AMY WRZESNIEWSKI: Thank you, Adam, and good morning. I am delighted to be here with all of you. And I would like to start my comments with a story.
And the story has to do with the University Hospital cleaning crew that Jane Dutton, Gelaye Debebe, and I studied some years ago. And we went to study this cleaning crew to understand the nature of the meaning of their work. We were interested in understanding how they experienced their work, what they enjoyed in it, what they found lacking, and so on. And what we found in that study was something that stunned us and has inspired a number of studies that we've done since and others have done in picking up the mantle of this.
And so I'd like to tell you a little bit about what that was. In going into the organization and talking with the people who worked on the cleaning crew about what it was they did each day in their work and how they experienced and how they felt about it, we found first a group of cleaners that talked about it in exactly the way that you would expect based on the research literature on this kind of job. They didn't talk about it as being particularly satisfying. They said it wasn't particularly high skilled. They talked about being there for the benefits of the work. And when they described what the tasks of the work involved, they described exactly what the job description of the organization listed.
On the other hand, we talked with a group of cleaners who talked about the job in very different terms. They enjoyed the work. They found it deeply meaningful. They thought of the work as being very highly skilled. And when we asked them about the tasks and the relationships that comprised the work, they talked about completely different things than the first group. So this piqued our curiosity, and we started to wonder if there was a difference between the two groups with respect to the kinds of units they worked on, the kinds of shifts they worked on, who it was they were in contact with, and things like that, and could find no differences whatsoever between these two groups.
In the second group, for example, in asking the cleaners about the kinds of things they were doing on the job, they described cleaning patient rooms each day and paying attention to which patients seemed to be upset, on the verge of tears, not having had many visitors that week, so that they could double back in the course of their shift to spend time with them, see if they'd like to have a conversation, give them an opportunity to cry. They talked about doing things like walking the elderly visitors of patients all the way back through the Byzantine structure of the hospital to their cars-- which was an offense for which they could be fired-- so that the visitors would not get lost, thus worrying the patient about whether their family members were OK.
And perhaps the best known example from the work that we did, one of the members of the cleaning crew we talked with worked on a floor that cared for patients who were in comas and were hopefully coming out of those comas and beginning the long work toward rehabilitation and recovery. And in describing the tasks that were part of her job, she described taking down the pictures that hung in the hospital patient's rooms on a regular basis and moving them around-- switching them around-- between rooms. And when we asked her why it was she did this, she said that her thought was perhaps something about changing some aspect in the environment of the patients, though they were unconscious, might spark recovery in some way. We became very intrigued by this and asked, is this part of your role given that you work on this kind of floor. And what she told us was, that's not part of my job, but that's part of me. And so in trying to pull apart in the organization, with the administration of the hospital, with the managers, and so on, what it was that was happening here-- what we realized was there were hospital cleaning staff members who were engaging the work in a completely different way without the knowledge of management, without the knowledge of administration, in fact often breaking the rules that were part of their job description to do the work in the way that they were doing. And that got us interested in understanding this phenomenon a little bit more deeply.
And so in work that we've done in several organizations since then, we've come to call this practice job crafting. And what we mean by "job crafting" is the following. In work with Justin Berg and Jane Dutton, we define it as "...what employees do to redesign their own jobs from the bottom up in a way that fosters their engagement at work, their satisfaction with their work, their resilience, and their thriving." And we talk about this as taking three different forms. So the first form is task crafting, in which individuals change the number, the type, or the nature of the tasks they do. So an example would be the hospital cleaning staff member who changed around the pictures on the patient's walls. The second form is relational crafting, in which individuals change the nature of the relationships, interactions, and so on that they have on the job in ways that change how they think about the meaning of their work. An example of this might be someone who works in the legal department of an organization forging relationships with a new product team so that they can help to anticipate and facilitate the challenges that that team may likely encounter in bringing that product to market, as opposed to being in a reactive mode and being part of the group that everyone has to pass through and go through before they're able to bring the product to market. And then, finally, the third form that we talk about and have studied is cognitive crafting. And this is about changing how people perceive the tasks and their meaning.
One of the things that was interesting in the study that we did is we asked every single cleaner we talked with, what is your role here in the organization?
And those who worked in what I would classify as this first set would give us their technical job title that the University Hospital used. But in the second group, we were more likely to hear things like, I'm an ambassador for the hospital or, in one case, I'm a healer. And when we asked the person, well, what is it exactly that you mean by this, she described, well, I create sterile spaces in which patients heal, but I also do everything that I can to facilitate that, whether it's caring for them, caring for their families, coordinating with their nurses, and so on.
Now, why does this matter? I think it matters for a few reasons. So first of all, it matters because it's not just a trick of the mind. So this is not just doing the same kind of work but thinking about it differently. It actually actively influences what
it is people are doing on the job, how it is they're doing it, when they're doing it, with whom the work is done. It changes the job description in ways that I think are pretty serious.
If we had done this project in a backward induction kind of way, we would have made the assumption that these two different groups of cleaners were in two completely different jobs. Second, I think it matters because it happens everywhere. So in studies that we've done subsequent to this and that others have done subsequent to this, whatever sector you're talking about-- industry, level of the organization from the top all the way to the bottom, in organizations where people are expected to craft their jobs, and in organizations where people are forbidden from crafting their jobs-- you find that people are doing this all the time anyway. And then finally, we think it matters because it changes both the meaning and the purpose of the work. It gives people an opportunity to have their own agentic impact on how it is that they're thinking about their contribution to the organization, to the world, the role of work in their life, all things that we know matter. We know these things matter because we write about them
and read about them all the time. As Adam said in his introduction, there's an enormous upsurge in interest in happiness at work, meaning in work, motivation in work, how is it that we connect to the work that we're doing.
You should be looking at all of this and thinking, fair enough, but is this actually good for the organization? Or are patients being harmed by this, or are people going off the rails, if you will, in the kind of job crafting that they do? And so in a couple of different kinds of settings, we're getting some initial evidence of this. So in correlational studies, what my colleagues of ours are finding are the following. So that job crafting is related to several positive outcomes that matter both individuals and organizations.
So first among these, job crafting is associated with more satisfaction in work. It's also associated with more commitment to the job. And then finally, it's more associated with attachment to the job and to the organization. But the argument that I would make is, this is studying job crafting sort of in the wild, if you will-- as it is already happening-- to look for what it's associated with. We've become interested in intervening in organizational systems, putting a drop in the pool, if you will, to understand what happens if you randomly assign people to engage in job crafting in whatever way that they would like-- versus crafting other kinds of things about their role in the organization-- and see what is it that job crafting actually creates as opposed to what is it that is associated with?
And so in doing this, we have found that job crafting actually uniquely creates several positive outcomes for individuals in work. So for example, it increases their happiness at work over time. This is by the blind ratings of co-workers and managers who work with them, who are not aware of which condition of the study the employee happens to be in.Their performance in the job, their mobility to new roles within the organization-- so it seems to facilitate moving around in ways that help to optimize what it is that person is doing in their work. So in thinking about this and the promise of it for organizations and also for individuals, I wanted to offer a few ways for you to think about how might organizations act as the architect for creating and seeding the ground, if you will, for job crafting. So there are four ways that I would like to suggest to all of you. So one is to just boost autonomy and support. We know that individuals tend to enjoy it a lot more and also do better if they have authority over the means by which they reach the ends that they are responsible for to the organization.
What we have found in the job crafting research that we've done is they're doing it anyway, even if they are not given control over the means. But in doing this in a more explicit way and giving people the opportunity to use the expertise they have at whatever level of the organization they work in, this is one way to increase job crafting. A second way that you can think about doing this would be to encourage individuals when they are in a performance evaluation situation to not just treat that as a check-in to find out how it is that they're doing, but instead to use it as an opportunity to build developmental plans with their managers for how it is that they might seed into the next quarter, into the next year. Changes that they would like to make to the job that are aligned with the organization's goals and mission, but also change their relationship to the work that they do in a meaningful way. The third way that I would suggest for this and that I think is a creative approach to it-- and we'll hear a lot about this in a moment-- is to communicate the strategic goals of the organization to the employees in a way that involves them and invites them to participate in this. There's a famous example of this. Some years ago, the CEO of Xerox was very much pushing the organization's initiative around increasing return on assets.And what that did in a particular case that has become quite famous is it enabled a middle manager buried deep in the organization to think about a way that he could re-craft not only his own work to align it with his goal of increasing ROA, but to craft the work of the team that worked with him to make that happen. And what they ended up doing was revolutionizing the way that supply chains worked at Xerox through what, in effect, was job crafting. But it was job crafting that was guided by an understanding of what it is that the organization wanted to do. And then finally, holding job crafting swap meets.
So I've talked about this very much at an individual level phenomenon up to this point, but in organizations we're starting to see the phenomenon that I think is quite promising of getting people who are in a group together and interdependent with each other to sit down and talk about what is it that comprises their jobs? What would they like more of? What they like to potentially offload? One person's most treasured task is something that the person next to them may dread. That we know from studies that we've done on work. And so there are collective ways to think creatively about how to make this happen. And I'll close with just a thought for all of you. And that is the following. If you think about the first step to considering the power of job crafting, both for individuals and for organizations, we've created is tool that you might want to check out. But the thought I really want to leave you with is this-- if you want to signal in the most powerful way possible the commitment that an organization has to an employee's sense of purpose, the answer that our work suggests is you celebrate and support their ownership of it first.
Thank you.