to adjust their roles to better fit their current life circumstances, talents and passions without completely disengaging from their work—or worse, leaving altogether.
Katherine Meese, PhD, is a scholar in the field of organizational behavior and leadership. She is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and has a passion for helping organizations and leaders translate science into actionable strategies to help humans work with humans.