How to get peak performance
Managers and supervisors, rejoice! Researchers at the Harvard Business Review did some vital research on the concept of job crafting and its application to employee performance.
The new data yields some great suggestions for how to improve the motivation and performance of your employees.
Job arts & crafts
Job crafting is the phenomenon where an employee examines their job’s duties and find ways to have these job duties fall more in line with their interests while being communicative about the changes to their manager.
Studies have shown this approach is an effective motivational tool in aiding the more proficient and useful work of employees across a sector.
Additionally, business psychologists have worked from concepts discovered in the job crafting research, to research the concept of citizenship crafting.
The idea of citizenship crafting acknowledges that any individual on a fixed salary is going to have to do things that go above and beyond their job duties. It may be attending specific networking mixers after hours, or perhaps leading an additional committee on top of expected duties.
The key point in citizenship crafting is to allow the employee to decide what types of citizenship duties they wish to perform, instead of assigning them.
If you apply the concept of job crafting to citizenship crafting appropriately, you can get excellent results.
When an employee feels valued and rewarded for what they do, it’s proven consistently in business research, that employee will perform better as compared to their counterparts.
Motivate like a champ
Theories and business research might be great, but how does a manager start to apply this to their team? Start small. Encourage an employee to do a similar process as job crafting, but on the things that go beyond their existing job duties.
If a person doesn’t enjoy evening networking mixers, perhaps they’d enjoy checking social media for the business on a weekend. That same person who enjoys the networking happy hour may prefer it as opposed to coming in an hour early to complete a large coding project.
Put adventure in their hands
Essentially by allowing your employee to have the freedom to choose how they work within the company’s needs, you’re allowing that employee to take ownership of the job they do. Employee buy-in is critical in maintaining not just good teamwork, but also generates buy-in to your leadership skills.
Allowing your employee to “choose their own business adventure” can be a great way to foster a positive company climate, which can only help your bottom line.
