Our ESRC PrOPEL Hub and Strathclyde Business School colleague Professor Colin Lindsay blogs about recent Job Crafting workshops with NHS oncology teams
At the ESRC: Economic and Social Research Council PrOPEL Hub, we have hugely valued the opportunity to share insights on the potential for Job Crafting to empower people to solve problems and drive innovation in the workplace. For the uninitiated, Job Crafting has been defined as “a specific form of proactive behaviour in which the employee initiates changes… to make their own job more meaningful, engaging, and satisfying”. Over the past few years, we have engaged with hundreds of employees and business across a range of sectors to help managers and employees to think about how they might facilitate Job Crafting. Our latest Job Crafting workshops were undertaken with NHS Oncology Teams based at the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre.
Why Job Crafting?
Job Crafting is a bottom-up approach to job redesign where employees alter their jobs to make them fit to their preferences and find meaning. Specifically, individuals craft their job by: crafting for job resources (the autonomy, support and development opportunities that employees value and that help them to cope with their jobs); crafting for challenges (feeling empowered to step up into new or different tasks that challenge and grow people); and ‘optimising job demands’ (having the autonomy to find efficiencies to manage with the demanding elements of work).
We have used the principles of Job Crafting to engage with large audiences of HR managers, contribute to ESRC PrOPEL Hub ‘Knowledge Into Practice’ events targeting team leaders and line managers, and deliver online materials. But perhaps our most challenging and rewarding work involves engaging directly and intensively with teams in different organisations and sectors through our ‘hacks’ and workshops built around specific workplace challenges.
Job Crafting with NHS Oncology Teams
It was a privilege for my colleague Nicola Murray (PhD) and I to engage with NHS Oncology Teams working at the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, where they deliver world class cancer care to more than 60,000 patients per year. In two Job Crafting workshops we engaged with more than 25 NHS professionals. NHS colleagues explored opportunities for Job Crafting and shared examples of good practice. They shared instances where they had found innovative solutions to improve communications and practice, and where colleagues had felt supported in taking on new challenges and opportunities to learn.
There was also the opportunity to share challenges and barriers to Job Crafting, perhaps inevitably focusing on staffing pressures and resource constraints, and resulting impacts in terms of wellbeing and stress. Some colleagues also pointed to the sometimes bureaucratic decision-making processes within the NHS as slowing attempts to drive change and secure investments in people.
Despite these challenges, NHS leaders who provided feedback on our Job Crafting workshops reported positive actions and reflections from team members. First, the workshops provided an opportunity for NHS professionals in different roles to come together and talk about challenges (and hopefully solutions) away from the day-to-day work environment.
A lot of people will be doing it [supporting Job Crafting] anyway. People will have been doing it instinctively, but giving them permission to talk about it is a good idea… And naming it always helps, because it gives people a structure to work to… It’s about giving people with different skills, different job descriptions the permission to do it. The workshop was nice in that they all acknowledged that everyone has skills and can contribute. Dr Rosemary Stevens, Clinical Oncology Consultant
There was also a sense that, given the resource constraints faced by NHS organisations, there was value in our workshops’ focus on collaborating to find team-level efficiencies and innovations.
It’s exactly what we have to do. We have to work smarter not harder. It’s very much about the idea that you can do better with the resources that you have, and that people will be happier if they feel that they have some control. It met the needs of our team, because we are in a resource-pressured environment and the only way to deal with that is to try to make the most of what you’ve got. Dr Rosemary Stevens, Clinical Oncology Consultant
Outcomes and reflections
Feedback from our workshops also identified a range of practical, ‘crafting’ actions that the teams agreed to take forward: from seeking to streamline the approval of CT scans to improving job plans and exploring an extension of the use of electronic prescribing. Of course, as with all attempts to drive change in challenging organisational contexts, there were some ‘wins’ but other suggestions for improvement that were more difficult to take forward.
We came up with quite a long ‘To Do’ list of things we would like to change to improve our day-to-day lives that didn’t involve much extra money. We have accessed the senior management team and they have taken that on board. Some are going to be easier than others but they are already acting on them. Dr Rosemary Stevens, Clinical Oncology Consultant
A final reflection shared by NHS leaders attending the events related to the practical value of engaging intensively with academic researchers like the ESRC PrOPEL Hub team, researchers who are committed to sharing high quality evidence on ‘what works’ in an accessible and actionable form.
In my role it is important to look at ways of creating headspace for our teams. These workshops, facilitated by Colin and Nicola, supported this and – based on positive feedback from our teams – we would be keen to organise more. NHS professionals value evidence, so it was important that Colin and Nicola were convincing in talking about the robust evidence behind their work on Job Crafting. But it was just as important that they were able to talk about Job Crafting in terms of practical examples of what can be done to improve our people’s jobs. Dr Ioanna Nixon, Clinical Director, Oncology
A growing evidence base points to the potential value of Job Crafting in promoting improved engagement, wellbeing and innovation in the workplace. It might seem a limited response to the significant pressures faced by NHS teams, but there is evidence that empowering under pressure employees to craft small improvements in their day-to-day work can make a difference. We’ll continue to work with organisations and teams who are keen to explore opportunities to craft improvements in their people’s experiences at work.
If your organisation would like to engage with our Job Crafting workshops or resources, find out more on our website or contact Professor Colin Lindsay, ESRC PrOPEL Hub at: [email protected]
