Crafting life for health and wellbeing: Understanding different types of crafting in everyday life and in challenging times (Craft4Health)

Background and rationale: In the new flexible and digitalized working life, life domains increasingly overlap, and a holistic perspective on life, including both work and leisure, is urgently needed.  Crafting is a proactive behaviour that is oriented towards a unique person-environment fit. Through such crafting, employees can individually align their work and nonwork experience according to their values and needs. Job Crafting is a well-established strategy to lower work demands, increase resources, achieve better person-job fit and meaningful work. In this project, we extend this strategy of proactively shaping one's (work)-life by including crafting the boundaries between life domains and employees off-job time.

Overall and specific aims: Our study's overall goal is to investigate how the different forms of crafting the job, off-job time, and the boundary between work and nonwork are related and form patterns of crafting behaviours. We will also examine predictors (i.e., stable, situational, and crisis-related parameters) as well as health and wellbeing related outcomes of single and combined crafting behaviours.
We study these processes and relationships integrating three different data acquisition and analysis strategies: (1) on the long-term (7 waves with 3-month periods; digital surveys before the COVID-19 pandemic), (2) on the short-term (daily; ecological momentary assessments with up to eight assessments per day across one week), and (3) again on the long-term combining surveys with measurements before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (digital survey).

Impact: Our project aims to pave the way for creating a more meaningful and sustainable (working) life where employees have the agency to align their environment with individual needs and values. As a primary consequence of this project, we will identify relevant predictors and outcomes of crafting and patterns of combined crafting strategies. This project directly informs the simultaneous development of hybrid crafting interventions combining in-company training and digital tools.

• Brauchli, R., Kerksieck, P., Tušl, M., & Bauer, G. F. (2022). Staying healthy during COVID-19 crisis: Well-being and salutogenic crafting among German and Swiss working population. Health Promotion International, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daac004
• Kerksieck, P., Brauchli, R., Bloom, J. de, Shimazu, A., Kujanpää, M., Lanz, M., & Bauer, G. F. (2022). Crafting work-nonwork balance involving life domain boundaries: Development and validation of a novel scale across five countries. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 892120. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.892120
• Kujanpää, M., Syrek, C., Tay, L., Kinnunen, U., Mäkikangas, A., Shimazu, A., Wiese, C. W., Brauchli, R., Bauer, G. F., Kerksieck, P., Toyama, H., & Bloom, J. de (2022). Needs-based off-job crafting across different life domains and contexts: Testing a novel conceptual and measurement approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 959296. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.959296
• Pijpker, R., Kerksieck, P., Tušl, M., De Bloom, J., Brauchli, R., & Bauer, G. F. (2022). The Role of Off-Job Crafting in Burnout Prevention during COVID-19 Crisis: A Longitudinal Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(4), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042146

• Ho, K. L., Morstatt A. I., Mäkikangas, A., Kerksieck, P., de Bloom, J., and Bauer, G. F. Patterns of combined job and off-job crafting: predictors in work and private life and their relationship with work engagement and mental well-being. (2022, July). Short- and Long-term Life Crafting: Understanding and Fostering the Crafting of Work, Leisure, Work-Life Boundaries and of the Future of Work [Symposium] Chair: de Bloom, J., and Bauer, G. F.. European Association of Occupational Health Psychology, Bordeaux, France.
• Kerksieck, P., Ho, K. L., Bauer, G. F. How future-oriented job crafting is associated with employees’ perception of the future of work. Results from a global study in 35 countries. (2022, July). Short- and Long-term Life Crafting: Understanding and Fostering the Crafting of Work, Leisure, Work-Life Boundaries and of the Future of Work [Symposium] Chair: de Bloom, J., and Bauer, G. F.. European Association of Occupational Health Psychology, Bordeaux, France.
• Kerksieck, P., Kujanpää, M., de Bloom, J., Brauchli, R., Bauer, G.F. Beyond job crafting: Antecedents and outcomes of boundary and off-job crafting. (2022, July) Only time will tell? – The role of time for research on stress, recovery, and well-being. [Symposium] Chair: Kühnel, J. and Vahle-Hinz, T. European Association of Occupational Health Psychology, Bordeaux, France.Kerksieck, P. The Craft4Health project: Employee health and wellbeing in challenging times. (2022, November)Talk presented at the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich.
• Morstatt, A. I., Ho, K. L., Kerksieck, P., Mäkikangas, A., de Bloom, J., and Bauer, G. F. Longitudinal relation between workload and recovery: Job and off-job crafting profiles as possible moderators. (2022, July). Short- and Long-term Life Crafting: Understanding and Fostering the Crafting of Work, Leisure, Work-Life Boundaries and of the Future of Work [Symposium] Chair: de Bloom, J., and Bauer, G. F.. European Association of Occupational Health Psychology, Bordeaux, France.