Unlock Performance: Job Crafting is the Missing Link to Employee Engagement

“He defined job engagement as the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components, all three components, um, associated with our individual role performance.”

This quote provides a clear, comprehensive definition of job engagement based on academic research.

“So individuals who are engaged in their work are also more satisfied, they're more motivated, they have less illness. Less stress-induced illness. They tend to have better safety records and things like that.”

This highlights the broad, positive impact of job engagement on individual well-being beyond just productivity.

“And really, our role as managers is to facilitate the learning and growth of our employees. And what we see is there's a lot of opportunity to create complex systems in place when really the actions of managerial coaching are pretty simple and very easy to replicate if we know what they are and we kind of sponsor people to do those activities.”

This emphasizes the core, simplified role of managers as facilitators and the ease of implementing effective coaching practices.

“Job crafting was absolutely a missing link between managerial coaching and job engagement. So if we wanted to increase job engagement by doing managerial coaching, we also needed the way, the way in which that happened was through job crafting.”

This is a pivotal statement, identifying job crafting as the critical mediating factor for coaching's impact on engagement.

“One of the questions I ask a lot is, what do you really like doing and what do you really not like doing? Very simplistically, I can make small adjustments in my, you know, team of 20-ish people in HR.”

This offers a practical, simple question managers can use to initiate job crafting conversations and implement small changes.

“But as human resource leaders, our job is to encourage people to think beyond a single task and what we can do to support, not without a fancy shiny program necessarily, but how do we sponsor supervisors having the conversation, not at the annual appraisal time, not as an event, but as an ongoing feedback loop.”

This provides actionable advice for HR leaders to foster engagement through consistent, informal feedback loops rather than formal, infrequent events.