Do you help your Scrum teams job craft?

One of the things I value most at work is autonomy. Not just autonomy in the way I approach work, but also in the way I perceive myself as a designer. I feel like there are as many interpretations of the designer role as there are people who work in design. The ability to shape my role to my personal definition is important to me, and I know that’s the case with a lot of other designers too.

But shaping your role isn’t just about gaining a sense of ownership — it leads to a lot of other benefits too. Known as job crafting, studies have shown that if you empower people to customise their jobs around their personal strengths and weaknesses, it can lead to improvements in employee engagement and job satisfaction and less burnout (e.g. Tims, Bakker, and Dirks, 2013).

So how do people job craft? According to Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) it primarily happens in these three ways:

1. The employee gets to select which tasks fall under their remit
2. The employee is able to choose the working relationships they build
3. The employee is able to cognitively reframe tasks in a way that gives them personal meaning.

What results is a better person-job fit. As an employee I can get more out of my job as it starts to fit more of my career, personal and, hopefully, financial needs. As a company, I get to better capitalise on the knowledge and skills the employee brings to the table which a more rigid job spec might not allow.

Job Crafting and Scrum

One of the great things about scrum is its capacity to support job crafting. When talking about roles and titles, The Scrum Guide™ has this to say:

Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members, regardless of the work being performed by the person;
Scrum recognizes no sub-teams in the Development Team, regardless of domains that need to be addressed like testing, architecture, operations, or business analysis; and,
Individual Development Team members may have specialized skills and areas of focus, but accountability belongs to the Development Team as a whole.

Scrum is a framework that is set-up to allow people to make the most of their experiences and abilities, and find personally meaningful work. It doesn’t matter if you’re employed as a developer, designer, QA person. If there’s a way in which you feel you can contribute towards the sprint goal, there’s probably an opportunity for you

The biggest challenge is facilitating it. Whilst naturally proactive people will search out opportunities to job craft those who aren’t won’t (Bakker, Tims, Derks, 2012).

At Potato that facilitation falls upon our product leads and coaches. Both have a responsibility towards team development and personal growth. Whereas our product leads can identify roadmap or backlog items which might give opportunities for people to work on the tasks they want; coaches can facilitate the building of relationships and help people discover the personal meaningfulness in their work. To do that effectively, both coach and product lead need to stay on the ball and know what the team wants and needs. 1-to-1s can be a good way to do that, as can sprint retros. If we know what team members want — we can help them to job craft.

At the beginning of my most recent project, the coach I was working with ran a Learning Cake exercise, something developed by Mattia Battiston over at Sky. The idea is that team members write down a few of their personal aspirations on a piece of paper. Once they’ve managed to achieve them, we have a team celebration (ideally cake based). One of the great things about this activity is that it makes it crystal clear what people want and what opportunities to look out for. For example, one of our front-end developers was really keen to get more involved in user testing. We do testing every sprint, so it was easy to find a way to help him achieve that. One of our designers was keen to get try his hand at coding in a production environment. Again, once the right story came up it was simple to get him involved. Once you know what people want to achieve, it’s normally not that difficult in finding an opportunity for them.

Job crafting, cakes, and beer makes for a tasty combination!

The message then? If you want happier, more satisfied teams — help them to job craft. Scrum is perfect for this sort of thing, and with a little facilitation you can really improve the wellbeing of your teams.

PS. If you want to job craft with me — we’re hiring!