Personal Development Hack 155: How to use job crafting?

Job crafting is an employee-initiated approach which helps employees to shape or redesign their own work environment’s demands and resources in such a way that it fits their individual needs. Therefore, the fundamental theme is to craft our work in such a way that it matches with our strengths, motives and passion. 

So, how to do effective job crafting? Berg, Dutton, and Wrzesniewski (2013), came up with a very effective approach to job crafting, which they divided into several parts that keep each of those job demands and resources into account. For this, employees need to keep asking themselves two questions: How could they reduce their psychological costs including stress and energy? And where might they welcome a challenge in their role? 

The following are the steps for building job crafting: 

1. Start with making a ‘before sketch’. In this sketch write different tasks you do and how you spend or allocate your time at work. Remember to think this in terms of energy, and broadly about resources and demands.
2. Secondly, divide your whole job into three types of task blocks. These blocks are in increasing order of their size where the biggest block is for tasks which consume most of your effort and time, and the smallest block is for those that take up least of your energy and time.
3. After doing this, start with making an ‘after diagram’ of what your ideal role should look like. Here, use your strengths, passions, and motives to create something more meaningful and exciting for yourself. Remember to not step completely outside of your formal responsibilities. 
4. Finally, your last step is to create an action plan to set some goals (both short and long-term) so that you can move your before diagram (current job) to your after Diagram (ideal job)?

A more easier approach to do this job crafting is to focus on 3 types of job crafting namely “task, relationship and mindset crafting” and changing those roles to fit your passion and needs. Such that:

1. Task crafting focuses on what tasks you need to craft. 

2. Relationship crafting focuses on what interactions you need to craft. 

3. Mindset crafting focuses on which mindset you are currently using and which mindset will fit your needs and resources. 

Challenge: Identify your current blocks and write your biggest block in the comment section that consumes most of your resources.

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