Improve your own work
Use job crafting to make small, meaningful changes that improve your work.
Improve your work using job crafting
Job crafting means making small changes to your work, so it works better for you.
You might change how you organise your day, ask for clearer feedback, use more of your strengths, build stronger working connections or find ways to make demands feel more manageable.
Job crafting is not about coping with unsafe or unreasonable work. It should fit within your role, your team’s needs and your organisation’s requirements.
Start by checking what is working well, choose one small change to try, then review what happened. You can use SMART work design to help choose where to start.
Start job crafting
- Check what's working well or what could be better
- Try one small change
- Review what happened
- Keep, adjust or stop the change
1. Check what’s working well or what could be better
Before choosing a change, take a few minutes to notice what is working well and what could be better.
You can use the job crafting self-evaluation tool to reflect on 5 important aspects of work: stimulating, mastery, agency, relational and tolerable demands. Your results can help you choose one focus area and one small change to try.
If you already know what you want to improve, you can move straight to trying a change.
Talk with your manager if the change affects others
Some changes can be made on your own. Others may affect priorities, deadlines, customers or clients, team members or role responsibilities.
If the change affects others, talk it through with your manager before you start. You don’t need a perfect solution. It may be enough to explain:
- what you’ve noticed
- what you would like to improve
- one small change you’d like to test
- how you will review whether it worked.
Use this conversation guide to prepare:
2. Try one small change
Start with the SMART focus area you want to improve and choose a small change. It should feel realistic and safe to try and small enough to test without disrupting your role, your team or your workload. You might:
- ask for feedback on one part of a task
- block focus time for detailed work
- try a different way of organising your day
- use a strength or interest in a useful way
- connect with someone who benefits from your work.
Starting small helps you learn what works before making a bigger change.
Example: using a strength
Sam wants to increase stimulation and make better use of his skills. He enjoys organising information clearly. He offered to turn a team discussion into a one-page summary. The change was small, useful for the team and helped Sam feel more engaged.
Example: protecting focus time
Mia wants to make her work demands feel more tolerable. She was trying to do detailed work between meetings and messages. Mia blocked two short focus periods each week and let her team know when she would be less available. She completed detailed tasks more quickly with fewer interruptions.
3. Review what happened
Ask yourself:
- What felt better, easier or more useful?
- What did not work as expected?
- Did the change fit safely within my role and workload?
- Did it affect other people or priorities?
- Should I keep, adjust or stop the change?
4. Keep, adjust or stop the change
If the change helped, build it into your normal routine. If it did not help, adjust it or try a different small change.
If the issue involves unsafe, unreasonable or unmanageable work demands, raise it through the right workplace channels rather than relying on job crafting alone.
Changing habits can be hard. To help sustain your change, you may want to set a reminder to check back in a few days, weeks or months. You can use this job crafting check-in prompt, simply copy and paste it into your calendar.
Job crafting check-in
Take a few minutes to reflect:
- Is the change still happening and helping?
- How is SMART feeling in my work?
- Do I need to keep, adjust, stop, and/or try a different change?
- What could I job craft next?
Case studies
Every day, people are using SMART work design to improve their work. See how they’re doing it in these work design case studies.