Have you ever felt burnt out, or wanted to make a change, yet choose not to leave your current position? Have you considered job crafting?
What is job crafting and why does it matter?
According to the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, job crafting, or for our purposes, hygiene crafting, "captures the active changes employees make to their job designs in ways that can bring numerous positive outcomes, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving."
I realize that dental hygienists usually have written clinical job descriptions, or a collection of tasks based on what we can legally do within our licensing jurisdictions. But hygiene crafting is a way of perceiving our daily roles differently that encourages opportunities within our roles.
What are the benefits of hygiene crafting?
Research findings from job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton) state that job crafters:
• Change the meaning of their work and identity
• Align with personal expectations, desire control over their job, and have a positive self-image
• Fulfill valued identities and have passion for the profession
• Regain achievement, enjoyment, and meaning
• Have increased competence, personal growth, and the ability to cope with future adversity
Hygiene crafters can carry out at least three different forms of job crafting
• Task Crafting: Hygiene crafters can change the boundaries of their jobs by taking on more or fewer tasks, expanding or diminishing the scope of their responsibilities, or altering the way they perform them.
a) Learn a new procedure or technology, or learn how to use the computer for clinical notes to decrease chart writing time
• Relational Crafting: Hygiene crafters can change their relationships at work by altering the nature of their interactions with other people.
a) You can reframe the social purpose of your services and realize the privilege you have to positively impact the health and lives of people every day.
b) You can schedule all the PIA patients in the other hygienist's schedule (kidding, just making sure you're paying attention).
• Cognitive Crafting: Hygiene crafters can change the way they think about their jobs by altering how they perceive responsibilities, or viewing the tasks involved in their job as a collective whole instead of a set of separate duties.
a) Rather than thinking that you only remove tarter and stain, you can view your work as supporting overall health.
b) By performing detailed assessments, perhaps you will save someone's life.
c) View sterilizing instruments or breaking down and setting up a treatment room as a means to help your patients and teammates stay healthy.
Job crafting exercise from the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship
• Write from one to four outcomes that you would like to obtain through work.
a) Examples include meaningful relationships and saving lives
• Write from one to four of your best strengths.
a) Examples are paperless clinical notes, phone skills, and knowledge in the field
• Write from one to four topics that you are deeply interested in at work.
a) These include educating others, learning new technologies, and learning about restorative dentistry
• Write all the duties and tasks you perform. Feel free to group them into categories. This list can be quite long.
a) These include paperwork or scheduling, treating patients in perio services, preventive, sterilization, and recare systems
• Structure the task that helps you achieve the motive, enables you to use your strengths, and provides you with opportunities to fulfill a passion.
• Summary
a) Which areas most excite you?
b) Name three things you can do during the next workday to help you reframe your responsibilities.
This abridged and condensed exercise may help you identify opportunities to redesign your hygiene responsibilities, or at least look at them in a new way. Job crafting is a way to regain insight and energize the daily perceptions of the services we provide for our patients, teammates, and employers. Even the most detailed job descriptions leave room for more meaning to our services and designing our own days.
Kristine A. Hodsdon, RDH, BS
Director, eVillage
www.rightbraindental.com
Director's Note: I'll be speaking at the Oregon Dental Association meeting http://www.oregondental.org/i4a/pages/Index.cfm?pageID=3600 and the California Dental Association meeting http://www.cda.org. If you attend, please say hello.
