Job Crafting: Get the Job You Want in the Job You Have!

Information Management (IM) can be often viewed from outside the profession as a boring, meaningless compliance-based activity that has little business value as a corporate function. So, trying to change these perceptions when promoting or selling the benefits of IM work or your next IM initiative can be a daunting task from the start.

This is where ‘Job Crafting’ can allow you to unlock your creativity by leaning into your ‘personal passions’ to improve the chances of your next initiative achieving its objectives. This article will explain what Job Crafting is, how it was successfully implemented in 2 local government agencies and how it can be used to reinvigorate your work.

What is Job Crafting?

Job crafting has always been part of the human existence where we have taken tasks or activities and redesigned them to make them more meaningful for the individual. This usually occurs naturally and often without seeking approval beforehand.

A very simple example of this would be deciding to speak with a new key employee in a business area to introduce yourself and the IM team purpose when it may have been more ‘time efficient’ to just e-mail them with a link to the IM webpage. The decision to speak with the employee was done without formal approval and with the purpose of making a more meaningful connection for you and your team with the new employee.

So, with this example in mind the chances are that you and/or your colleagues have been job crafting without realising it.

Inspired by Yale University Study

The term ‘Job Crafting’ was formalised in 2001 as part of a Yale University study which was focused on cleaning staff at a hospital (
as explained in this video). The study determined that around half of the cleaners viewed their role as being very different to what their position description said. This group reported greater meaning, enjoyment, and commitment to their job.

While some cleaners repeated what their position description said and viewed it as the means to an end the other group viewed the same job as part of the overall patient health care plan. These cleaners described themselves as ‘Healers or Ambassadors’ for example and would often double back on their round if they noticed a patient may need extra support. One cleaner, who was cleaning the area where patients were in a coma was changing the artworks in their rooms regularly and when asked why by the researchers said they were doing so in the hope that changing the environment might spark the patient’s recovery. When asked if that was part of her job? she replied “No, that’s not part of my job. But that’s part of me.”

This was a powerful example of how ‘lower level’ organisational employees can find meaning and belief in the work when common perceptions maybe that they do less meaningful work in the organisation. This resonated strongly with my own personal experience working in IM for 37 years.

Is Job Crafting for Everyone? 

As the Yale University study highlights only half of the hospital cleaning team were job crafting and it’s important to note that you can’t make everyone fall in love with job crafting. I experienced this directly when I began researching ‘job crafting’ in 2019 and looking to implement it with an IM initiative on naming conventions we were planning at Moorabool Shire Council in Victoria, Australia.

Project X at Moorabool Shire Council

The information management team was tasked to introduce naming conventions for documents to support a SharePoint system implementation. When raising the idea to job craft the initiative it met a less than enthusiastic response. Nevertheless, I was inspired to try job crafting and set about deploying a simple, colourful, and engaging one page naming convention based on ‘metadata’ bricks that staff could use to build standard document titles. Naming conventions, even for the seasoned IM professionals can be a very ‘dry’ subject so we created ‘Project X,’ an ‘educational initiative’ to explain the importance of naming conventions, with a secret agent theme.

In researching the initiative, I encountered research around the power of storytelling which discovered that people are ‘22’ times more likely to remember facts when told in a narrative. Outside of my regular work I’m passionate about pop culture, comic book stories and most things historical. With these ‘personal passions’ mixed into the project led me to develop a central comic book story set in 1863 in the Victorian gold fields with the main character Stan ‘Doc’ Titles, a notorious ‘metadata’ bushranger (bandit) who explains to the reader the importance of naming conventions.

The project secretly recruited staff volunteers to help conduct the project. The project had just commenced when the pandemic broke, so material had to be reworked and while the project was shut down for 5 months, we reorganised to film a short movie once regional lockdown lifted. Additional volunteers with specific skills such as Bakers, Actors, Illustrators, costume design, set construction, film photography, video editing and movie directing were all skills needed and secured.

Moorabool – A Metadata Journey the movie - was born. One of the most enjoyable aspects of doing this was that the project also had family members of the staff volunteers assisting. We had teenagers helping their parent actor rehearse their lines and family members of staff build the movie set. This job crafting project brought together volunteer staff from Executives, Managers and frontline staff all working on creating visual art for an IM initiative and having a lot of fun doing so all performed on a tiny budget.

The project exceeded its outcomes in terms of influencing the use of naming conventions use in SharePoint. Executives embraced it as it provided them an opportunity to show their fun side which in turn led to many of their staff also getting involved. The project went on to influence other corporate functions such as occupational health & safety using visual art and Human Resources looking at storytelling to refresh corporate values statement.

The project was submitted for the Municipal Association of Victoria’s 2022 Technology awards and was nominated in 3 of the 6 categories, winning in the ‘Collaboration & Partnership’ category.

Project X creator, David Robinson (left) accepting MAV Tech award.

Updating the Information Asset Register for Greater Geelong City Council

The Council needed the Information Asset register (IAR) updated in 2023. This task fell to the IM team to conduct. Again, similar to naming conventions the IAR can be a ‘dry’ topic to raise with Information Asset owners, so it was a prime candidate to receive a ‘job crafting’ makeover. The new Information Management Analyst Sam Parker was assigned the task and after workshopping with Sam about possible job crafting ideas we agreed on a ‘marine’ inspired theme. Outside of work Sam is passionate about growing coral and having amazing reef fish in an incredible home marine aquarium.

A briefing was organised for 60 key business unit staff to update the IAR. Sam immediately grabbed their attention when they saw the first aquarium slide and realised this wasn’t going to be a standard IM compliance briefing. Sam was able to link the 5 key IAR steps:

1. Capture Quality
2. Classify & Organise
3. Protect & Maintain
4. Regularly review
5. Disposal

To how these are managed in a marine aquarium which had the audience completely engaged on each step. This completely opened up the conversation and interest in getting the IAR update done.

Shortly after the initial briefing the new CEO announced a major organisational restructure. Now this would usually be expected to push any compliance tasks to the background in staff minds, but largely due to this innovative job crafting approach and the passion showed by Sam helped keep the momentum in the update going. Originally the task had an objective of 40% completion but when the update finished it had doubled the completion rate to 80%. This was despite the organisational restructure impacting the task, job crafting helped establish strong connections and allowed the outcome to exceed expectations.

Additional benefits were that Sam, being a new staff member quickly became known as ‘the fish tank guy’ and garnered many hallway chats about, of course coral and fish but also information management activities. This materialised also into getting information management a seat at the table on various projects that were commencing.

Key Learnings 

We’ve all had to do the less exciting tasks at work at some point. Those ‘tick box,’ compliance activities we send out and expect the target audience to complete. Here are the key takeaways that I learned from job crafting so that you can kick those ‘tick box’ exercises to the curb with job crafting!

1. You can’t make everyone fall in love with Job crafting.
2. Make memorable work moments for you and your team.
3. If you hit an issue when job crafting, try to incorporate it.
4. Give others the opportunity to job craft.
5. Embrace unexpected outcomes, they’ll improve it.
6. Executives are fun people too, so give them a chance to show it!

In Conclusion

Job crafting is a real possibility for those of you who want to take a chance and lean into your personal passions to reinvigorate your day job. Both case studies in this article started with trepidation around could ‘job crafting’ these tasks be misunderstood in the organisation and should we be taking a risk? This was quickly set aside when further discussion occurred around likely low impact of taking traditional approaches (i.e. send out global e-mail) without job crafting.

The fun, engagement and commitment to the tasks became infectious and I saw the enjoyment of the work rapidly expand out with these case studies. So, now with job crafting in your heart go out there and explore getting the type of job you want in the job you have.

This work was first published in the Vol 40 – Issue 3 – November 2024 issue of iQ - The RIMPA Quarterly Magazine of the Records and Information Management Practitioners Alliance.

Job Crafting at the AI+IM Global Summit 2025

Join David and learn more about job crafting at his interactive session at the AI+IM Global Summit, being held March 31-April 2, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. Register and learn more.