Before branching into coaching, I worked in the New Zealand public sector, for 20 years.
For eight of those years, I worked in the same policy team, with the same manager and the same core group of colleagues. How did I manage to last eight years in one place? People have asked me this on more than one occasion. Usually, I’ve answered that good projects just kept coming along and that I had the best manager I’ve ever had.
That’s not the whole truth though. I had several dips in motivation, and I’ve got new versions of my CV for each of those to prove it. Right after the GFC, for example, there was a lot of restructuring at my organisation, and I really questioned if it was the right place for me.
But what I’ve realised recently is that I did a lot of job crafting, before I even knew what the term meant.
So in this post, I’m going to share some of my own job crafting examples from that time, back when I was working in policy.
What’s job crafting again? A quick recap
Most career coaching and advice assumes that to learn, expand your capabilities and progress your career, you have to move up or move on. But over the past 25 years, the process of job crafting has been widely researched and found to be an effective way to achieve those things right where you are.
Job crafting is the process of an individual employee redesigning their current job for themselves, perhaps but not necessarily with the help of their manager, so it fits them and their goals better.
I recently wrote a mini-series of four blog posts on job crafting, which explain the ins and outs and provide you coaching questions that can help get you started. Find the first of the mini-series posts here.
Increasing structural resources by adding task variety with a side project
Your structural resources at work are the things that come with the job as its described parameters: the range of tasks you’ll do or skills you’ll use, or the things provided by your organisation to do your job, like learning and development opportunities. Structural resources can also be temporal and spatial, like your working hours, your office location, and whether you can work from home.
My first job crafting example illustrates how you can increase your structural resources by creating yourself a side project to have more variety in your job tasks.
Early on in my work for that policy team, I discovered the importance of data in policy making and I got hooked pretty quickly. What I realised though was that my organisation held way more data than it made available on its website, and the key issue stopping it from publishing more of the data for my team’s specific policy area was that the design of the corresponding webpage was outdated.
I had felt in need of branching out from my usual day-to-day work, so – with my manager’s support – I worked for a few hours a week, together with a staff member in the Ministry’s data and information team, to redesign the page over six weeks or so.
Rather than the analytical tasks that characterised my usual work, it was a side project that was more creative and I loved it. As well as providing extra task variety (so increasing the structural resources I had to do my job), it provided extra challenge, because it was a task in an unfamiliar area, and I made a new friend in a different part of the organisation so increased my social resources as well.
Increasing social resources – convening and chairing a working group
Your social resources at work are the interactions you have in the course of your work day, who you’re interacting with, the team climate, the network you have across your organisation, the feedback you get from your colleagues and from your manager, and any coaching and mentoring you receive.
The second job crafting example I want to share, actually follows on from the first. As part of getting to know the datasets that could be included in the newly redesigned data and information page for our policy area, I also got to know the contact people for those datasets, both in our own organisation and in others like Stats NZ.
What I discovered was that there was an appetite for filling some of the gaps in the data landscape for that particular policy area, which had become more important with a change of Government, but it was an effort that needed coordination. And just like that, an opportunity for me to connect with a new collection of people opened up.
I chaired monthly working group meetings for over a year, gained a lot of energy from the camaraderie and the feeling of joint purpose of the group, and benefitted from the different views and combined wisdom of people who’d been working in the public sector longer than me.
Increasing challenge demands – mentoring an up-and-coming colleague
Challenge demands are the demands of your job that, while they require energy and effort, leave you with some reward. For example, a feeling of attainment when you’ve finished a big task or project, the satisfaction of overcoming an obstacle, like some tricky but interesting technical problem, or the knowledge you’ve expanded the bounds of your capability by having performed well in an unfamiliar situation.
Adding challenge demands is a good thing to do when you feel comfortable with all the main duties in your job and need to flex your professional muscles and see what you can do, to prevent boredom.
That was my situation when I offered to mentor a more junior colleague. I had already been participating in a mentoring programme outside work for a while, and when I found out that one of the support staff in my division was curious about working policy, it seemed a natural step to take.
Although I didn’t find the process of mentoring difficult, it added challenge to my job because I had the responsibility of having to describe my professional discipline in clear terms to someone who was completely new to it. In the six years I’d been in policy, I’d accrued way more knowledge, skill and understandings about government and the public sector than I’d realised. What was most important to share from my experiences that would help someone decide if it was the career for them?
Decreasing hindrance demands – steering clear of interpersonal conflict
Hindrance demands are the demands of your job which don’t bring any reward, and instead, can drain you or stress you out. They cost you energy, time, motivation and even gnaw away at your commitment to your job and organisation. They can be things like clunky processes that have never been sorted, and tasks that are time-consuming and repetitive. Or things like interactions with stakeholders or customers that trigger negative emotions, or office politics.
For most of my time in that policy team, one working relationship took the lion’s share of my relationship-building energy. There was no one particular ‘event’ that fuelled it, it was just a clash of personalities. So, I enlisted the help of my manager to engineer me a partial secondment of 20 hours a week to another policy team for six months.
It didn’t completely remove the relationship from my life, but it meant I had reduced the impact of difficult daily interactions on my emotional state, and felt re-energised by meeting new colleagues and working on an interesting policy project in a different team.
How these job crafting examples might be relevant to you
If you work in the New Zealand public sector right now, it’s a difficult time. Budgets have been cut, organisations have been restructured or even merged, roles have gone. If you’re not happy in your role, or you feel as if your career progression has stalled, it’s hard at the moment to fix that through promotion or getting a job elsewhere.
But I hope I’ve shown, by sharing job crafting examples from my own career, some of the ways that job crafting makes it possible to re-engage with your work and keep growing your career – in the role you’re in.
And if you’re not sure whether your particular job could be crafted, I’ve recently designed a Job Audit session to address just this. It looks at how your current job stacks up in terms of demands and resources, and where there might be scope to job craft. If there is, you’ll leave the session with a couple of job crafting moves to get started with! (And if not, we'll talk about a couple of other options.)
If this sounds like it fits the bill, but you're not sure, get in touch so we can set up a chat. I can give you more details and we can double-check it’s a good fit. Or, find out more about me on my About page.