The Job Crafting™ Exercise helps you make your job more fulfilling and engaging. This interactive tool allows you to view your job as a flexible set of building blocks. Using this unique perspective, you create a visual plan for redesigning your job to better suit your values, strengths, and passions. The result is a more optimal fit between you and your job, boosting your happiness and effectiveness at work.
The Job Crafting™ Exercise is now available as an online tool or hard-copy booklet. To learn more and view pricing, please click the “purchase” link to the left.
The Job Crafting™ Exercise (JCE) is a workbook with a visual and creative nature that enables people to ask and answer a number of questions about their jobs in a clear, concise, and enjoyable way. Here are the most common ways the JCE is used:
- Self-development: People do the JCE on their own–you can just purchase a booklet for yourself and start crafting.
- Group Workshops: Organizations invite employees to complete the JCE in professional development workshops. See Two-Hour Workshop Outline.
- Classroom Teaching: Instructors use the JCE to teach students about job crafting theory and how employees can and do redesign their own jobs, providing a complementary perspective to traditional, top-down views of job design. Request a PDF of the teaching note for instructors here.
- One-on-One Coaching: Coaches guide clients through the JCE.
* One workbook required per participant.
The effects of using the Job Crafting™ Exercise have been tested in a field quasi-experiment at a Fortune 500 technology company. Participating in a Job Crafting™ Exercise workshop significantly increased employees’ happiness and effectiveness six weeks later, as rated by the employees’ peers and managers (controlling for levels of happiness and effectiveness prior to the workshop).
The concept of job crafting captures the active changes employees make to their own job designs in ways that can bring about numerous positive outcomes, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. The following briefing introduces the core ideas of job crafting theory for management students by defining it, describing why it is important, summarizing key research findings, and exploring what it means for employees, managers, and organizations. Download What is Job Crafting and Why Does it Matter (132K PDF).
Additional research includes:
- Berg, J. M., Dutton, J. E., & Wrzesniewski, A. Job Crafting and Meaningful Work. In B. J. Dik, Z. S. Byrne & M. F. Steger (Eds.), Purpose and meaning in the workplace (pp. 81-104). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
- Berg, J. M., Grant, A. M., & Johnson, V. When callings are calling; Crafting work and leisure in pursuit of unanswered occupational callings. Organization Science, 21(5), 973-994.
- Berg, J. M., Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. Perceiving and responding to challenges in job crafting at different ranks; When proactivity requires adaptivity. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31(2-3), 158-186.
- Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. Crafting a job; Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201.
- Wrzesniewski, A., LoBuglio, N., Dutton, J. E., & Berg, J. M. (2013). Job Crafting and Cultivating Positive Meaning and Identity in Work. In A. B. Bakker (Ed.), Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 281-302). London: Emerald.
Media Coverage
[Advance to 6:35 for job crafting segment]
Society of Women Engineers podcast with Intel’s Sierra Reid on Creating Your Own Career
The Society of Women Engineers’ (SWE) annual WE conference is the world’s largest conference for women engineers. In this special edition podcast recorded live at WE19 in Anaheim, California, SWE past president Jessica Rannow speaks with Intel’s Sierra Reid who explains the concept of ‘job crafting,’ and how we can all create and cultivate our ideal careers.
