A few weeks ago I wrote about career skeptics and the changing way we are interacting with our jobs during the pandemic. Today I want to talk about job crafting and how it can be used to improve your working conditions and perhaps move your job in the right direction and help your career.

The term conjures up glue guns and glitter, which isn’t a bad metaphor for what is really behind the term. In a 2007 paper written by academics, the authors talk about how employees should redesign their jobs to improve work satisfaction and engagement. If HGTV or DIY had shows about job crafting, they would show the before and after shots of tedium transformed into an exciting, vibrant workplace. Or something like that. (But please, no shiplap. I can’t stand shiplap.)

There are three components of job crafting: tasks, cognition and people relationships. Let’s take them in turn. The task crafting is perhaps the easiest to get your head around: you want to change the type and scope of the particular tasks of your job to make the job more interesting, more useful or other reasons. This often involves changing your job responsibilities. My wife says you should be doing the job that you want to have when you get a promotion. A companion piece is changing your cognition or mindset of these tasks, such as how you interpret your job responsibilities or the specific work that you have been hired to do.

Here is an example: if you take orders from your customers, your job could be defined as just pure input, and making sure the orders are entered correctly. But if you alter your mindset a bit, you could be providing your customers with the best possible experience and making sure that they are ordering what they need and have the right expectations. It is a subtle shift, but an important one.

Finally, crafting your relationships is a lot harder: are you aiming to get more mentorship from a particular person in your organization? Or find a particular collaborator? Or are you looking to build particular connections to an important customer or partner? The authors of the 2007 paper wrote a 2020 piece for Harvard’s Business Review that provides some case studies to illustrate these three points.

These three elements interact with each other, so the lines are somewhat blurry among them. But what is important is that crafting your job is only possible when you have cooperation from your manager. If your boss is a bad one and can’t delegate responsibility and authority (just to pick something at random that frequently happened to me), they aren’t going to be able to help and will use their job glue gun to gum up the works, rather than build something wonderful.

We all know that the pandemic has had a major impact on employment patterns: not just more people working from home, but fewer people returning to their pre-Covid jobs. This has revealed what journalist Charlie Warzel calls career skeptics. His original piece can be found here, where he says folks don’t reject how they navigate their careers, but a complete rejection of having a career. That post received a sharply divided reaction from his readers: one group agreed with his point of view, but another felt the skeptics were a bunch of entitled complainers with a poor work ethic.

I have had essentially four careers. The first began when I was still in college and with a full-time job in my senior year as a professional photographer for the City of Albany, NY. It only lasted a year and only paid $5000 but it was the prototypical “foot in the door” in a very competitive profession. How competitive? After the job ended, I came to New York City with my portfolio in hand to try to get a job with a photographer. It was depressing: most of the people I tried to talk to wouldn’t even give me the time of day. Some just laughed at me: “What New York City (with emphasis on the last word) experience do you have?”

One of the photographers who actually let me in his door was W. Eugene Smith, the celebrated magazine photojournalist who was a few years away from his death. When I saw him he was in poor health, after being poisoned by covering the Minamata Mercury pollution story. He was very kind, although also very critical about my work. But just being able to spend a few moments with him made me realize that I had a long way to go, and that photography wasn’t in the cards in terms of my own career.

That “decisive moment” (to quote from another photographer) with Smith is what I guess many people are going through right now with their own career decisions. Maybe they don’t have a famous person giving them advice. Maybe they are seeing what their contemporaries are doing and want to find something else. My point is that you don’t necessarily have to stop at one career, if you understand your motivations and why you aren’t happy with your current job.

My other three careers were more successful: as a policy analyst in Washington DC and then various roles in IT and finally as you probably know me as a tech journalist. Early into that second career – in fact, at the end of my first job and about to take a second job offer – I remember a conversation with my dad, who ended up working for the same employer for decades as an accountant. I had just finished two years with the first firm, and he cautioned me that the change in jobs was too quick and wouldn’t look good for any future employer. It seems so quaint now, where a two-year tenure is almost too long in some quarters. My point here is that times change, and how our careers evolve need to be considered in the context of the times.

Warzel posits that our culture should perhaps aspire to better relations between employers and employees: the old saw that a company owes you nothing more than a paycheck and a safe working environment aren’t enough in today’s world where career development, intellectual stimulation, and doing something good for the world should motivate people to come to work, or at least come to their laptops in their spare bedrooms.

But that brings up another issue that is bugging me, and that is how we monitor our newly remote work forces. Employers are using increasingly intrusive monitoring software to track what their remote workers are doing, according to this piece in the Washington Post. This software category has exploded: It used to be just time and keystroke tracking, but now these tools can take screen captures, record video and ambient audio as well as track browser URLs and track geolocation. These tools include products such as Hubstaff, DeskTime, VeriClock and ActivTrack, and their use is growing quickly. PC Magazine even has a review of the category here. They say that “solutions that have been traditionally focused on tracking employee activity, logging suspicious behavior, and sniffing out possible insider threats are now pivoting to not only track productivity, but also monitor health and wellness, and even improve engagement.”

That frankly scares me. If we want to develop better employee/employer engagement, we have to start out trusting each other. Using more heavy-handed monitoring is a step backwards and could be yet another reason why employees aren’t returning to their pre-pandemic jobs — even if they don’t have to suffer long commutes to get to the office.

Back in the late 1980s, when I was a manager at PC Week, I supervised about a dozen people. Almost all of them were working remotely from our main office in downtown Boston. It was easy enough to measure their productivity: if the writer wrote his or her assigned stories, that was good enough for me. One of them was Bob who started out with a bang and then eventually tapered off to writing very few stories, and I had to fire him (the first person that I ever fired, by the way). Now, maybe your own productivity can’t be so quickly quantified, but I tried to give Bob the benefit of the doubt but after a month of no output and numerous requests to change his behavior I didn’t have much choice. That firing was a decisive moment for Bob, who went on for a second career as a pastor and talk show radio host.

Could it be that we have witnessed the last of the Zuck World Apology Tours? Technically, his last one was in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which I wrote about on my blog here). But the Facebook executive – and his minions – have been apologizing frequently since then. Kara Swisher writes in her last week’s NY Times’ column, “What’s most revealing is the persistence of the tired old, so-so-sorry, we’ll-do-better excuses that Facebook’s executives trot out when the company is called out for its destructive products.” This was in the context of some recent bad news about Instagram, but still.

In Swisher’s column, she points out that Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO, told her back in 2018 that “Facebook is the new cigarettes. It’s addictive. It’s not good for you.” Now this remark seems eerily prescient. Yesterday, the Times ran a story about how Facebook will be pushing more positive stories about itself in its news feed in attempts to burnish its image. Called Project Amplify, it is doing what it does best: tweak its algorithm to present its own warped world view. This comes after a series of other failures to use various large-scale manual efforts to monitor and control how it spreads information.

One of the tweaks is to break up the data analytics team behind its CrowdTangle offering. This used to be the domain of data nerds and a few selected social media managers at major news outlets and retail brands. For example, here is a promotional piece that NBC News did on how they used the tool to identify individuals who post particularly poignant pieces on their news feeds. The tool was acquired back at the end of 2016 and its small development team was kept more or less intact until earlier this year. The developers explain it makes engagement on public content from various pages and groups within Facebook, Instagram account posts and other content more discoverable for researchers.

“CrowdTangle is a good resource for the right question such as large-scale text and image analysis but it is limited in its focus on public pages, which isn’t appropriate for my research,” says Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an Assistant Professor at UCLA.

But the top Facebook brass didn’t like the results of its analysis, as Kevin Roose explained (in another Times piece entitled, “Inside Facebook’s data wars”) how he constructed his “Top 10” Twitter list of most engaging Facebook posters using CrowdTangle. He still produces these lists daily, and they vary widely across various familiar and unfamiliar names. Roose pointed out how his Top 10 lists were frequently filled with conservative opinion leaders such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino and Sean Hannity.

Facebook has tried to be transparent and continues to fail. It has this idealistic vision of being the online town square where ideas can flow freely. That may be the case in one corner, but the folks who shout the loudest and buy the digital equivalent of ink by the barrel are only interested in their own world view and the spread of misinformation. Its leaders suffer from toxic positivity, where they think their company can do no wrong.

As newspapers have become endangered species, we now have a new target, the addictive and unhealthy social media. As one gruesome warning label in Australia claimed about smoking, using social media can cause blindness and irreversible eye damage. Sad to say, Benioff was spot-on years ago.