Job crafting with NHS teams: making work better

Professor Colin Lindsay, Deputy Director of the Scottish Centre for Employment Research at SBS and part of the team at ESRC's PrOPEL Hub, 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 with 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. 

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. 

Dr Rosemary Stevens, Clinical Oncology Consultant, told us: “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.” 

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. 

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. 

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 by contacting Professor Colin Lindsay, ESRC PrOPEL Hub at: colin.lindsay@strath.ac.uk 

About Colin Lindsay

Professor Colin Lindsay, a lecturer in the Department of Human Resource Management, has been researching and teaching on employability, skills, public management and social policy for more than fifteen years. His current research focuses on the link between health and employability; and the impact of new technology on employees’ experiences of job quality. He works closely with the Scottish Centre for Employment Research (SCER), and is currently conducting research with colleagues at SCER on workplace innovation.