RW7 Job Crafting - small tweaks can make a big difference

Having talked about superpowers and strengths, in the last related work podcast, it’s a natural follow on to talk about job crafting and exploring where we the power and autonomy to shape the work we do. Drawing on work by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, I talk about three ways you can job craft – cognitive, task and relational – and draw on examples including from pervious podcasts to illustrate. We all have more scope to make work more meaningful than we might think and even small tweaks can make a big difference.

Related work links:

Job Crafting website – including an exercise you can buy and links to various published papers https://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/cpo-tools/job-crafting-exercise/

Michelle McQuaid’s podcast conversation with Amy Wrzesniewski about job crafting

First key paper: Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E.(2001) Crafting a job; Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201.

Specific to academia: Wellman, N. and Spreitzer, G. (2011) Crafting scholarly life: Strategies for creating meaning in academic careers, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(6), 927-931.

The love-loathe article: Buckingham, M and Goodall, A. Work-Life Balance is a myth. Do this Instead. Time Magazine, June 6 2019.

The Changing Academic Life podcasts mentioned – see the notes on the webpage for dipping in if you don’t want to

Ali Black podcast conversation

Cliff Lampe podcast conversation and Cliff’s article on why he loves academic service

Katherine Isbister podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

Image acknowledgement: Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Transcript

(00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.

(00:21):

In the last related work podcast, we talked about super powers and strengths, super powers and strengths being those things that we're not just good at, but that we really love doing where we're at our best, and we can really make an impact. And we also talked about the literature saying that if we can work out and identify what our strengths are and then use and develop, the more we'll be happier, more engaged have all sorts of positive benefits from it. So what might be some practical strategies then for how we go about doing that? What I want to talk about today is a theory of job crafting that was developed by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton in a paper in 2001 based on some qualitative studies that they'd done on people at work, and they identify three different types of ways that we can craft our work to connect to something that's more meaningful that makes more use of our strengths. That makes work more fun.

(01:30):

And so I'd like to just spend a little bit of time now, just reflecting on that. So to start off with that might be useful just to think for yourself about, you know, if you think about the, all the different sorts of aspects of your work from your great work that you really love, where you're using your strengths, where you're at your best to have to work, that you don't enjoy that that's just tedious, but you can't really get out of and just think about what some of those might be, because I'm going to suggest that the strategies that they propose can make the great work, even more fun and allow you to do even more of that. And to turn some of the, have to work, that's a bit of a chore and a bit tedious into something where it's still may not be your favorite thing to do, but you've found a way of connecting with it more to make it more interesting.

(02:29):

And why I think this notion of job crafting is really interesting is that it invites us to explore what are the things within our power, within our control that we can shape, even when we think we may not have a lot of scope. I think that we still do have, we still do have scope to make things better, to some extent, and especially as academics, this notion of academic freedom and autonomy, even though we know that it's probably a contested notion these days is we're still very lucky that we do have a lot of autonomy to some extent compared to many other people. So how do we make best use of that? So the three types of crafting that they talk about cognitive crafting task crafting and relational crafting. So let me just walk through each of those.

(03:32):

So cognitive crafting is about changing the way we think about or approach some job or work. So it's about changing your mindset in a way that might connect to something that you care about. So I can give you an example for myself where I think I'm marking, you know, especially if you have sort of long essays to mark in a big class can be something that, you know, where you just look at that pile of papers to be marked and go, Oh, do I have to do it? And I've been working on lately trying to flip that around and just say I'm really interested to learn from the students because often they will pick essay topics. If I give them an open essay topic where they write about things that I don't know a lot about. And I think I said last week, I'm quite eclectic in my interests and I love learning new things.

(04:32):

So I've, I've reshaped that to think about, Oh, this is a great opportunity just to learn about a topic that I don't know anything about and what I've also done is I often ask the students to write a reflective learning report. And I, of course, I think there's value for them in doing that, but it makes my marking more fun as well because one of the other things I really care about that drives me is helping people develop themselves. And I love reading the learning reports now because I can see the journey that the students have been on. So I've still got the job of marking, but it's no longer quite feeling as tedious as it was. It still takes time, but I I've found a way of finding meaning in that work. So in, in previous podcasts as well, you may remember Cliff Lampe and I always, this always struck me because he talked about loving, going to faculty meetings and that's changed for me how I think now about faculty meetings that they're, they're not something that's a big chunk of time out of my week or out, out of my calendar that doesn't add any value. But he challenged me to rethink my relationship to faculty meetings and that thinking about it as a chance to catch up with colleagues and to contribute to the future direction of this.

(06:13):

So what are the things that might be your 'have to do' work that isn't fun. That is a bit tedious. And is there a way that you can change the way you think about it, even, that it makes it a little bit different that changes the energy around it when you go to do that at work,

(06:39):

They also talk about task crafting, and this is where you may be able to find, so you still have to deliver on a task and there's still some output that's required, but there may be a way that you can change the mix of activities that you do in delivering on that task, or that you have possibility to change the scope of the task in some way, or that you can change the way you perform the task that may be connects to more of your strengths. So it's sort of exploring the boundaries of that task and how it can be made different. So if I pick up on my marking thing, the other thing that I've done with marking is I now also change the way I do that job as well, apart from adding in the reflective learning report to the task for the students, and to my task, I also mark the papers on the iPad with the pencil and go and sit somewhere nice. So I changed my location and the setting makes a big difference. It's sort of an inviting, warm setting, you know, that I choose and just even changing the setting has helped with that as a job that I didn't particularly like doing, and it would feel worse doing it, sitting at my desk.

(08:08):

I can also reflect back on something I did with the teaching challenge as, as being an instance of task shaping to fit, to connect more to my strengths. So I had a lecture that I'd been doing quite a number of years, and the slides were getting quite outdated in the design and the content may be needed updating as well, but I was really, really busy and I just didn't have time to put in all the effort that was needed to do that. But I did care about the students' learning experience as well. And just as a sort of an essential sort of solution, I started conducting this course not so much as lectures anymore, but as facilitated discussions workshopping with the class, obviously it was a small enough class for about 30, 40 students that it was possible to do this. And I realized that I had more fun and the students were more engaged and it felt like, and it seemed like it's certainly in their assessments that they learned a lot more as well.

(09:22):

And what it did was I connected I'm actually, I think one of my superpowers is in facilitating these sort of group workshopping type experiences. And I'd actually fallen back on one of my natural strengths as a solution for shaping the way I did that job of teaching to deal with the very practical challenge. But now it's the way I, I now choose to run my courses wherever I can, wherever the content suits that. And I, I think that's been really important because I now really look forward to teaching those classes. I'm not just standing up going blah, blah, blah, the whole time. I think the students do too.

(10:05):

And I'm also reflecting on a story that another colleague in another university was telling me about how they were given a database class to teach, and that's not their area at all for first years. And they weren't looking forward to it. They were inheriting someone else's material, and they ended up crafting how they taught this topic. So they still had to deliver to the curriculum, but they were, there are very creative person and their core research areas more in multimedia. And they ended up connecting to multimedia type databases and materials and metadata as example data that the students worked with in the database class. And I thought that was a really lovely example of someone, again, shaping a job that didn't seem like it was going to be so good or much fun, but connecting it to what they knew, what they were good at and having the freedom, you know, using the freedom that they had to shape sort of the examples that they used in the assignments to make it more fun for them and of course the students.

(11:14):

And I think in the podcasts conversations that I've had so far, the chat with Ali Black is also a lovely example of shaping the task. And I don't know if you listened to Ali's conversation it's really worth listening to, she talked about how she was pretty sort of feeling like a failure and pretty broken down by the whole managerial approach to academia and the challenge of trying to get promoted and, and, you know, ticking all the boxes and ended up as a reaction or as a totally pivoting her research that she did. And actually focusing on slow scholarship as, as a topic of research, and paradoxically has ended up producing lots of beans that get counted that do the tick boxes, but now it's not being done just as an external motivator, but it's come out of something that she loves doing and that she cares about, which I think also connects then to the third type of crafting that can be done, which is relational crafting.

(12:32):

So that's changing where we can, who we do things with, or the social context will support that we draw on in getting work done. And so the other part of Ali's story is that she created this wise woman's writing group, and, and she talks about how this wise women writing group became a real saving space for her and helped to find her own ways of working on what mattered to her. And in the end, she was able to create a promotion application that she said was like me. So I thought that was really useful and strategy because when she was struggling, the way she shaped her work was not just to pivot in the topic that she was working on, but reaching out to colleagues and, and being instrumental in forming this writing group in the first place so that she had that support. So I'd really strongly recommend listening to that conversation.

(13:37):

Katherine Isbister as well. She didn't talk, she talked about this after we actually finished recording, and I just mentioned it at the end. She also talks about how a really important thing that she has done that helps her deal with just her role more generally, is that she has a weekly Skype call with a friend colleague where they act as a peer mentor for each other and help hold each other accountable to commitments. And just check in. And again, like this is just building on social networks and relational aspects to shape the work so that you're not doing it so much alone.

(14:20):

And I think we could also interpret Mike Twidale's example from last week where there, there was some of the details that of scheduling a job that needed to be done as part of his curriculum role. He didn't like that at all. And he had just assumed that no one would like it. And then he found a colleague who lit up and loved doing that sort of work. And he ended up, she ended up taking that on and he could then do the more strategic things that he was better at. And that, I think that's a lovely example of crafting as well, is co-opting other people and being able to draw together all of your different strengths and working together on the task. I know that for the academic leadership development courses that we're running, doing it with Austin Rainer has just been such a pleasure and so much more rewarding and enriching than just doing it on my own. And I've learned so much more from doing that, even though it's been a little bit harder in some ways, in terms of needing more time, just to coordinate and plan together.

(15:26):

And we could also think about, you know, the move in a lot of academic circles to have shut up and write groups or reading groups. These are all nice examples of relational crafting and shaping aspects around our work to connect to other, and those notions of high quality connections can be really important. The literature also talks about in terms of relational crafting the value of understanding who benefits from your work. So it could be for us, as lecturers may be hearing back from students or connecting back with students to hear how they're going, or from what they've learned in your courses, or if you're doing a lot of participatory research with participants, you know, thinking more also about how they might benefit from the work.

(16:25):

So I think that, you know, even if the power that we have to shape our work to craft our work is only in terms of how we think about it. That's a huge power because how we think about it really can impact how we engage with the work and the energy that we bring to it.

(16:47):

And then if we also have the opportunity to, you know, to the autonomy, to shape the task itself in how we engage with it, or the boundaries of it, how can we shape this job to do more of this sort of thing and less of that, the other sort of things. I know that it goes going back to the task shaping. I know that if I have a research problem, I will choose to shape the research questions that connect to more, how and why research questions that connect to my love of more qualitative exploratory in depth research, rather than framing it up as a hypothesis that would require an empirical lab study. While I, I appreciate the value that such studies bring, they not working to my strengths, or they don't get me as excited. So we often have much more power than what we think.

(17:41):

And we can help others that we work with also explore what are the boundaries that they to shape their work, and whether that's people were mentoring or people that we're working with, or students, even in working with masters students or PhD students, when they're looking at their key topics, or they're looking at their methods, we can have conversations with them. That sort of say, what, what do you want to get out of this, this research work for your thesis for your future career? What skills do you want to develop? What knowledge areas do you want to develop, and what do you really love doing? And help them iterate around to shape a question or an approach that connects to where they want to go, and that makes use of where they are. And if we're working as a team in the way that Mike did with the woman that he was working with, you know, how do we exploit the exploit? That sounds like the wrong word in this context, doesn't it. But how do we enable the shaping of the work as a team so that everyone's able to do more of what they like?

(18:48):

And there was an interesting