Job Crafting: A Promising and Possible Strategy to Enhance Well-Being and Cope with the Challenges of Algorithmic Management?

6 min read 

In today’s rapidly changing employment landscape, algorithmic management (AM) is transforming how we work, presenting both bright and dark sides for workers. Emerged from platform organizations, AM refers to the use of algorithms and data-driven processes to control and coordinate workers. In recent years, AM is also increasingly spreading towards other work contexts, such as logistics or retail. While some workers enjoy the seemingly increased autonomy and flexibility, others miss personal interaction and support from traditional management structures.

Both, platform-based and non-platform contexts share several challenges due to the use of AM: For instance, AM often leads to forced compliance, i.e., a compulsory acceptance of algorithmically assigned orders and tasks, thus leaving almost no room to decline, negotiate or re-arrange these assignments. To ensure workers’ adherence to task assignments, workers’ behavior and specifically their task execution and performance is continuously measured, cameras and intelligent sensors are used to monitor workers’ results, habits, and interactions, and based on GPS, workers’ whereabouts are continuously tracked. Moreover, AM implies an accelerated work pace, i.e., a high responsiveness to order assignments and fast order completion time. Hence, it is no surprise, that AM is often said to severely limit workers’ options for co-determination and decreases their occupational well-being. Specifically, occupational well-being refers to an affective state in which, in the context of work and related tasks, an individual’s subjectively evaluated physical, intellectual, and social needs are met.

Particularly constant surveillance, a key mechanism of AM, and the associated reduction in (task) agency can lead to various negative effects. These include psychological impacts such as technostress, physical strain, and mental fatigue, resulting in different forms of stress and reduced occupational well-being. As AM is said to be a central component for the future of work, particularly as firms strive to keep up with innovation and technological advancements, policymakers, workers’ representatives, and employers need to find ways to improve the technology-induced working conditions to consequently enhance workers’ occupational well-being. Extant research has already suggested several ways how to achieve these improvements. These suggestions include support in terms of unionization, for example the establishment of worker councils, as well as extended regulatory frameworks, such as offering permanent contracts. However, as these changes are often of a fundamental and structural nature, requiring extensive efforts, it will take much time until the success of these efforts can be proven fruitful.

Beyond these structural and fundamental suggestions, research has also started to reflect on improvements at the individual level of workers. For instance, as shown in a recent study, job crafting is shown to be a promising behavior to better cope with the demanding mechanisms of AM. Job crafting refers to workers’ proactive changes in terms of their tasks (i.e., task crafting), with whom and how often they interact (i.e., relational crafting), and their cognitive perceptions (i.e., cognitive crafting). However, with every activity being algorithmically tracked and traced, concerns arise about how job crafting is possible. Fortunately, job crafting is often considered a behavior invisible to supervisors. But is it also invisible to the often-said intrusive algorithmic mechanisms? A few studies have explored this question and found examples of how workers engage in job crafting: For example, food delivery workers, a group of workers highly affected by AM, engage in task crafting by extending the time of an order completion (iteratively) by several minutes, to have a short break to recover from an exhausting bike ride. By doing so, workers regain a sense of autonomy and can improve their physical well-being simultaneously. Moreover, food delivery workers engage in relational crafting by participating in or establishing messenger and chat groups to find both emotional and work support they might not receive from their organization, thus finding ways to improve their emotional well-being. An example for cognitive crafting, i.e., altering perceptions of their work, is to perceive order assignments and working by bike as a workout, thus improving both physical and emotional well-being. In a similar vein, some food delivery workers aim to excel in order completion time by executing as many orders as possible to increase their bonus payment and performance statistics. In this regard, workers enhance both their financial and emotional well-being.

These examples demonstrate the effectiveness of job crafting as a strategy for workers to enhance their resources and better manage the challenges of AM. Hence, based on the job crafting examples introduced and on prior work, I recommend workers representatives and policymakers should encourage workers to engage in job crafting, i.e., to execute job crafting training interventions which might surely not solve all challenges that arise in the realm of the of AM and other new work technologies. However, job crafting is a promising start that, if executed regularly on the individual level, can improve the occupational well-being for many workers. As research on AM and job crafting is still in its infancy, especially in non-platform work contexts, I recommend future researchers to particularly focus on conducting empirical studies in these contexts.