Crafting jobs for the future – Johnny Depp is an optional extra

It’s funny how sometimes our brains take a moment to recognise and make sense of what we are seeing or reading. Last Friday, I saw a tweet that showed a poster entitled The Pie Rates of the Caribbean. My first thought was there were no cheese and onion or vegetable pies on offer. My second thought was to compare the prices and wonder why they were different. It probably took me at least 10-15 seconds before the penny dropped and my brain registered the clever and witty paronomasia (pun). And when it did, I laughed out loud.

Which was good, as there weren’t many laughs to be had last week. Even ignoring the ever increasingly depressing spectre of life after Brexit, there were other concerns that were just as sobering. For example, on Tuesday I attended a half-day workshop on how the NHS Trust, where I’m a Non-Executive Director, could take the NHS Long Term Plan forward. I’m sure most readers of this blog will have read the 136 pages, and probably like me, have a copy by their bedside for quick and easy reference. So, I don’t need to tell you that the long-term plan is committed to improving community and primary care services, mental health care and services for children and young people. New service models are to be the norm with much more integration, both of health and social care organisations coming together to provide more joined-up care closer to people’s homes.

It’s all good stuff, and ambitions that nobody, health professionals and patients alike would want to argue about, except there are more patients than there are health professionals to provide care for them. Conservatively, it’s thought that across England there are 100,000 vacancies, many of them nurses and doctors, and these shortages are chronic and not easily resolved in the short term. It would also take a great deal of money, and although there is some new money, realistically it wouldn’t buy many steak and kidney pies in the Caribbean.  The health think tank - the Health Foundation - published a comprehensive review of the situation – see here – the report’s title, ‘A Critical Moment’ says it all. If you are looking for something to read that will cheer you up, steer clear of this report.

However, having been asked to read this report and the NHS long-term plan prior to the workshop, I arrived feeling quite at a loss as to how we might tackle the plan’s ambitions, with very little new money and the constant difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff. After the scene was set, we were taken through some of the approaches already in use across the Trust to promote a healthy and engaged workforce. Whilst there had been some notable successes, it was also true that the recent ‘pulse’ staff surveys had shown a downward trend in terms of satisfaction and happiness in the workplace. Many colleagues were tired and there had been an increase in the number of older experienced colleagues taking their pensions early. 

When we moved on to new initiatives and approaches, there was one stand-out idea that captured my imagination. It was something called ‘job crafting’. I had not really heard much about this approach before, and it sounded both a simple idea and a difficult one to implement. The idea comes from the same stable as ‘flexible’ and ‘agile’ working. With senior management buy in and support, organisations can implement job crafting for little or no extra cost, something to be welcomed by all concerned. At its simplest, job crafting allows individuals to alter their jobs in ways that better suit their skills and interests.  Job crafting doesn’t mean that folk can change everything about their job or get rid of necessary tasks, but it is a powerful motivator for staff engagement. 

Job crafting is simply a brilliant idea. For the individual, it can mean stronger connections with others in the organisation (and beyond), improved well-being, a reduction in stress and greater happiness (and happy workers are on average 12% more productive than unhappy workers).  Equally, employers benefit from high levels of staff engagement, and emotional commitment from the workforce, employees who are more productive and keener to seek out opportunities to grow personally and professionally. 

There is a very famous example of job crafting in the US, which involves the empowerment (I so dislike that word, but that is a subject for a different blog) of hospital cleaners. Starting off as a way of reaching out to women living with breast cancer, it became a national phenomenon in changing the relationships people have in the work place – see here. For the cleaners themselves, the validation of their ability to speak with and support patients moved them from seeing themselves as cleaners, to being part of the hospital’s team of healers. In this case pink gloves were involved, and readers of this blog might be just as familiar with the pink socks approach, see here. Keen-eyed readers will notice the name Eric Topol mentioned, he used his formidable Twitter following to promote the ideas behind the pink socks’ movement (he is also the author behind the recently published Topol report looking at the need to prepare NHS staff for a digital future) – it’s a small world, albeit there might be no cheese and onion pies in the Caribbean.