You can be anything you want to be. This simple statement proclaimed by parents around the world was meant to inspire you to follow your hopes and dreams. However, it didn’t take long before the illusion shattered and you came to terms with flying from meeting to meeting instead of flying through space for NASA. Though you’re likely not doing what’s printed next to your 5th grade yearbook picture, you still have a desire to find significance and joy at work. Unfortunately (let’s be real here), many of us hate our jobs. While quitting your job to reclaim the dreams of your youth may not be an option, Job Crafting is...and it puts you back in the driver's seat.

You were hired against a list of requirements; your skills and experience satisfied an organization’s specific needs. It’s no surprise then that, while your position utilizes many of your core skills, it may have little natural alignment with your other unique giftings, relational styles, and sense of purpose—leading to increased dissatisfaction and that dreadful feeling you get every time you walk into the office. Thankfully, you’re not as trapped as you may feel. Job Crafting is the perpetual process of reshaping your role to leverage your strengths, engage in more meaningful behaviors, and better align your unique attributes with the needs of the organization—ultimately benefiting you and your employer (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001; Tims & Bakker, 2010).

Here we focus on two main types of job crafting: positional and social. As you’ll see, both methods involve reducing focus on the aspects of your job that you hate so you can re-focus energy on aspects that are life-giving (Fritz & Sonnentag, 2006).

Take Action: Positional and Social Job Crafting

Positional Job Crafting

Positional job crafting means taking steps to position yourself for new trajectories, even within your current role. Let’s say you’re a back-end software developer, but staring at code all day is feeling dry. Positional job crafting could mean taking an online course on front-end design or picking up the additional responsibility of running your team’s meetings. Simply learning or doing something related-but-different from your core role will help you feel unstuck, and you’ll better position yourself to one day have a job or management role that doesn’t involve just code. One warning: make sure not take on more than you can handle! Ask yourself:

• What peripheral work tasks do I enjoy and how I can develop myself further in those areas?

• Are there any colleagues around me that have roles I might like more? Consider asking for mentorship or finding professional development resources to learn what they do.

Social Job Crafting

If you hate your job, you may think you’re the one that needs some help, but research shows the opposite to be true. Helping others is meaningful. When you make strides to help your colleagues, you focus less on the negative aspects of your work and begin to feel a greater sense of self-value and purpose (Grant & Sonnentag, 2010). Further, by building stronger relationships at work, you ultimately get more of the support you need in return. Ask yourself:

• Is one of my colleagues struggling, either personally or professionally? How could I be supportive and helpful? You’ll likely have to be the brave one to engage in vulnerability and initiate these deeper relationships. In the long run, you’ll be glad you did!

• If you’re a manager and you suspect an employee has negative feelings about her/his job, set her/him up with someone to mentor or train. It may sound counter-intuitive to have a “negative person” in a mentorship role, but research shows that, by helping others, a negative person can start to feel a positive sense of purpose and re-engage in the work before them. 

Even if your job feels purposeless in the scheme of humanity (most companies are money makers first, world savers second), you can find a significant sense of purpose and joy through positional and social job crafting. If, however, you work in a truly toxic environment that is psychologically unsafe, or, if you’re in need of a complete career overhaul (from engineer to actor), you have our permission to begin your exit strategy!

Thanks for reading. Project [Re]Work is about to undergo some big and exciting changes! Stay tuned for news on what’s next with this initiative. If you missed the last article, catch up here. Now, go craft your job to better suit you!

Join The Conversation

Hate your job? Already job crafting? Tell us about it on LinkedIn, or over email. Know someone who could benefit from this information? Share this article with your colleagues, friends, and HR/culture leaders.

Definitions

• Job Crafting: The process by which employees alter elements of their jobs and work relationships to find greater meaning and alignment with their individual needs (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) (Tims & Bakker, 2010).

References

Hetland, J., Hetland, H., Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2018). Daily transformational leadership and employee job crafting: The role of promotion focus. European Management Journal, 36(6), 746-756. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2018.01.002

Grant, A. M., & Sonnentag, S. (2010). Doing good buffers against feeling bad: Prosocial impact compensates for negative task and self-evaluations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 111(1), 13-22. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.07.003

 "Productive and counterproductive job crafting: A daily diary study": Correction to Demerouti,  Bakker, and Halbesleben (2015). (2015). Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 20(4), 469-469. doi:10.1037/ocp0000012

 Dubbelt, L., Demerouti, E., & Rispens, S. (2019). The value of job crafting for work engagement, task performance, and career satisfaction: longitudinal and quasi-experimental evidence. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 28(3), 300-314. doi:10.1080/1359432x.2019.1576632

 Bruning, P. F., & Campion, M. A. (2018). A Role–resource Approach–avoidance Model of Job Crafting: A Multimethod Integration and Extension of Job Crafting Theory. Academy of Management Journal, 61(2), 499-522. doi:10.5465/amj.2015.0604

 Van Wingerden, J., Bakker, A. B., & Derks, D. (2017). Fostering employee well-being via a job crafting intervention. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 100, 164-174. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2017.03.008

Wrzesniewski, A., LoBuglio, N., Dutton, J. E., & Berg, J. M. (2013). Job Crafting and Cultivating Positive Meaning and Identity in Work. Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology, 281-302. doi:10.1108/s2046-410x(2013)0000001015