Did you know that in Canada there are two ambassadors from Germany sharing one diplomatic post? It’s a married couple with three children. They rotate the ambassadorship every eight months. When the wife serves in the role, the husband focuses on caring for their children. Then, they switch.
Why would a foreign ministry redesign such a traditional, high-status role? Germany’s Federal Foreign Office explained it clearly: if we want to remain an attractive employer for the best and brightest, we must become more flexible to meet talent’s expectations.
This dual ambassadorship is a powerful example of employer-enabled job crafting. The traditional structure – one ambassador, one post, full-time – was reshaped to fit human realities. This example invites us to rethink how leaders and HR can intentionally create space for job crafting in their organizations.
What is job crafting and why does it matter?
Job crafting is a process in which an employee takes an active role in redesigning their job in a personally meaningful way. A job crafter may redesign their everyday tasks, relationships with people at work and the way they see their job so it aligns more with their values, skills, interests and internal constraints. Job crafting helps lead to a stronger feeling of security, ability to express one’s identity through job personalization, strengthen the feeling of belonging, enhanced motivation, increased competence and improved well-being.
In addition to multiple advantages of job crafting that individuals may enjoy, organizations may benefit when their employees craft their jobs through enhanced engagement, stronger organizational fit, increased job satisfaction, improved employee well-being, reduced turnover, higher productivity and increased bottom-line.
What if HR and managers lead job crafting in organizations?
While job crafting is often discussed as an individual behaviour, HR professionals and managers can play a critical role in enabling it. For career development professionals working with organizations or leadership teams, job crafting offers a practical framework for helping people shape more sustainable and meaningful work. Given all the benefits that individuals and organizations may obtain because of intentional job crafting, people leaders might decide to become the pioneers of job crafting in their organizations. An important thing here is not to come up with massive transformational programs but to start with small and consistent cultural shifts.
Educating employees about job crafting
Educating employees builds awareness and language for job crafting – something that employees may already do informally.
You may start with a one-hour “lunch and learn” session to talk to your employees about the idea of job crafting. While educating your people about job crafting and its benefits, you may invite them to reflect on one task or one relationship that they would like to amplify or reshape to enjoy their job more.
Leading by example
Another effective step is when an HR or a manager leads by example. Start crafting your own job and share your experience with your employees. For instance, a manager may share how they spend more time mentoring a team member instead of focusing only on reporting tasks.
Seeing people leaders craft their jobs will build employees’ trust and psychological permission signaling that job crafting is safe and accepted. Shared examples may make the job crafting concept more concrete, not abstract.
Enabling team crafting
An effective way to do job crafting is to do it in teams.
You can start with facilitating open conversations among team members about the different aspects of their work, and in particular the parts they enjoy and find rewarding and the elements they dislike or find a chore. For example, a team member who dislikes taking meeting minutes may swap this task for organizing team social events with a colleague who prefers note-taking.
Team crafting as opposed to an individual crafting will prevent job crafting from negatively impacting others and redistribute tasks based on employees’ strengths.
Another simple thing that you can do in your team is to log in each member’s most productive time and block these times to protect from any team meetings. For example, if one team member is most productive between 8–10 a.m., and another between 4–6 p.m., you can agree as a team to protect those hours from meetings.
This small adjustment will bring your organization an increased productivity and happier employees who will feel more in control of their time.
Mentoring employees in team crafting
Whether you do this individually or as a team, you may need to take the role of a mentor to walk employees through the job crafting process, helping them define meaningful changes to their roles. HR and managers can guide people through the process by asking various questions about people’s energy drainers and restorers, values, interests, and strengths.
While mentoring people, it is critical to ensure that job crafting never shifts burden onto others. To help with this Rob Baker, the author of a book about personalization at work, suggests HR and managers encourage people to think about alignment, impact on others and self while job crafting:
- Alignment: Does this change support your role and the organization’s strategy?
- Impact on others: How might this affect teammates, stakeholders, or customers?
- Impact on self: Will this help you work smarter, or are you simply adding more to your plate?
Guiding people through job crafting will help them craft intentionally, not randomly, align individual changes with organizational goals and reduce risk of unexpected consequences.
Creating a supportive culture
The final but important element of enabling job crafting in your organization is creating a supportive culture. A simple way to do so is acknowledging, sharing and celebrating job crafting stories of success.
This will normalize job crafting as part of work, not as an exception.
Conclusion
Employees inevitably reshape aspects of their work – often informally and out of sight. When organizations acknowledge and support job crafting, those changes can become a shared process that benefits both employees and the workplace. For HR professionals, managers and career practitioners, the opportunity is not to control job crafting but to create the conditions where it can happen openly and effectively.
