01 Mar Improving teacher job satisfaction through job crafting ≠ longer hours
Teacher retention remains a significant concern in Australia, with stress, burnout, and job dissatisfaction being major contributors to educators leaving the profession, writes Hugh Gundlach
Numerous studies and media reports highlighting declining job satisfaction and deteriorating wellbeing among teachers make attracting new applicants challenging as well.
My research on more than 900 Australian teachers’ career decisions and behaviour found that teachers who were more committed to their schools and profession tended to actively shape their own roles.
This strategy, known as ‘job crafting’, is linked to improved job satisfaction and wellbeing. The approach involves proactively reshaping one’s work tasks, professional relationships and overall perspective of the role.
Adapting a research method from job crafting experts Associate Professor Gavin Slemp and Professor Dianne Vella-Brodrick, I looked at a subset of the larger sample of English teachers.
English teachers were chosen because they have (arguably) more autonomous, independent and distinct teaching styles than other teacher types.
I found that English teachers with a stronger commitment tend to engage in various forms of job crafting. These include:
Task crafting, involving modifying work duties, and relationship crafting, adjusting work relationships, were the most common.
Cognitive crafting, or changing how we think about our duties, was less prevalent, possibly because teaching is already widely perceived as meaningful work.
These findings provide a basis for strategies to address teacher shortages and improve job satisfaction in education roles.
Task Crafting
The survey of 304 English teachers found that many teachers take on additional tasks or roles to increase job satisfaction.
After excluding non-negotiable commitments to the profession – such as financial need for a job and school-enacted supports like wellbeing programs – I could isolate personal-level initiatives that teachers pursue for their own job satisfaction.
Examples include seeking voluntary roles leading clubs and co-curricular activities like debating and the school play, and creating new teaching and social initiatives.
These extra, voluntary duties did improve job satisfaction and wellbeing. But this raises questions about whether these roles should eventually be recognised and potentially formalised, to avoid overwork and stress.
Schools can help lead teachers’ self-care by setting boundaries to help them define their work without diminishing their sense of job importance and meaning.
And while dependent on individual communities, defining the balance of responsibilities among parents, teachers and other services can also be helpful.
Relationship Crafting
Positive relationships with students and colleagues are strong factors in teacher retention.
Relationship crafting can take various forms, including engaging in social activities with coworkers, mentoring new employees and arranging to work with particular colleagues and students.
Unfortunately, teachers rarely have the freedom to choose their assigned subjects or students, which highlights a tension that needs to be addressed between the structure of the education system and the benefits of relationship crafting.
Survey data from this study suggests that the more senior a teacher becomes, the more likely they are to have influence over their subjects.
In practice, this might look like a longer-serving teacher holding a coveted spot teaching senior students, or a subject that they can teach without other team members.
Because it works both ways – relationship crafting can be an avoidant behaviour, too.
While the data suggested it was rare, it was not unheard of for teachers to move schools because they did not get a class they wanted to teach.
This tension could be addressed by more overt and regular career discussions with leadership about teachers’ career goals and preferences.
Cognitive Crafting
Cognitive crafting has been found to be used in other industries to add meaning and importance to menial work roles, for example, cleaning and repetitive factory work, as well as white-collar roles.
In this study, we were surprised to find that some teachers also use cognitive crafting to free themselves from the importance of their work.
Knowing that teaching is an essential and life-changing profession, some participants use cognitive crafting to draw a line under where their responsibility ends, effectively ‘switching off’ thoughts and worries about their responsibilities for students, which would otherwise pervade their personal life.
Long-serving teachers in the study observed responsibilities shifting to them from parents over time, with life and social skills education increasingly becoming part of their work as teachers.
Similarly, teachers who have been in the industry for approximately seven to ten years identified ‘role creep’, where more administrative and supplementary duties – not directly related to classroom teaching – were added to classroom teachers’ roles.
Many teachers who participated in the study also reported substandard office spaces compared to those in other professions.
This left them feeling both isolated from their colleagues and unable to find privacy and space away from their students, suggesting that schools should be providing adequate spaces for productive formal and informal staff interactions.
When job-crafting becomes a double-edged sword
Teachers who take on voluntary duties at the start of the school year like sports coaching, clubs and other academic, pastoral and co-curricular duties, may regret it at busier times of the year or when it becomes an expected, but still unpaid duty.
Excessive job crafting can also result in less time available for core duties and avoiding activities that might lead to professional growth.
However, one relevant study found that employees do not necessarily perform worse because of avoidance behaviours, but because they stop doing energising behaviours.
Allowing teachers to opt out of certain tasks or aspects of the role because they don’t align with their strengths may be unwise. But more importantly, preventing them from doing the voluntary activities they enjoy is counterintuitive and may worsen both burnout and performance.
Implications for policy and practice
Teaching remains a highly individualised profession, lacking the administrative support and option to delegate or ‘advance above’ certain tasks, which is common in other industries.
The profession also resists economies of scale and scope, as each class and student demands individualised attention and outputs.
More research is needed to better understand how job crafting affects teacher wellbeing, and whether job satisfaction can be achieved with the workload required to meet a teacher’s expected productivity and student outcomes.
Or it may be that the current education model is overly reliant on unpaid labour.
While job crafting can boost satisfaction and retention, it must be balanced against school and student needs.
Thoughtful implementation of these strategies could improve teacher retention and attract new talent to the education sector.
Dr Hugh Gundlach, is a Lecturer and researcher, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne
