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

Background and rationale: An intensified and increasingly demanding working life, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, requires new approaches to improve health and wellbeing at work and beyond. Job crafting is a well-established strategy to lower work demands, increase resources, and achieve better person-job fit and meaningful work. In this project, we broaden this perspective of proactively shaping work life to include also boundaries between life domains and off-job time.Overall and specific aims: The overall goal of our study is to better understand how the different forms of job crafting, off-job crafting, and boundary crafting are related and form patterns of crafting, as well as to examine predictors (i.e., stable, situational, and crisis-related) as well as health and well-being related outcomes of single and combined crafting behaviors. We study these processes and relationships across three different time frames: (1) long-term (3-month periods; digital surveys), (2) short-term (daily; ecological momentary assessments across one workweek), and (3) crisis-related (digital survey before and during the COVID-19 pandemic).Expected results: Based on a broad, diverse sample, our research project will result in new theoretical and empirical insights on the crafting process over time (i.e., antecedents and outcomes) and on the interrelationships of crafting efforts in different life domains. In addition to these new scientific insights which will be published in high-quality academic journals, the practical implications will be communicated via policy briefs and the general media. Impact: In the new flexible (tele)working life, life domains increasingly overlap and a holistic view on life, including both work and leisure, is urgently needed. Our project will pave the way for creating a more meaningful and sustainable (working) life in which employees take an active role in aligning their environment with their personal needs, preferences, and abilities. Beyond this project, our findings will directly inform the parallel development of hybrid crafting interventions combining in-company training and digital tools (websites & smartphone applications).