To work from home or to work from the office? That is the question of the moment. Open any tech or business publication, and you’ll be jerked around by the work-from-home narrative:
They will! They won’t! They’re resigning! They want to come back to work! They’re demanding workers come back! They’re selling their houses. They’re selling the office building! They’re moving to a coworking community in Omaha!
This conversation is a distraction. We’re squabbling about something that doesn’t apply to all of us and can’t be settled in any satisfying way.
Job fit is more expansive than location.
When the organizers of Ann Arbor SPARK’s A2 Tech 360 invited me to speak on a topic relevant to the future of tech work, I wanted to talk about an idea I see as making a bigger impact on our work lives than the location of our work.
In the video below, I explore the profound tool of Job Crafting. Created by University of Michigan researchers, Job Crafting can help workers piece back together jobs that work for them after our professional lives were shaken and disordered since March 2020. Many of us might have even become numb to questioning whether our jobs make sense for us in the first place.
For both of these types of workers, Job Crafting is a process that helps you consider your unique qualities and build a career that brings you closer to yourself—instead of further into professional alienation.
Savvy managers can also use Job Crafting to invite their reports into the design of their jobs for better results and retention in a competitive talent environment. In this video, I walk the audience through an example process of the Job Crafting activity and explain how it helps craft a role around the worker.
Working from home is only one of many Job Crafting design choices.
Covid has brought unprecedented stress to our work life. But it has also blown up some long-accepted and needless constraints on work. Part of that has to do with where we’re going to work.
But I don’t think that, at its heart, the work-from-home debate is really about where we work. It’s about us workers craving agency in a chaotic world. People working in jobs crafted around them will be better able to solve hard challenges. Job Crafting is a great first step to that end.
If you want to try it for yourself or your team, go to jobcrafting.com and find your fit.