'Really improving work design requires leaders to consider more than three dozen positive and negative work characteristics'
To address employee stress and burnout, employers should be more focused on job design, say two academics.
With stress levels continuing to rise, employers have been focusing on “fix-the-worker strategies” that include offering the overworked employee productivity tips and encouragement to assert healthy boundaries, or providing stressed-out workers with training in mindfulness techniques or yoga classes at lunchtime.
However, these strategies “do little to resolve stress caused by long hours and unreasonable workloads,” say Sharon Parker, director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design at Curtin University, and Caroline Knight, senior lecturer at the University of Queensland Business School.
“A better approach is to create healthier and more sustainable jobs through good work design,” say the two experts in an article in the report Innovating for Top Performance. “Decades of research show that when jobs include positive characteristics such as autonomy, variety, and social support, employees are more satisfied, motivated, and committed to the organization, and they perform better. Meanwhile, minimizing work characteristics that harm people, like excessive time pressure, is crucial to preventing burnout.”
This, however, is not easy to do, they say.
“Really improving work design requires leaders to consider more than three dozen positive and negative work characteristics. This level of detail enables them to gain a nuanced understanding of work design, but deciding which characteristics are most important to address can be overwhelming.”
Employee burnout is among the top challenges for employers, according to a survey by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) and Angus Reid Group.
In the report – published in the MIT Sloan Management Review – the authors introduced the SMART Work Design model that captures five key interrelated categories that should be considered when making work design decisions:
While work design problems are often systemic in organizations, the SMART model can be applied at the corporate or team level, according to the MIT Sloan Management Review.
“Using it in multiple ways, with an emphasis on collaboration between employees and their managers, may deliver the most benefits. Companies can redesign teams' work; align people management systems; develop leaders who understand SMART work; guide and evaluate operational change using a work design lens; and encourage and support employee job crafting.”
Workers shouldn’t be left to cope on their own with poorly designed jobs that cause burnout, according to the report.
To implement the model, Parker and Knight suggest that organizations:
Many HR teams are facing challenges when it comes to navigating an increasingly digital workforce and AI-driven technologies, according to a previous report.
