Positive Organizational Practices

Contents
Key objectives.............................................................................................................................2
Challenges and requirements for execution..............................................................................2
Measure success of initiative.....................................................................................................2
How the initiative will be useful.................................................................................................2

JOB CRAFTING

The initiative would be job crafting. It is the design of employees' jobs that can significantly
shape how they experience their work's meaningfulness. Job crafting is the process in which
employees redefine and reimagine their job designs in personally meaningful ways. In turn,
these changes can influence the meaningfulness of the work. We use the term
"meaningfulness" to catch the degree of significance employees believe their work
possesses. Meaningfulness is usually linked with numerous work-related benefits, including
increased job satisfaction, motivation, and performance.

OBJECTIVES:
We propose the following objectives of job crafting to cultivate greater task variety,
identity, and significance, thereby enhancing the meaningfulness that the 150 employees of
our IT firm at Pune are likely to derive from their work:

 Emphasizing tasks: Employees can take advantage of any tasks that they see as
meaningful that already are part of their jobs by allocating more time, energy, and
attention to them. For example, a dentist could spend more time educating patients
on healthy dental habits. In this way, the dentist can better leverage an existing part
of the job that is considered to be meaningful.

 Redesigning tasks: Another objective is to re-engineer existing tasks to make them

more meaningful. For example, an experienced salesperson could bring a new co-
worker along with him on the sales calls, so this task becomes not just about selling
to customers but also about training the co-worker. This might excite the
salesperson by making a mundane task more meaningful by supporting the new
colleague to form essential contacts and learn this part of the job.

 Reframing relationships: Next objective is to craft the work relationships by changing

the relationship's nature to build a more meaningful and new purpose. For example,
principal of a school might reframe what it means to have relationships with teachers to
understand their individual work interests and preferences (and helping them
understand the principal's), rather than just about evaluating and supervising the
teachers' work. Approaching relationships in this positive way may change the nature
and content of interactions with teachers by compelling the principal to ask more
questions (against just giving directions) and explain the reasoning behind these actions,
which may produce more high-quality connections with teachers.

 Expanding perceptions: Employees can cultivate meaningfulness by broadening their

perceptions of their jobs' impact or purpose. This often takes the form of employees
thinking about their jobs as a whole rather than a set of separate tasks and relationships.
By keeping their jobs' holistic purpose in mind, employees can better connect with the
 ultimate fruits of their labor and beneficiaries of their work and thus experience their
work as more meaningful and motivating.

We identified three critical categories of personal characteristics that are used to guide

their crafting objectives:

Job crafting in ways that align with employees' key motives,

or the specific outcomes that drive them to put forth effort
and persistence (e.g., enjoyment, personal growth,
Motives
friendship), can foster meaningfulness by enabling
employees to pursue outcomes that they care about and
deeply value.

Job crafting in ways that enable employees to leverage their

strengths, or areas of talent that can be productively applied
at work (e.g., problem-solving skills, attention to detail,
Strengths public speaking), can cultivate meaningfulness by helping
employees leverage what they are naturally capable of doing
well.

Job crafting in ways that create opportunities to pursue

passions, or the activities and topics that spark deep interest
Passions
(e.g., learning, teaching, using technology), can be a rich
source of enjoyment, engagement, and meaningfulness.

Challenges and requirements for

Requirement for Execution

IT Infrastructure related requirements

COVID-19 has taken the world towards remote working and that has caught many
companies off-guard and unprepared. The companies which did not invest in digital
transformation lacked technology to support remote working. CIOs across globe have a
golden chance to provide stability to this new normal.
The problems faced are related to the endpoints not set up for the employees. The
execution requirement to make end point readiness which can improve the life of stressed-
and burned-out employees.
In the IT firm, IT infra teams need to ensure the business continuity to give the same
experience as the employees had in the office.
The requirements of executions are following-
Empowering IT support teams to provide real-time support
Need to make agile IT support teams so that these teams can handle high spike of service
desk tickets. Need to provide level 1 technicians to access proper tools, data, and
programming knowledge to identify and remediated issues rapidly. Fulfilling this
requirement can remove bottlenecks, improve call resolutions, reduce escalations, and
make employees’ work more seamless.
Requirement to provide self-service options
Because of work from home set up, Employees may be working usual hours to balance work
and family time. It may create more technical issues during work from home at odd hours.
Giving employees resources and autonomy to manage their own devices and software can
help employees, and it will make them empowered. Providing solutions such as chatbot,
self-serve app, or a built-in automation can go a long way in maintaining and increasing
employees’ productivity.
Requirement to tackle security issues
In IT companies, when devices move outside the firewall, the access becomes more
complicated for the employees. IT infra team must ready with software patch upgrades to
improve security for the employees.
Requirement to plan for future
There is a requirement to plan for long term by IT firms for work from home facility as it is
going to be a new normal. It is required to provide stable platform to the employees which
hassle free and limit employee disruption. Automation and easy of troubleshooting are the
hallmark for such planning.

Requirement to avoid burn out

There has been a sudden transition to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a
requirement to execute steps to avoid employee burn out. The risk is huge because the lines
between work and non-work hours is reducing. Employees who are managing this kind of
situation first time may run into the risk of preserving boundaries between professional and
personal lives. There is a need to take steps to ensure employees mental health. The
pressure on the employees is more because other help institutions such as day care and
house helps is limited. Hence employees especially women employees face many challenges
at home.
Requirement to maintain physical and Social boundaries
A proper demarcation of work activities and home activities may do wonders for employees.
Getting yourself ready before the start of the work time. Following as similar start and end
time as office time helps maintaining the balance. It can be considered to replace office
commute to a morning walk.
Requirement to maintain temporal boundaries
Sticking 9-5 routine may be not practical in work from home scenario. There is a need of
being respectful that other employees may have other time of work and responses may be a
bit delayed. There is a requirement to inform other colleagues about temporary
unavailability, so employees with very young kids can set small out of office alerts. Temporal
boundaries depend on the ability to coordinate each other’s time better in a remote setting.
Virtual coffee meets or virtual check – meets may be required to fill the gap. Idea through
temporal boundaries is to keep a sense of normality in not so normal times.
Requirement to prioritize and focus on important work
In work from home environment employees feel to be compelled to project their
appearance of productivity. There is a need to for a proper demarcation between
immediate and important tasks. Employees need to prioritize between these tasks
themselves in remote environment.

Requirement to maintain productivity

Communication is the key
No communication is over communication. Communication is highly important in the times
of uncertainty. There is a need to have straight forward and honest communication about
individual, project, and company related information. It will help in reducing panic among
employees and can bring sense of calm.

Feedback
There is a need to give and provide regular feedback to the employees. In the new normal
the frequency of the feedback can be increased a bit to keep employees in loop for any
updates. It is the best way to provide and get update about employees’ needs.

Value and Appreciate

There is a requirement to value the work of the employees, and a good work should be
appreciated. It holds good in the normal times, and it is now more valuable in the COVID
and post COVID times.

Partner in employees’ growth

Employers need to look beyond the employer- employee relationship and need to become
the partner in employees’ growth. The way now the firms develop the relationship with the
employees in tough times will go a long way towards work culture and growth of both the
employee and the firm.

Limit virtual meets and plan quiet times

In COVID times the screen time for all the employees across the hierarchy has increased
drastically. Hence virtual meets become more exhausting than face to face meets. The
virtual meets should be short and to the point. It should be taken one step further and plan
the quiet time or no meet or screen time for the employees. These steps will help
employees rejuvenate and increase productivity.

Giving meaning to work

To explain the importance of work to the employees and conveying how this work help in
their personal growth can help in increasing productivity in the work from home
environment. It provides and extra push and employees find the work more meaningful.

Provide time to develop new skills

In normal times, employees attend trainings to hone new skills. In the new normal
employees should keep on providing opportunities where employees can gain newer set of
skills. This will help in keeping the motivation of the employees high and keep them updated
with current market and latest technology trends.

Challenges

Time Management Challenges

Employees don’t have experiences of scheduling their own time table, and they lack the
discipline to avoid all the distractions present at home. When WFH started first, employees
thought that they don’t have to wake up early, get ready, and travel all the way to the
office, they have so much spare time in their hand. This attitude has changed their sense of
timing for different tasks performed on daily basis. Moreover, this malfunction of timing
has affected their productivity & efficiency.

Distraction Challenges
The biggest challenge of WFH for employees are avoiding distractions. When employees are
working from home, they have thousands of distractions to deal with: they have many
distractions lying around the home - from a play station to playing with the dog. For
employees who are mothers, it’s more difficult as they have some extra distractions laying
their way as their kids are out of the school. These distractions at home are challenges for
both the employees and employers.

Supervision Challenges
When employees work from home, they possess the liberty to work without any directions
and supervision. It allows the employees to solve problems on their own and improve
analytical skills. However, all the employees are not the same. Majority of employees need
constant monitoring and supervision. Without interventions from employers’ side, they will
make wrong decisions that will eventually impact the reputation of a company. Hence,
remote workers need to be monitored.

Communication Challenges
People tend to miscommunicate even in one to one in-person meetings. When it comes to
communicating virtually, the job becomes doubly difficult. In WFH, it’s very tough to hold
productive virtual meetings to coordinate different team members so that the teams’
cumulative efforts remain aligned. Miscommunication or partial communication has
potential to slow down decision-making, and business houses may have to face adverse
consequences for the same.

Motivation Challenges
When employees aren’t surrounded by the fellow employees, they tend to feel demotivated
as it is totally unprecedented to work from home and contribute effectively. They start to
lose their vision as they don’t have fellow employees around them to drive inspiration from.
Additionally, social distancing and isolation negatively impact the productivity of the
employees. In such a situation, employees are bound to feel totally demotivated.
Measure success of initiative
Describe how you will measure success of this initiative?

The success of Job crafting initiative for the Pune software company could be measured as
follows:
1. We could carry out survey wherein we try and measure overall well-being of the
employees, motivation of the teams, and productivity of the Pune office before
implementation of the Job crafting initiative.
2. Teaching and training employees on Job crafting.
The author Wrzesniewski talks about three forms of job crafting: Task crafting, Relational
crafting, and Cognitive crafting. Employees could be trained on these aspects of job craftin
by someone who is an expert in this field.
3. Creating a questionnaire that measure employee performance on the above job
crafting parameters.
After considerable research by asking Job crafting related questions in surveys a Job Crafting
Questionnaire (JCQ) should be developed. This questionnaire would then be used to
measure the frequency with which each employee has engaged in job crafting activity from
1 (hardly ever) to 6 (very often). The questionnaire would try and measure what physical
and cognitive changes an employee has made in their task or relational boundaries of their
work and how these changes have led to more optimal design of their job. The
questionnaire would try and judge on indices of proactive behaviour (i.e., organisational
citizenship behaviour, strengths use, and goal setting), and positive work functioning (i.e.,
job satisfaction, work contentment, work enthusiasm, and positive affect).

4. Final Survey on how Job crafting has improved overall well-being of the employees,
motivation of the teams, and productivity of the Pune office.

A sample questionnaire
Source:
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323849206_A_Literature_Review_of_Job_Crafti
ng_and_Its_Related_Researches)
Please indicate the extent to which you engage in the following behaviours using the
following scale: 1 = Hardly Ever, to 6 = Very Often. (Note: 'Very Often' means as often as
possible in your workplace)
1. Introduce new approaches to improve your work*

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

2. Change the scope or types of tasks that you complete at work

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

3. Introduce new work tasks that you think better suit your skills or interests

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

4. Choose to take on additional tasks at work

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

5. Give preference to work tasks that suit your skills or interests

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

6. Think about how your job gives your life purpose

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

7. Remind yourself about the significance your work has for the success of the
organisation
1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

8. Remind yourself of the importance of your work for the broader community
1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

9. Think about the ways in which your work positively impacts your life

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

10. Reflect on the role your job has for your overall well-being

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

11. Make an effort to get to know people well at work

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

12. Organise or attend work related social functions

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

13. Organise special events in the workplace (e.g., celebrating a co-worker's birthday)*

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

14. Choose to mentor new employees (officially or unofficially)

1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

15. Make friends with people at work who have similar skills or interests
1 (Hardly Ever) 2 3 4 5 6 (Very Often)

Note: Items 1 to 5 reflect task crafting, items 5 to 10 reflect cognitive crafting, and items 11
to 15 reflect relational crafting.

Benefits of the initiative

In any organisation, employees don’t want to go to work to feel disengaged, bored or

unwell. They want to experience and accomplish new things. They desire a sense of purpose
in their work. Employers can help facilitate this by allowing employees to make some
changes to their tasks and interactions with colleagues or customers at work.
A healthy office environment serves as the foundation for a healthy and high-performing
workforce. The physical, social and overall structure of a company directly affects employee
behaviour, attitude and morale. When employees feel that they have no input on their role
at their company, they have trouble staying engaged and feeling satisfied at work.

Job crafting, which typically focuses on employees, already gives positive outcomes,
including improvements in well-being, organizational commitment, perceptions of meaning
and purpose of work, self and colleague ratings of performance, and adaptation to
organizational change.
Job crafting can be fully successful only if it’s supported and encouraged by all levels of
management because it’s a bottom-up approach.
Job crafting must align with both the employee’s and the company’s goals. That’s because
there are three main forms that crafting adjustments can take.
 The first relates to changing the job’s task boundaries and is referred to as task
crafting. By choosing to do fewer, more, or different tasks than those prescribed in the
formal job listing, employees create a different job.
 The second relates to changing the relational boundary of the job through either the
quality or number of interactions with others at work and is referred to as relational
crafting.
 The third relates to changing the cognitive task boundaries of jobs and is known as
cognitive crafting, because it’s about altering one’s perception of the meaning of work.

Job crafting occurring post-pandemic has altered tasks rather than relationships or
cognition. This is because home-based work and the subsequent videoconference fatigue
that has ensued has destroyed traditional ways of interacting with others at work, such as
engaging in watercooler and coffee bar chats. It’s also hard at the moment to alter one’s
perceptions around the purpose and meaning of work, given that most people throughout
the world are experiencing cognitive overload.

Both employees and employers alike will benefit from the outcomes of job crafting. It’s a
relatively simple and inexpensive way to help employees feel more engaged and improve
their overall sense of well-being in the workplace.

Perks of Job Crafting for Employees:

Happiness: Employees who are able to participate in job crafting will also feel more
respected, trusted and appreciated by their employers, which in turn boosts happiness, job
satisfaction and feelings of fulfilment.
Improved well-being: They will naturally feel a sense of improved well-being because
employees with the ability to job craft feel happier and more satisfied in their roles.
Stronger connections: When employees tweak their roles to include more collaboration
with different departments or colleagues, it creates more opportunities for teamwork and
social connection.

Perks of Job Crafting for Employers:

Engagement: Most employees will care more about helping a company achieve its goals
when they feel respected and trusted by employers. Job crafting helps boost this emotional
commitment between an employee and a company.

Productivity: By giving employees the opportunity to engage in job crafting, employers will
be rewarded with higher levels of productivity. These employees will also be more likely to
experience both personal and professional growth, which can positively increase workplace
productivity.

Loyalty: In many cases, when an employee feels unhappy in their role, they go on a search
for a new job at a different company. However, employers can prevent this by introducing
the option of job crafting to help retain talent.
Less stress: Employees who engage in job crafting might experience less levels of workplace
stress because they have more input on their role.