How can job crafting help?

International evidence suggests that job crafting can help. Job crafting happens when employees are upskilled and empowered to make proactive changes to their jobs, often in collaboration with their line managers. Job crafting is flexible and person-centred. It can involve changes to tasks, timing, location, activities, goals and relationships at work, amongst other things.

Flowing from the Job Demands-Resources approach, our approach to job crafting focuses on three key elements: optimising demands; seeking resources; and seeking challenge. Ultimately job crafting is about improving the person-job fit for workers so that they can be as productive, engaged, happy and healthy as possible. This helps the worker, their employer, and their colleagues.

For workers with disabilities and/or long-term health conditions specifically, many interventions focus on trying to fix people’s health and disability. In contrast, WISHES is rooted in the social model of disability. This highlights that whilst individuals may have health impairments it is social and organisational contexts that act to disable – or, if well crafted – to enable them.

What will WISHES add to existing job crafting evidence?

International evidence shows that when job crafting happens work engagement tends to increase and staff burnout tends to reduce. However, there is not enough research about how job crafting might benefit workers with health conditions and disabilities, the organisational factors that affect job crafting adoption and outcomes, and the effects on longer-term and employment-related outcomes. The existing evidence base is also rarely at a level of evaluation rigour and breadth that WISHES provides. Taken together, WISHES offers a major contribution to existing evidence around the potential of job crafting in supporting workforce health and productivity, especially as it relates to workers with disabilities and health conditions.

What will we do in our WISHES job crafting trial?

• We will co-produce a voluntary job crafting intervention for a diverse range of UK workers, including centrally workers with health conditions, disabilities and/or other significant workplace support needs (e.g. carers).

• We will partner with employers of all different sizes and sectors across the UK to deliver our job crafting trial with their workers and line mangers in a way that fits organisational priorities and needs. We deliver our job crafting trial to partner employers between Summer 2026 – Autumn 2027. Individuals who volunteer to take part will be randomised to one of two job crafting approaches – a short series of facilitated job crafting workshops or an information, advice & guidance leaflet. Our aim is to reach at least 600 trial participants across diverse UK employers.

• We will deliver a step-change in international evidence about how job crafting can help the employment and health experiences and outcomes of UK workers. We will measure the effect that job crafting has on a range of key outcomes for workers and employers – for example work engagement, person-job fit, health and wellbeing, productivity, sickness absence, job exit, and work hours. We will listen to people’s experiences to understand the individual and organisational factors that help/hinder job crafting use and outcomes.

Who can take part in the WISHES job crafting trial?

Employer inclusion criteria: organisations based in the UK of any sector and size can partner with us to support their workforce in our job crafting trial.

Individual inclusion criteria: Participation in the WISHES trial is open to all UK-resident workers in partner employers who would like to make their work more manageable, engaging and enjoyable through job crafting. Although all workers are eligible, WISHES may be of particular interest to those who self-identify as having any type of disability, long-term health condition and/or workplace support needs (e.g. caring responsibilities, faith practices, combining multiple jobs) and we have designed training to be inclusive and accessible for people in these groups.

How will be share findings and maximise benefits through the WISHES project?

• We will develop toolkit resources to enable employers and workers to understand and do job themselves in a structured, facilitated, evidence-based way.

• We will deliver a series of regional engagement hackathons and online seminars to share findings.

• We will work directly with employer organisations, employers, and policy colleagues.

• We will share findings at academic and policy conferences and will publish the results in open access academic journals.