The Future of Work – A creative agency perspective: Job Crafting


something like three minutes.

Welcome to part two in a three-part blog series on the Future of Work in a creative agency. In this post, we share our views as a leading regional creative agency on the Future of Work trifecta: Talent, Job Crafting and Embracing Digital.

In this second blog of the series, we discuss how businesses can re-design tasks and employees can craft jobs by shaping their work to be more engaging and meaningful. 

As creative visionaries in our space, we hope you’ll find these points useful for your own approaches to the workplace.

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So, what is Job Crafting and why is it important?

In 2020 our ways of working were dramatically disrupted almost overnight. Lockdowns began, home working and balancing of multiple responsibilities became a fast reality. This disruption has created an opportunity to rethink how we all do business now and into the future.

PWC’s Future of Work Report claims this disruption as the perfect opportunity to craft jobs, that are adaptable to change, balance wellbeing and productivity, drive innovation and make our future better.  

Job crafting is about redesigning what we do at work, essentially changing tasks, relationships, and perceptions of our jobs, to craft a job that we love. 

Job Design on the other hand is a supportive approach from businesses to design jobs that can be flexible to individual’s needs. (AIHR)

At Coast we encourage all employees to make their roles their own, to grow their skills and play to their strengths, whilst focusing on job satisfaction and happiness.

The 5 Must Haves for Crafting the perfect Job

We found this super-easy SMART tool to be the most helpful in helping us craft our best jobs. 

This SMART Work Design model, developed by the Centre for Transformative Work Design follows 5 simple focusses to ensure your job is Stimulating, enables Mastery and Agency, is Relational and Tolerable.

  1. Stimulating – your job provides a variety of interesting and meaningful tasks.
  2. Mastery –  you are empowered to master your skills and fully understand your role and how it fits into the bigger picture. 
  3. Agency – you have a sense of autonomy in your role and control over when and how you do your tasks. 
  4. Relational – Your job provides a sense of connection and support at work. You feel an important part of the team.
  5. Tolerable – the demands of your role are not overwhelming. Your work hours and performance expectations are reasonable, and you are not micromanaged.

The Future of Work: Engaging and Meaningful Tasks

The result, we all have the ability to do our best work in the way we do it best. We are experts in our fields, autonomous in our roles, we collaborate as part of a strong cohesive team to deliver the best results for our clients.

We celebrate our wins together as important valued members of the close-knit Coast team. We ebb and flow with the projects we work on, sharing responsibilities when we need to ensure we are never overwhelmed and take continually find joy by doing engaging and meaningful work.

We seek to work with brands with a sense of purpose and look for opportunities to deliver a change for good.

As an agency by focusing on the future of work, the people we want to work with and results we want to deliver we find the detail of the tasks and where and when these happen seamlessly fall into place as we collaboratively focus on the future of Coast together as a team.

In summary

If there is one key takeaway from this blog, it’s this. Empower your employees to craft their jobs to fit their individual needs alongside the needs of the business. You’ll have a more engaged and motivated employee. Empowered Employees = Thriving Employees – Thriving Business. 

In our next blog, we will focus on embracing digital technology and what this means for the workplace. You may have heard the phrases – hybrid; flexible or remote working – or in fact be doing some of these yourselves already. Look out for our next blog to learn about how we have approached this at Coast and tips for forward thinking brands to adapt these themselves.

If you missed Part One – Talent be sure to check it out. Do you have an Employee Value Proposition to attract new talent? Read our Future of Work Part One: Talent blog today.