Personalization at Work

How HR Can Use Job Crafting to Drive Performance, Engagement and Wellbeing

Rob Baker

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781789662948
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789662955
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione delle risorse umane
• Index: Business

SHORTLISTED: Business Book Awards 2021 - HR & Management Category

The potential benefits of personalization on a workforce are huge. We curate music and online streaming content to suit our own tastes and we place more value on lottery numbers we have chosen ourselves, rather than a random selection from a lucky dip. When job roles are also personalized, employees are more interested, engaged and motivated at work.

The responsibility for enabling this personalization lies with HR and people professionals and a key approach to doing this is via job crafting. Personalization at Work is a practical guide explaining what job crafting is, why it's important, what the benefits are and more broadly how a personalized approach can be brought to all aspects of HR including recruitment, learning and development, performance management, diversity and inclusion and reward.

Full of practical advice and case studies from companies who have already seen the benefits of a personalized approach including Virgin Money, Widerøe airlines, Logitech, Google and Connect Health, Personalization at Work is essential reading for all HR professionals wanting to improve staff engagement, retention, productivity and the overall people experience. With expert guidance on how to encourage job crafting and a personalized approach to work for employees through everything from job titles, role descriptions and benefits packages through to working patterns, flexibility and work environment, this is a book that HR and people professionals can't afford to be without.

Part One

Explore

01

Why personalization matters

Work is broken. If our work was an item of clothing, for most of us it would be a straitjacket. Or at best an ill-fitting suit. Modern working practices are failing us – constraining rather than amplifying our diverse skills, strengths, passions and interests. No wonder globally over 86 per cent1,2 of us aren’t fully engaged, excited and energized about our jobs.

As a society, and in business, people embrace opportunities for the personalization of products and services. We enjoy and value having our own individual style, beliefs and passions reflected in the things we do and how we do them. What if we encouraged people to customize their work the way a tailor would the final fit of a semi-tailored suit? What if we started to shape work around people rather than expecting people to constantly contort themselves around their jobs? What if we took a more personalized approach? What would an exceptional personalized people experience look and feel like? These are the questions that we will be exploring in this book.

So how can we bring a personal touch to our work? The answer lies in job crafting. Job crafting enables and encourages people to bring their diverse, whole and best selves to work each day in ways that foster engagement, job satisfaction, resilience and thriving. Job crafting is a research-informed and evidence-based approach to personalizing work and the research into this practice is compelling – it boosts innovation, nurtures health and wellbeing and amplifies meaning, purpose and productivity. This book focuses on what job crafting is, the positive impact it can have on individuals, teams and organizations, and how to practically encourage and embed a personalized people experience. But before diving into job crafting research, evidence and case studies, it’s useful to explore the concept of personalization itself, why it matters and why it is missing from most organizations. This will be the focus for the first two chapters of this book.

In this first chapter, we will consider what personalization means, how different industries and sectors are evolving to enable and encourage greater customization, and why the ability to customize and shape objects and experiences makes us feel good and perform well. By exploring examples of how personalization is being used to create exceptional customer experiences we’ll see what’s possible with technology and creativity. By contrast, these illustrations will start to demonstrate how starkly an employee-centred and, arguably, human-centred mindset, is missing from the people experience in most workplaces.

The personalization revolution – a (very) brief history

Personalization is the action of designing or producing something to meet someone’s individual requirements. Today, personalization permeates almost all aspects of our everyday lives, with the exception of most workplaces. We can now personalize our cars, our clothes and our holidays. This was not always the case. In the past, customization was the Rolls Royce or Savile Row of services, with the price tag to match. With new technology, production and information systems, costs are reducing and the benefits of personalization are more affordable and widely available. Reduction in costs combined with developments in digital technology has led to more enabled and interested consumers becoming engaged in customizing the products and services they buy.

‘Off the shelf’ is beginning to sound like an outdated and substandard term. As a society and in business, people enjoy and value having their own individual style, beliefs and passions reflected in what they do and how they do it. Consequently, consumers increasingly want products and services personalized and customized to meet and amplify their preferences, personalities and lifestyles.

Personalization is now all around us, but it is hard to pinpoint exactly when the concept moved from something that was a specialist luxury offering, to something more mainstream. One way to spot trends is to look at the use of a word or phrase in our modern language. Between 1950 and 2009, there was a 16-fold increase in the incidence of the terms ‘personalisation’ (the common British spelling) and ‘personalization’ (the Oxford English and American spelling) within the millions of books and articles that are scanned as part of the Google Books project.3 Whilst the available data currently stops in 2009, as we will explore further in this chapter, there is nothing to indicate that the use of these words would have slowed down. In fact, there is everything to suggest that their use would have exploded further as opportunities to personalize our goods, services and lives in general have become both more accessible and affordable.

One-size doesn’t fit all – insights from car manufacturing

In the past, car manufacturers and designers approached heterogeneity and diversity amongst their customers as a problem or business challenge to overcome. Over time this mindset has shifted and manufacturers are increasingly recognizing that responding to and tapping into individual preferences is a source of competitive advantage.

One of the most famous quotes made by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor company is: ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black’.4 Ford made this comment in relation to the Model T car in 1909. Despite lobbying from his sales and design team, Ford was adamant that his company should save costs and leverage efficiencies by only offering one type of chassis and one colour of car. And that colour was black. In his autobiography,5 Ford stated that his rationale was that 95 per cent of potential car purchasers were not interested in the colour of their car and that they should be focusing on these consumers rather than the 5 per cent – labelled by Ford as the ‘special customers’ – who were potentially interested in a more distinctive look. There is no denying that Ford’s approach was successful; when the final Model T ran off the production line on 25 May 1927, over 15 million cars had been produced.

Whilst it is difficult to challenge the success of Ford’s original thinking, it’s certainly fair to say that the one-size-fits-all approach is not shared by modern car manufacturers and does not remain within the Ford Motor Company today. Today, all car buyers appear to want to be part of the ‘special’ 5 per cent that Henry Ford referred to and want to be able to customize and choose the specifications of their vehicles. As John Cooper, Vice President Customer Service Division at Ford Asia Pacific, said: ‘Customers today view vehicles as an extension of their own personalities and are keen to customize their cars to stand out from the clutter.’6 Modern car consumers are now able to personalize their vehicles with specifications way beyond the colour and the engine.

People who want a wider range of purchasing and personalization options are no longer thought of as demanding. To encourage and enable people to choose the options for their cars, Ford, along with other manufacturers, now have vehicle personalization centres across the world. These showrooms are set up to create a customized car-buying and driving experience. As well as being able to see and drive test and show cars, some showrooms now offer people the opportunity to use immersive technology to configure their cars. Having put on a virtual reality (VR) headset, customers of Volkswagen, Audi and Toyota are now able to see, feel and hear what their final car will look like.7 Using augmented reality (AR) it’s now possible for customers to use their smartphone or tablet to project what their car will look like sitting on the driveway of their house.

From mass production to mass customization

In the same way that mass production and standardized production are key legacies of the first Industrial Revolution, mass customization and personalization can be indelibly linked to today’s technological revolution, which is fuelled by digital advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. From a production perspective, mass customization enables products to be manufactured at scale that can be individually customized and tailored to the specifications of the purchaser. The distinctive aspect of mass customization is that the customer is a critical and integral part of the design process and is in effect a co-designer of the final product. Whilst modern technology is now enabling mass customization at scale, it is not an entirely new idea. The first modern description of mass customization can be traced8 to the American futurist and writer Alvin Toffler and his 1971 book Future Shock,9 which described a new paradigm in manufacturing where personaliz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Titlepage
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the author
• Foreword (the practitioner perspective from A Dodman)
• Foreword (the academic perspective from J Dutton)
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART ONE Explore
• 01 Why personalization matters
• 02 Why personalization is missing from our work
• 03 An introduction to job crafting
• 04 The benefits of and evidence for job crafting
• PART TWO Experiment
• 05 Different forms of job crafting
• 06 Setting job crafting goals
• PART THREE Encourage
• 07 Exercises and activities to encourage job crafting
• 08 Supporting the HR agenda through job crafting
• PART FOUR Embed
• 09 A personalized people experience for now and the future
• Index
• Copyright