Job and work design are critical factors in the development and maintenance of a committed high-quality workforce. The pandemic has been the catalyst or global social experiment for people to work at home en masse encouraging employers and employees to think about how and why their jobs are being done, to develop new work and job design policies and practices. However, as well as significant benefits, there are potential pitfalls in moving 'on-line' that needs to be considered as many see this as a permanent feature of the new workplace post pandemic. This chapter explores these issues in the context of job crafting.
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Advances in (smart) information communication technologies (ICT) symbiotically interacting with globalisation and neo-liberalism have had an increasingly profound effect on forms, meanings and importance of work in the 21st century. These changes have not (directly at least) impacted some work at all, but for an increasing number of people, particularly in the most developed market economies, they are increasing their ability to craft jobs and work more flexibly in terms of time, place and space (Holland & Brewster, 2020). Harvey (2005), channelling Schumpeter (1942), identifies these changes as substantial, using the term ‘creative destruction’ to describe the way technology (in this we also include artificial intelligence) is fundamentally changing traditional concepts of work as equal to employment and re-focusing on wider interpretations of work and how work is done. Harvey argues these changes have created an intensive burst of ‘time-space compression’ in the organization of work. Reinforcing this point, Maitland and Thomson (2011, 32) note:
We are on the cusp of the next big transformation in the model of work….. technology allows us to work very differently than we did …. All this points to a fresh approach to work. We are poised for a revolution in work practices.
Writing in 2020, we would argue that the impact of the global coronavirus (or COVID-19) pandemic that year became the defining point of this transformation, creating what is increasingly being called the ‘new normal’. In many situations this has led to making the ‘place’ of work incidental to the work itself and hugely expanding the phenomenon of ‘working from home’ or now in common language ’WFH’. We are also seeing not just the defined space of work (the workplace) but also the defined time during which people are ‘at’ work melting away. Indeed, countries like Finland had already moved, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, to pass laws allowing for more flexible location of work, giving employees the opportunity to negotiate a significant amount of their work time away from the office. Of course, we need a caveat: for many people their place of work has not changed – if you are constructing a building or caring for children or working in a hospital, then your work has to take place where the need is. For others, the time of work has not changed – if you are in retail or emergency services, then you have to be available when the needs arise. We also note that in many countries the technology is still behind where it is in the most advanced market economies (AMEs), limiting the opportunities ICT affords. However, for many in the developed economies, and for many kinds of workers, the place, space and time at which they can work have - through the catalyst of the pandemic - become much more flexible: people are working from home or the local café, they can work, to a much greater degree, at their own pace and around work-life issues. This kind of job redesign and flexibility is what we explore in this chapter.
Invoking one of the common terms used through the pandemic – ‘never waste a crisis’ - this (forced) social experiment conducted on millions of workers and managers moving en masse to the virtual workplace has created a new paradigm in how work can, and potentially will, be designed post the pandemic. However, the possibilities of this new normal are balanced by potential pitfalls. In this chapter we attempt to highlight these possibilities and pitfalls and outline a route-map for change.
Research continues to reinforce the fact that the foundation of good jobs and good work design remain fundamental to employee attraction, retention and motivation (Wang, Lui & Parker, 2020; Tims & Parker, 2020). As the dynamics of the ‘new normal’ challenge and push the boundaries of work organization, it is important to keep these concepts of quality work design central to our thinking. The technology underpinning the paradigm shift to the virtual workplace has the capacity to support and maintain fundamental changes in how work is and can be undertaken. Indeed, the terminology of ‘Zoom’ and ‘Teams’ describing the leading conferencing platforms used when working from home during the pandemic have entered the mainstream workplace language, as the terms ‘Google it’ and ‘texting’ did before them. As organizations embrace these new dynamics in work patterns and practices, new challenges emerge. We explore this emerging landscape of work in the context of quality job and work design.