For this series of posts, Terri is thrilled to be joined by Brett Li of Tonkean. Brett and Terri had a great discussion on “human-in-the-loop” workflows and we’ve taken three different angles on looking at how this works in the real world. The first was about top-down and bottom-up approaches to adding automation to our work. In the second, we focused on the value of the operations role (or chauffeur) in adding automation. The third (this post) takes a start on how individuals can add automation to their work. It’s a long post, but we hope you appreciate that we wanted to keep the justification, how-to, and an example, all in one place.

We also hope you’ll come back soon for even more on the individual and team approaches.

For all of these posts, we’ve explicitly considered how talent, technology, and technique come together to help us reach our targets given the times we’re working in. That is, we take a 5T Thinking™ approach. 

Setting the Stage for People-First Work Crafting

Research highlights the value of fitting/crafting work to individuals’ strengths, skills, and working preferences. The value of work and job crafting gained visibility with a 2001 article by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton. Their article set the stage for two decades of follow-up research, yet not as much organizational action as we would hope. 

Terri’s assessment is that we need better branding for much of what researchers know about work, but have difficulty implementing. In this case, she offers 5T Thinking as a starting point (or Thinking in 5T -- about to test which will make a stronger brand). That is, work crafting is great, but needs to be triggered and designed thoughtfully -- much as you need to acquire a hose and access to water, turn on the water, point the hose in the right direction, and know when to stop if you want to keep your garden green. We all need to focus on the target of our work, the times or context that we’re working in, and then manage our talent, technology, and techniques to reach that target.

From a technology perspective, no-code and low-code workflow and automation solutions are also putting more power in the hands of business users to design their work. At Tonkean, Brett has worked with many operations teams newly empowered by these solutions to build custom workflows for their own specific needs without needing to rely on developers. They are also able to take a people-first approach to designing their processes, whereby instead of focusing process design primarily on business needs then thinking about the impact to people later on, teams can now create processes that allow people to focus on what they do best.  

The benefits are clear (in both gardening and work crafting). When people craft their individual work, they have higher performance. Not surprisingly though, crafting your work needs education and organizational support to be effective. Here are some steps to get you started.

A How-To for Work Crafting

Here, we highlight the steps to implementing work crafting in a people-first approach. We build from the foundational work and job crafting research of others (Example 1,  Example 2), as well as our own research and experience. We would love it if you would add other examples in the comments below.

Knowledge is Power

Part of being human is that our brains take short-cuts that don’t always maximize our results; we satisfice and make use of heuristics rather than seeing everything as an opportunity for improvement. Workshops and other forms of learning are one way to trigger ourselves and others to take a step back and see if work could be done in a better way. (Reading this post counts!) Think about having a brown-bag lunch where you raise the issue of work crafting with your colleagues. Share the 5T Thinking approach and discuss whether work would be better (more interesting, engaging, fulfilling, profitable, etc.) if your talent, technology, or techniques were shifted in some way.

Putting a Stake in the Ground

Another step is to outline your work as it is today. Consider using a spreadsheet where you note your targets and the tasks you have to hit those goals. Then break down the work across your talent, technology, and techniques. (You might also want to take a look at the book, Reinventing Jobs or this article). Think about what you’ve put into the spreadsheet and how much of your expertise is unique to the work, how much you enjoy (or dislike) the work, and how many times you’ve thought of different ways of going after your targets in different ways. If you are a leader instigating this process with your team -- but sure that they understand that change is allowed (and if there are boundaries, what those are).

Personal Crafting Plan

Either on your own or in a second workshop/brownbag, create a personal crafting plan. You may want to sort the aspects of the work in your spreadsheet by their opportunities. Take on one easy shift where you have clear control and one that may take a while (or other people’s engagement). Like any good goal-setting opportunity, follow the SMART model: Specific, Measurable, Accepted (that one is easy here as you are creating the goal, so why wouldn’t you accept it, i.e., be committed to it?), Realistic, and Time-based. 

Go a step further and outline the first five steps toward achieving your goal. Start at the very beginning, “open up my laptop….” Be sure that you’ve considered all the of the 5Ts as you thought through your options. Keep in mind that you can never change just one thing, nor can you change everything all at once.

One Step At a Time

This isn’t a quick fix, but rather a new way of working. Given you’ve set your goals and even your first steps, make those steps official in terms of your regular work process. For many of us, this means adding them to your calendar. 

Now add your first “check-in” to your calendar. This can be a self-check-in, or better yet, make a commitment with a colleague about when you will check-in with each other about progress and hurdles.

After Action Reviews

After each check-in, or other significant moments in the process, do an After Action Review (AAR - also known as retrospective, or, my least favorite, post-mortem). Here’s an example related to a slightly different topic. The key questions:

1. What did you set out to do?

2. What happened?

   • As expected

   • Better than expected

   • Worse than expected

   • What did you get away with this time, but maybe won’t be so lucky in the future?

3. Why did those things happen?

4. What are you going to do next time?

Using Automation to Tailor Our Work

In addition to creating a work crafting plan, you can also use automation to remove mundane tasks like manual data entry, routing tasks, and chasing people for updates. Unfortunately, enterprise applications today have really neglected the user experience, instead of relying on people to fill in many of the gaps that exist between packaged applications and the unique needs of each organization, team, or individual (learn more about this “last mile” problem).

No-code automation solutions have started to change this by putting more power in the hands of the business to connect systems, coordinate people, and automate custom processes. To maximize the impact of these automation solutions, you can take the outcome of your work crafting plan and target areas in your or your team’s work that are low value, time-consuming, or repetitive. Work to implement automation in such a way that still satisfies business needs while freeing you up to focus on more meaningful tasks.

Customer Support Example

There are many processes across organizations that could benefit from a people-first redesign. To help crystallize this new way of thinking, Brett provides an example from his own experiences at Tonkean. 

One of the most resource-intensive areas of any company is customer support. Organizations frequently need to handle high volumes of incoming requests from a variety of sources (like chat, email, or forms) and with a range of topics. To properly handle and document each of these requests, customer support agents frequently need to perform a series of manual tasks. Everything from creating support tickets to updating conversation details to coordinating with the right internal resources for things that require escalation. All of these manual tasks take away from what ultimately customer support agents are meant to do, serving customers.

The reason these manual tasks exist is because business systems were designed primarily to satisfy a core business need – like providing customer chat or providing a single place to manage customer support tickets. However, each business process actually spans multiple different needs and multiple different teams. Thus, individuals, like customer support agents, end up manually traversing multiple systems and teams in order to get work done.

A people-first redesign of this customer support process would allow agents to stay in the single place they should be spending the most time, the place where they’re serving the customer. The rest of the internal processes can then be fully automated to connect the tools, coordinate the right teams, and document each conversation without requiring manual steps from the agent. This allows agents to focus on the thing that matters most, providing a great customer experience.

Take Away

Today you have more power than ever to craft your work such that it accentuates your unique skills and maximizes meaning. Start with education - your own and others. We all need to know:

1. Change is possible: Automation and work crafting are possible and supported.

2. Where to find the resources to take action: What process mapping or automation tools are available.

3. How to find the right expert and team support. Signal to the operations team, or others, if you could use some assistance to deliver impactful improvements to your work experience.

Related to this last, Terri is looking to collaborate with companies curious about how to support automation from the bottom up -- and she has research funding in support of the work. Please let her know via the comments below or an email if you’d like to know more.