Making your job your own. A job crafting success story.

You know that coworker who drives you nuts? How you wish you could cut out your interactions with her, or at least keep them to a minimum. And how wonderful it would be if you could spend more time working with the Customer Care team; they’re always so fun and professional. But alas, this is your job and you can’t always have things your way…or can you?

Last week I wrote about the concept of job crafting, a theory coined by researchers at Yale University describing the process of sculpting your job to increase your satisfaction and productivity. There are a number of ways to make this happen, and one is through relational crafting, or in other words, customizing how you interact with others on the job.

Take Amy for example: she works in an accounting department for a large corporation. Mostly she’s happy in her position. The thorn in her side is interacting with one particular coworker who has the annoying habit of interrupting Amy frequently with non-urgent questions and comments.

Thinking it through, Amy realized she could craft her job a bit to make things better.  Amy got permission from her manager to wear headphones, playing instrumental music to help her keep her focus. She also spoke with her coworker and requested that she make an ongoing list of non-urgent items, and they’d go over them once each day. With these two tweaks, Amy’s productivity and happiness on the job took a big leap in the positive direction.

Feeling more empowered with these two small changes, Amy went one step further and asked her manager if she could be the liaison with the Customer Care team, acting as the primary go-between for projects between the two departments. It created more work for Amy, but because she enjoyed working with their team so much, she was happy to do it.

Tweaking her position in these three ways significantly improved Amy’s happiness at work. There’s  another crafting strategy that I’ll describe for you next week. In the meantime, be on the lookout for things you may want to customize in your own job.