Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management; she has a track record of rigorous, innovative and applicable research that is published in top academic journals and the popular business press. In this episode we have a conversation about the concept of job crafting and how it is ties in to vital aspects about our personal relationship with our work including the meaning of work and work identity.
Although on first blush these concepts may sound weighty, Amy elegantly illuminates these concepts providing a case study about hospital custodial staff. We also talk about how manager-centric models of job design, which are prevalent in public bureaucracies, can hold us back from getting the best work out of our employees.
In the second half of the show we get down to the practical. Amy walks us through four strategies on how the job-crafting framework can help to assess and improve satisfaction and productivity in our own jobs:
- Optimize the Job You Have
- Re-Vision the Relational Landscape of the Work
- Queue it Up
- Aspirational Job-Crafting
Amy was also kind enough to share a tool that was specifically designed for employees to walk through the job crafting strategies. View the resources link on the President’s Challenge podcast webpage to access the tool along with further readings. I encourage you to take a look and find an area that resonates with you.