Craft Punk
Did you know that there's a scientifically proven way you can make small tweaks to your job to derive more meaning from it?
There’s a question I can ask that I reckon will have you unconsciously flinching a little bit: how much meaning do you get from your work?
It’s one of those questions that most of us tend to recoil from, putting it in the ‘too hard’ basket because there are so many other things to think about. But nailing and naming what meaning you get from your job (even if it’s just a tiny something) is one of the little secrets to living a great life that no one tells you.
I totally get it, when someone starts talking about finding meaning at work, it’s very easy to tune out. Some jobs have obvious meaning, like a doctor who saves people’s lives, or a primary school teacher who passes on to young children the building blocks of education. Sometimes meaning is a straight line from vocation to outcome, but if I asked most people to define what meaning they got from their job, they’d stare blankly back at me.
Your meaning doesn’t need to be some worthy aim that will solve all of the world’s problems – it’s a lot more personal than that. But if you only get satisfaction during work hours, then you’re likely to spend too much time, energy and focus on that one aspect of your life. And if you’re only fulfilled from the minute you clock off and head into the weekend, work will become an endless chore that will never have much enjoyment.
I’ve been lucky to connect with some of the world’s foremost researchers on meaning at work for my new book Work Backwards (which comes out in just a few weeks!).
One of them was Amy Wrzesniewski, who first wrote a research paper in 2001 with Jane Dutton that proposed a novel theory. They are now professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan respectively, and two of the leading experts in how we experience work. But two decades ago they defined a simple way that anyone could use to increase their ability to find meaning at work. Their theory was born when they noticed that most employees didn’t follow the job descriptions that were handed to them when they started a new position.
Job descriptions are one of these things most people have at the commencement of a job, which are then promptly filed away and seldom seen again. They are usually drafted by managers and HR teams based on an idealised view of what a worker should theoretically do in a job, and rarely match up with the work someone actually does. It was this sleight-of-hand that inspired Amy and Jane when they observed that many employees took their job descriptions as a starting point from which they actively shaped their jobs to fit their own needs, values and preferences.
They named their theory job crafting, and it’s emerged as one of the most interesting areas studied by researchers who investigate meaning at work. Amy defines it as ‘the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work’, which basically means having a clear awareness of which tasks you personally find meaningful at work, and altering parts of our job to emphasise those areas. Most of us have more leeway than we realise in how we do our jobs, and scores of researchers have now proven that making small changes to the way you work can increase how engaged you feel, your performance and your psychological wellbeing.
There are three areas of your job that can be improved using job crafting:
Tasks: Actively deciding to take on more or fewer tasks to increase how you feel about your job.
Relationships: Altering interpersonal relationships by leaning into some and decreasing others to improve your work environment.
Cognitive: Changing the way you think about your job on a wider scale
I first discovered this tool when researching my book, and it’s now something I seriously think about all the time when it comes to designing how I work. That’s why I’m sharing it with you this month.
One Useful Thing for March 2024: Job Crafting
Job crafting is a scientifically proven exercise that can help you find more meaning at work. It involves adapting and shaping your role to include more activities you find meaningful, and fewer that you don’t. This is not about shirking responsibility or not doing what’s required of you, it’s about crafting parts of your job to better suit you. It’s a proactive approach to taking control of your own job satisfaction, and a tool anyone can use today.
Job crafting is an approach anyone can use to consciously increase the amount of meaning they get from their job. It’s a tool that can be applied across industries, regardless of the field you work in. In fact, the first empirical study of job crafting in 2006 looked at manufacturing engineers and special education teachers, and concluded that the approach enhanced individual job satisfaction, performance and commitment levels. Similar findings have since been repeated on a range of workers including salespeople and midwives, who were able to craft their jobs to better cope with adversity at work.
There are three main areas that can be improved through this method, but for this exercise, which was inspired by the work of HR consultant Rob Baker, we’re going to concentrate on just the first area, tasks.
You can actively decide to take on more or fewer tasks to improve the way you feel about your job. For example, if you have an interest in design, you can try to spend more time using programs like Canva or Photoshop to create your own designs for work projects. The more of this you do, the more likely you are to foster feelings of deeper meaning at work. On the flipside, if you detest certain tasks, trying to spend less time on them will make you feel better about work. To shape your job, you can add tasks, emphasise areas you like or redesign them to make them more meaningful.
How to use this tool:
1. Write a list of your most common tasks.
Create a list of the 10–20 most common tasks you do at work. Think of what you get up to during a typical week, and list the main ones. It can help to refer to your work calendar to remind you how you spend your time.
2. Draw up a quadrant chart.
Create two long lines that intersect in the middle, like an even cross. If you’re doing this exercise with a group, you can draw a quadrant cross on a whiteboard or large piece of paper. Label the ends of the horizontal axis so ‘Draining’ is on the left and ‘Energising’ on the right, and label the ends of the vertical axis with ‘Short’ at the top and ‘Long’ at the bottom.
Each of the two axes represents a scale. The horizontal axis represents your energy levels when you are doing a particular task at work, and how it makes you feel as you’re completing it. The vertical axis represents the amount of time it takes you to complete each task.
3. Populate the axis with each of your tasks.
Add each of the tasks that you do onto the axis, giving each of them a position on the quadrant chart that takes into account how long they take you to do (‘short’ vs ‘long’), and how much energy they give you (‘draining’ vs ‘energising’). Keep adding each task until you have a full quadrant that ranks all your tasks by those two elements.
4. Spend more time on tasks in the top-right quadrant.
The tasks in the top right-hand quadrant are those that are not time-consuming but give you a lot of energy back. The aim of job crafting is to be aware of which things you enjoy doing, so you can prioritise these.
If you can, aim to incorporate more tasks into your role that are on the right side of the quadrant that energise you. The more tasks you can do that fill you with energy, the more of those positive effects you will feel. Look at your upcoming calendar and try to add in more tasks that you enjoy and can do relatively easily. That is the sweet spot – that’s where you will increase the meaning you find in your work.
5. Spend less time on tasks in the bottom-left quadrant.
Tasks that are both draining and time-consuming will ultimately have a negative effect on how you feel about your job. If possible, see if you can either do less of those tasks (after speaking to your boss, of course), or decrease the time that you devote to them.
This doesn’t mean you should just stop doing anything you find difficult. It’s about having an awareness of which tasks drain you, and figuring out if there is anything you can do to address that. One alternative is to make time outside your usual workplace to complete these ‘heavier’ tasks without the usual distractions so you can power through them quickly. Whatever method you choose, the mere act of being conscious about which tasks you do and don’t enjoy can have a considerable impact on how you think about work.
It’s a genuinely useful tool you can use right now to help make your work that tiny bit more meaningful, and it’s an example of some of the things I explore in lots of detail in my new book.
I’m currently in Southern Thailand, a far more agreeable timezone and temperature than Europe right now, and will be back in Australia again in a few weeks to launch my new book. Thank you everyone who has pre-ordered it so far (more people on the first day alone than all of the pre-orders for Killer Thinking!). It’s still not too late to get all of the amazing pre-order benefits, but time is running out. Read more about them all on this link below:
I’m also super excited to be going on tour to help spread the word about it! To celebrate the launch, I will be hosting some intimate Boardroom Lunches in Sydney and Melbourne to show you in person how to work smarter and live better. You'll learn all the insights from my years of research into where the future of work is heading, and be able to ask any questions you might have.
Over lunch I'll teach you the Work Backwards framework, and we'll complete several worksheets together so that you can leave with a personalised plan of how you can best take advantage of this once-in-a-generations moment to rethink how and why we work.
The event includes a delicious lunch and drinks. I'm intentionally keeping this super intimate around a boardroom table, so tickets for this are extremely limited.
Here are the full tour dates:
Wednesday April 3 from 6pm to 8pm: Book Launch @ Work Club George Street SYDNEY
Wednesday April 10 from 5pm to 7pm: Florence Guild @ Work Club Miller Street SYDNEY
Thursday April 11 from 12pm to 2pm: Boardroom Lunch @ Work Club Locomotive SYDNEY. Limited tickets now on sale.
Tuesday April 16 from 12pm to 2pm: Boardroom Lunch @ Work Club Olderfleet MELBOURNE. Limited tickets now on sale.
Tuesday April 16 from 5pm to 7pm: Florence Guild @ Work Club Olderfleet MELBOURNE
Wednesday April 17 from 12:30pm to 1:30pm: Florence Guild @ Work Club CANBERRA
More information on the Florence Guild events can be found here.
As always, I’ll be back next month with another Useful Thing just for you. Have a great March.
-Tim