Crafting a better job case study solution

HUMAN RESSOURCE

case W88C54 November 20, 2009

Published by WDI Publishing, a division of the William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan.

©2010 William Davidson Institute. This case was developed by Development Consultant Researcher Justin M. Berg and Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology Jane E. Dutton. This case was prepared as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.

Burt’s Bees was founded in 1984 when Roxanne Quimby and Burt Shavitz used leftover beeswax from Burt’s honey business to produce and sell $200 worth of candles at a craft fair. By the end of that year, sales had reached $20,000 and continued to grow exponentially. They soon moved from a one-room schoolhouse to an abandoned bowling alley. The move enabled them to expand into natural personal care products, including soaps and perfumes, which their 40 employees brewed on gas-burning stoves. The popularity of these products helped Burt’s Bees—now headquartered in Durham, North Carolina—become the leading manufacturer of environmentally friendly natural personal care products.

From large nationwide chains to corner grocery shops, Burt’s Bees products can be found all over the place. Best known is the lip balm, but a quick walk through one of the thousands of stores that carry the Burt’s Bees brand could reveal dozens more of the company’s over 150 products, including face moisturizer made from carrot root, hand soap infused with green tea and lemongrass, and baby oil extracted from apricots. In 2006, sales of a diverse array of products exceeded $250 million. Despite its ever-increasing growth, Burt’s Bees has striven to not leave its core “mom and pop” values behind. Through what it calls “The Greater Good Business Model,” it is committed to operating with the utmost of social responsibility, emphasizing its care for the environment, consumers, and approximately 400 employees.

However, even with their efforts to hold on to their wholesome values, employees in the 21st Century version of Burt’s Bees work in a very different organization than those in the abandoned bowling alley days. Due to the organization’s greater size and complexity, employees have to be given more structured jobs in order for work to be done properly and efficiently. But unlike their mascot, the honeybee, which performs its job the exact same way as each other bee in the hive, Burt’s Bees employees have their own unique personalities and backgrounds that make each one desire a different experience at work. Just like in many organizations, Burt’s Bees managers could not possibly design a customized job for every one of their employees that would keep them all optimally engaged, motivated, and satisfied. As a result, many employees are left with formal job designs that could be changed to align better with their individual motives and strengths. This is the case for the four Burt’s Bees employees described below.

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

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Part 1: Why Do Employees Job Craft?

Mindy likes to be challenged. She would enjoy a job that presents a new challenge every day. She performs well when pushed to do more and feels best when using her people skills to tackle new endeavors. Unfortunately, Mindy’s formal job design does not accommodate these characteristics. She works as a Customer Care Representative, which is a rather repetitive job consisting of taking orders and dealing with routine customer concerns over the phone. After they learn the basics of the job, employees in her line of work are rarely confronted with new challenges.

Andy always wants to see improvement. He gets excited about the prospect of improving the status quo and does not like to settle for less than the most efficient method of doing something. As a result, Andy yearns to explore new possibilities that may lead to the discovery of a better procedure. But Andy is a Maintenance Technician in charge of maintaining the working order of equipment, not improving manufacturing procedures—work usually designated for Process Engineers.

Jake is a people person. He loves to communicate and thrives when learning from and teaching others. Yet, Jake’s formal job design has very little to do with people. He works in the Compounding Department, where employees spend most of their time following standard recipes to mix bulk ingredients before they are sent to packaging. Compounding employees perform their duties independently, so the work itself requires barely any communication with others.

Karen enjoys being creative. Since she works in marketing as a Brand Manager, she is able to use her creativity on occasion, particularly when she gets to think about the big picture of her product lines. But like many employees in marketing, her job also includes numerous tasks that are more analytical and less about the big picture. These time-consuming day-to-day tasks make it difficult to find time for the creative side of marketing that Karen enjoys.

Part 2: How Do Employees Job Craft?

Instead of simply enacting their jobs as they are formally designed, Mindy, Andy, Jake, and Karen have all managed to craft their jobs to better align with their individual motives and strengths. Their job crafting stories are described in the following paragraphs.

Mindy, who likes to be challenged, easily gets bored with the monotony of her Customer Care job. So she tries to take on small projects to break up her day. She will often ask her supervisor if she has any tasks for her to do, update the information sheets given to the person who fills in when she is out, or brush up on training material. When an opportunity arises for someone from Customer Care to travel to a trade show, she eagerly volunteers to tackle the new challenge. Although these tasks and projects are extra work, they help make Mindy’s job more engaging and satisfying. While speaking to clients on the phone—a task formally required of her—Mindy plays to her strong people skills and draws from her background in customer relations at a credit card company, where communication with clients was much more scripted. She does not just take orders and answer questions. She utilizes her people skills by building relationships with clients and her work background by carrying over helpful elements from the scripts she used in her previous job. Mindy sees her job as more than entering data and answering questions. She believes the purpose of her job is to provide a positive experience for her clients, so she performs her job accordingly. Having this view makes her job more meaningful to her.

Andy, who seeks constant improvement, seems like he would be more engaged and satisfied working as a Process Engineer, rather than a Maintenance Technician. However, Andy does not have the training required

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

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Job Crafting at Burt’s Bees W88C54

to be a Process Engineer, but that has not stopped him from doing similar work at Burt’s Bees. Andy deeply cares for the environment, which is one of the primary reasons why he applied for a job at Burt’s Bees. While performing his maintenance duties, he suspected that some of the manufacturing procedures could be improved to reduce wasted energy. He took the initiative to ask his supervisor and the Quality Assurance Department if he could conduct some studies to determine if certain processes could become more energy efficient. He ran the experiments in his free time, and, just as he expected, his findings revealed some energy-saving improvements. Andy now considers this type of work as just a part of his job. He continues to journey outside his job description to find ways to improve procedures, and he feels more alive and empowered at work because of these efforts.

Like Andy, Jake appears at first glance to be in the wrong line of work. He is a people person, but his compounding job requires little interaction with others. However, Jake is highly satisfied with his job. How can this be? A primary reason is that he has crafted his job to include much more interaction with others than is formally required of him. For example, because he was fascinated by their work, he reached out to the group of employees at Burt’s Bees that assembles new equipment. He maintains relationships with people in this group and learns much more about the equipment from them than necessary for performing his job, simply because he enjoys it. He also uses this knowledge while training new compounding employees, a task he volunteered to do but is now just expected of him. Jake is also involved with the Eco-Bees, which is a group of employees who try to help the organization reduce waste and be more environmentally friendly. All these additional tasks and activities make Jake feel more connected to the organization and the people in it.

For Karen, an ideal job design would still be in marketing, but would involve more creative thinking and less data analysis and cumbersome day-to-day tasks. Unlike Mindy, Andy, and Jake, Karen just does not have time to take on additional tasks to help fulfill her desire for being creative. But despite time constraints, she has managed to craft her job to include more creative thinking. When working on analytical tasks, she does not start out with the level of excitement she is able to bring into more creative, big-picture tasks. To deal with this lack of excitement, she keeps the big picture of her product lines in mind while doing the less enjoyable tasks involved in her job and uses the positive energy that comes from thinking in this way to become more excited about the task at hand. When analyzing data, she tries to find new insights and use them to help create a whole story about her product lines. She constantly reminds herself how her more unpleasant tasks fit into the larger purpose of her job. This keeps her excitement level up and ensures that she does not lose touch with what she enjoys about marketing.

Part 3: In Their Own Words

Mindy:

The orders come first, but when there are no orders, if I haven’t already been given something to do, I will ask my supervisor for a project. I’m always up for a challenge and once I’ve learned that challenge and become experienced in that and mastered it, I’m ready to move on to something different—a change or something additional to broaden my experiences. I don’t like to settle or just come for a paycheck. I like to prove myself and show that I can do more. I like it because they’re relying on me. I like the feeling I get when they’re seeking me out to do this because they know I have the experience or that I’m detailed enough to pay attention to the little minor things. That makes me feel good.

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

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Andy:

I’ve learned a lot real quick. A lot of the education on recycling and energy usage is still real fresh in my mind. So some of the older guys who were educated on the same stuff, it might slip their mind if they don’t continue to think about it, but it’s in the front of my mind. I think about it all the time, and personally, I feel like that’s part of my job—to find better ways to use less and do more. I recently filled out the paperwork for a deviation through Quality so I could run this study to help conserve energy. What I did was find the optimal amount of energy usage with the most amount of production, and then I showed my research to the Production Supervisor. It makes me feel more valuable, more like I’m a part of the team. It’s evidence that your voice matters, your opinions matter. When I worked at a pharmaceutical company, I could have just been a number. You could just go through the motions. At Burt’s Bees, you act on your ideas. It’s embraced for you to act on your ideas, and you’re rewarded too for acting on your ideas. It makes me feel challenged, like you don’t know what’s coming up, you don’t know the answer, and you’re fact finding, letting the facts lead you to your root cause. It’s like finding your way out of a cave or somewhere when you’re lost and you’re like, “If I head east, I don’t know where it’s going to lead me, but it’s fun to be on a journey.”

Jake:

We have our own group here that literally has built equipment from scratch to make this stuff run—to put lip balm in the tube or put the lotions in the bottles. I just think that’s brilliant work, seeing how they do it from a ground-up perspective. I was interested. I used to run a lot of equipment to where I knew what it did, but I didn’t know how it did it, and getting involved with the maintenance crew, you just learn so much about the instruments or the equipment that you’d never know if you’re just pressing a button. When I came here, it felt like I was inside walls and each department had their own barriers, and getting through those barriers was much easier on the management side than it was with employees, my peers. And once I bridged the gap with management, just going up and talking to them, not necessarily about anything other than just, “How are you doing?,” it bridged a gap with the peers as well. They realized that there’s a lot of communication going on, a lot of people they didn’t necessarily talk with, but now they can or now they do. I feel like branching out to management worked out a lot better because they would tell their employees: “Oh, talk with him. He’s fine. There’s nothing wrong. He’s not looking out after you. He’s not going to tell on you. He’s just out there communicating.” I’ve gotten to know a lot of good people quick. Once you engage them, they’re really wonderful people working here, and you wouldn’t know it unless you went up and talked to them. They’re not the type of people who would just come out and talk to you. And I’ve always been that type of person. It’s just how I operate, and having that wall just really bothered me. So I had to do something about it, just for myself.

Karen:

I definitely enjoy the creative side of things versus just pulling numbers. The job is probably 50/50. But I guess on the analytical side, I don’t have the energy. I’m not excited to go into it, but I get more excited about it as I find some insights and bring that out and create a full story. So starting out, it kind of seems like a drag, but the excitement or the energy grows as that comes together. Whereas on the creative side, I just get excited about that from the beginning. For instance, recently I had to put together a pricing analysis on one of our line of products. So I started out on the creative side, went out and just looked around and kind of designed my presentation before and then went into the data side of it. It worked well. My recommendation ended up being approved.

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

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Job Crafting at Burt’s Bees W88C54

Notes

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

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Job Crafting at Burt’s Bees W88C54

Notes

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

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Job Crafting at Burt’s Bees W88C54

Notes

For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.

The Center for Positive Organizations, based at the Ross School of Business, is a world-class research center that brings transformational research to students and leaders

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For the exclusive use of M. Mombo, 2019.

This document is authorized for use only by Marjorie Mombo in MAN5305 Spring A 2019 taught by MICHAEL PELAEZ, Florida National University from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019.