Jennifer DuPlessis
CHRO
Collin College
Episode 386
Unlock Performance: Job Crafting is the Missing Link to Employee Engagement
Current chapter: Covering monthly expenses is the number one concern for employees in 2024
Built By PeopleNovember 14, 2024 · 15:33
Thesis
“Maximizing organizational effectiveness and employee performance hinges on a deep understanding and intentional implementation of job engagement, which is crucially facilitated by ongoing managerial coaching and the empowerment of employees through job crafting.”
Show notes
Managerial coaching alone doesn't reliably produce employee engagement—and Jennifer DuPlessis has the dissertation data to prove it. As CHRO at Collin College with a PhD in human resource development, she discovered what she calls the "missing link": job crafting. Without it, coaching can be excellent and engagement still flat. With it, the path from good management to engaged employees becomes measurable and repeatable.
Job crafting is the process by which employees actively align their roles with their own preferences, motives, and passions—adjusting tasks, relationships, and how they think about their work to better fit who they are. It's not about rewriting job descriptions every week. It starts with a simple question DuPlessis asks her own team: "What do you really like doing, and what do you really not like doing?" The answers create space for small adjustments that compound significantly over time in terms of engagement, retention, and individual wellbeing. Engaged employees, research confirms, show higher productivity, lower turnover intent, less stress-induced illness, and better safety records.
Her practical framework for managers is intentionally simple—because complexity is what kills adoption. The behaviors of effective managerial coaching are not elaborate: use analogies, give constructive feedback, ask questions that stimulate thinking, set clear expectations. Most managers already know these behaviors intellectually. The gap is the ongoing conversation—not the annual review, not the program launch, but the consistent feedback loop that makes engagement a continuous practice rather than a periodic event.
- Job crafting as the missing link: why coaching without crafting fails to reliably produce engagement
- A research-backed definition of job engagement: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components of individual role performance
- The business case for engagement: higher productivity, lower turnover, less illness, better safety records
- Simple managerial coaching behaviors that are easy to replicate—if managers know what they are and are sponsored to do them
- How to start job crafting conversations: a one-question method that works in teams of any size
- Moving beyond annual appraisals to ongoing feedback loops as the engine of continuous engagement
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What you'll take away
- 1Job engagement encompasses cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components, leading to increased productivity, lower turnover intent, and better individual well-being.
- 2Managerial coaching should focus on simple, replicable actions such as using analogies, providing constructive feedback, asking questions to stimulate thought, and setting clear expectations.
- 3Job crafting is the 'missing link' between managerial coaching and job engagement, enabling employees to align their roles with personal preferences, motives, and passions.
- 4Overcoming hurdles to job crafting requires managers to be more flexible and encourage employees to understand it's about aligning focus, not constantly rewriting job descriptions.
- 5Effective engagement efforts are measured through ongoing, one-on-one conversations and feedback loops, rather than solely relying on annual appraisals or fancy programs.
What most organizations get wrong
- •Traditional job design, focused on manufacturing-era efficiency, needs to be 'thrown on its head' for the knowledge economy, embracing self-initiated job crafting.
- •Managerial coaching alone does not consistently lead to job engagement; job crafting is the crucial intermediary mechanism that makes coaching effective.
In Jennifer's words
“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.
The problems this episode addresses
- •Organizations face staffing shortages and difficulty attracting and retaining talent, particularly in skilled trades.
- •Traditional, 'assembly line' job design is ineffective and outdated for the modern knowledge economy and complex work.
- •Managers perceive job crafting as idealistic and struggle with its implementation due to pressure to meet objectives and lack of understanding.
- •Barriers exist for managerial coaching, including lack of time, confidence, trust, clear expectations, and self-efficacy among supervisors.
- •Many workplaces lack ongoing conversations and feedback loops, relying instead on infrequent, formal events like annual appraisals, hindering continuous development.
In this episode
Covering monthly expenses is the number one concern for employees in 2024
Built by People
Jennifer Duplessis is the chief of human resources at Collin College
Jennifer Duplessis
Jennifer's PhD is in human resource development and change
Jennifer's focus on engagement in her PhD
Jennifer, how do you define job engagement? That is a great question
How do you define Job Engagement?
Some research shows that managerial coaching can lead to job engagement
Six examples of managerial coaching in the skilled trades
Job crafting helps employees align their jobs with their own preferences and motives
Job Crafting and Employee Engagement
What do you see as some of the hurdles to implementing job crafting within organizations
Job-Crafting in the Workplace
Jennifer says HR leaders should encourage supervisors to have conversations about unconscious bias
Jennifer on the Human Resource Conversation
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
Full transcript
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