Want your high performers to stay longer? Here's how.

When Jane Decided Not to Quit - The need for preserving high-performers in an ever-changing market

It was a typical Tuesday, and Jane, a project manager had once again met her deadlines with ease. Rated as one of the five highest performing project managers in the ops team for the last five years, Jane found herself in surplus - a surplus of time, energy, and untapped potential. With spare time on her hands, her mind started weaving innovative ideas - the potential of which she knew could benefit the company significantly. But her role's rigid boundaries gave little room to explore these initiatives, turning her excitement into frustration.

The inability to pursue these ideas meant her growth felt stunted, feeding into her sense of dissatisfaction and leading her towards contemplating a career change. She wanted to work in an environment that thrived on her innovative spirit, encouraging her thirst for learning and growth.

Just when she was about to start her job hunting, a piece of internal news made her pause. The internal news is the launch of 'Morph', a high performer retention program that will give high performers the opportunity to design their own jobs, initially in a 12 months secondment format with the potential of a permanent role.

Formal job crafting - A radical idea to keep your top performers

What if the key to retaining a company’s top talent lies in an unconventional shift of power – one that hands over the reins of job definition to the high performer themselves?

After hearing about Morph, Jane pondered on this new program. Suddenly, creating a role that nourished her innovative spirit seemed not only possible but also within reach. Exercising greater autonomy over her job might be the catalyst needed to break the confines of her current role and unleash her innovation on projects she always wanted to tackle.

The essence of the conversation on high performers' retention often revolves around motivation. When high performers like Jane start contemplating the options to leave for extrinsic rewards such as higher pay or more benefits, they are likely already disengaged. It's a sign that the drive to excel, the intrinsic motivation fuelling their exceptional performance, has started to wane (Kiersch & Peters, 2017).

Formal employee-led job crafting offers solutions. It cultivates the ground for intrinsic motivation to thrive, sustaining engagement and congruence with the role, the team, and the organisation. The prospect of job crafting sparked hope in Jane. She could see a way forward that retained her within the business, allowing her to bring her innovative ideas to fruition without having to compromise her commitment to learning and personal growth.

In the next section, we will show you what a formal job crafting program can look like in your company and its potential to drive a sustainable shift in employee retention.

Employee-led job crafting - How does it work?

The idea - a formal employee-led job crafting program like 'Morph' - aims to revolutionise the talent retention strategies for enabling functions, such as Finance, HR, Operations, and Legal, by turning traditional job structures on their heads. This starts with giving high performers within these functions the ability to draft their own job descriptions. Firstly, the high performer needs qualify through achieving two or more years of high performer rating. Once qualified, the candidate will submitting an Expression of Interest (EOI) form, where they would include a business case detailing the initiatives they aim to accomplish over a year, how these plans align with both company and functional objectives, the resources required, and their predicted Return on Investment (ROI).

The business case then goes to an executive committee made up of cross-functional senior leadership for rigorous evaluation. Top-ranked proposals would proceed to create distinct secondment positions for 12 months. These new positions would carry a 70-30 split, dedicating 70% of the time towards the proposed business case, and 30% towards vital company tasks that align with the substantive role. The crafted positions would coexist with the original one, ensuring a seamless back-and-forth transition.

Throughout the year-long secondment, quarterly 'Dragons Den / Shark Tank' style check-ins with the executive committee would occur to monitor and affirm project progress and ROI status. Importantly, adhering to 'fail fast, learn fast' Agile ethos, projects can be discontinued at any stage within the year if the committee deems it necessary, ensuring efficient resource utilisation.

At the conclusion of the 12 months, the success of the crafted position lies in its ability to meet the ROI target. If successful, it could potentially evolve into a full-time, permanent role, funded by one or more members of the executive committee who believe in the project's value.

However, if the ROI objectives are not achieved, the project would be discontinued, reminiscent of the Amazon Fire phone's fate, acknowledging that not all innovations can successfully change the game. (Farr, 2020)

Regardless of the outcome, such failures are not a loss, merely stepping stones towards fostering a culture that champions innovation, reinforces resilience and ultimately, keeps high performers like Jane passionate, engaged, and fiercely loyal to their companies.

Companies like Google, 3M, Patagonia and Facebook have all rolled out programs incorporating the concepts of job crafting. For example, in 3M, technical staff members are encouraged to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects - a policy that has sparked innovations leading to successful new products.

Devil is in the details - Implementation limitations

Implementation of programs like this demands careful evaluation and consideration of its potential and limitations, while the above outlined process may work for enabling functions in corporate firms, the below are some limitations to consider:

• Limited Scope: The above outlined processes may currently be best suited to enabling functions in corporate firms. Careful consideration would be required for effective roll-out in customer delivery environments.
• Human centred research required: The program, as it stands, is a general model. To make it effective, user-centric research is imperative to tailor the program to meet user needs and fit the specific organizational context.
• Scales of operation: The program has the potential to deliver significant impact in medium to large organizations. The impact in smaller operations, however, might be constrained due to limited resources and role variability.
• Collaboration prerequisite: An existing culture of transparency and collaboration is a prerequisite for the program to work.
• Cultural context: While this model may function better in international or more technology oriented organisations, the geo-cultural context needs to be considered. The program may need adjustment or may not be viable for some cultures.

It's also worth to call out that informal employee-led job crafting already exists in many workplaces. Just observe a high-performing colleague who switches roles according to emergent needs.

Transitioning from this informal structure to a formal job crafting program ensures the formal recognition of the scheme, providing standardised quality and equal opportunities to all high performers who aspire to shape their roles. This blend of structure and autonomy could bring innovation, satisfaction, loyalty and skill enhancement.

Can this be the first step towards the future of work powered by self-organising teams?

The formal job crafting programs not only redefines roles for high performers, but it also sets the stage for self-organising, cross-functional enabling function teams.

As individuals reshape their roles, they pave the way for more adaptable, collaborative work dynamics. The expertise they develop during the job crafting process could be shared across teams, enhancing overall adaptability and resilience.

The boundaries between departments become fluid as roles involve increased cross-departmental cooperation, laying the groundwork for self-organizing teams. Job crafting could also initiate the formation of cross-functional teams, boosting operational agility, fostering innovative thinking, and improving problem-solving capabilities.

In essence, job crafting can serve as a catalyst and has the potential of triggering a chain of transformations leading to an increasingly agile and cooperative work environment.

So, what do you think? Will you appreciate the opportunity to craft a job? Join the discussion using #formaljobcrafting

Reference

While the ideas in this article are original, this article is written with the help of OpenAI GenAI solution.

Farr, C. (2020, May 22). Jeff Bezos: What you can learn from Amazon's biggest failure. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/jeff-bezos-why-you-cant-feel-bad-about-failure.html

3M United Kingdom. (n.d.). 15% Culture. Retrieved from https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/careers/culture/15-percent-culture/

Wrzesniewski, Amy., & Dutton, Jane. E. (2020, March 05). What Job Crafting Looks Like. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2020/03/what-job-crafting-looks-like

Kucera, D., & Womack, B. (2009, December 21). Google Workers Wonder About '20% Time' in Tight Economy. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/google-20-percent-rule-shows-exactly-how-much-time-you-should-spend-learning-new-skills.html

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Patagonia's Balancing Act: Chasing mass-market appeal while doing no harm. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/patagonias-balancing-act-chasing-mass-market-appeal-while-doing-no-harm-1471426200

Himler, P. (2011, December 20). Facebook's Hackathon Culture. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhimler/2011/12/20/facebooks-hackathon-culture/

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67.

Kiersch, E., & Peters, J. S. (2017). The Underestimated Importance of Intrinsic Motivation. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 10(1), 91-94.