Psychosocial risks reduced by simple work-design changes
Source: OHS Alert (subscription service) (https://www.ohsalert.com.au/) (10.02.2025)
Employers developing solutions to psychosocial risks need to resist the temptation to go straight for the "hard things", bypassing simple effective measures that workers can help to identify, a chief research officer of a major organisation says.
In a recent workshop hosted by mental health organisation SuperFriend and Comcare, attendees were challenged to come up with solutions to psychosocial safety issues faced by hypothetical worker "Sara" in her demanding call centre role.
While participants were good at identifying the hazards in the scenario, discussions around what they meant and why they were risks for Sara were "a bit more superficial", SuperFriend chief research officer Dr Ross Iles tells OHS Alert.
According to the workshop report, participants offered a range of solutions but many extended beyond the scope of Sara's role.
"Several groups suggested that Sara take proactive steps by becoming a 'champion' for her team or even building a business case to advocate for better work design," it says.
Some participants suggested she "take a holiday" to improve her wellbeing, and there were "multiple mentions that Sara's best option to improve her situation was to quit", but these options "did not address the underlying issues of work design".
Iles says these results could be due to participants being unfamiliar with the specifics of the fictional role, or applying a "leadership lens" to the scenario based on their own senior positions.
He says a lack of deeper discussions on psychosocial hazards stops organisations from identifying "simpler" measures that could actually resolve some of the problems for workers like Sara.
Such measures include job crafting – making minor modifications to a worker's role, Iles says.
Others include scheduling five minutes at the end of shifts for workers to foster connectedness, which only involves a small change to rosters but can have a big impact on teams' interpersonal dynamics, he says.
"What we found in this workshop is that sometimes people go straight to the really hard things," Iles says.
Expecting a frontline worker not in a leadership role to display a lot of leadership qualities and lead the charge for change when she already has "enough on her plate" is "unrealistic", he stresses.
What is actually needed is good work design, which is not as difficult as people might think and requires finding "a balance between the essential requirements of the job and the essential requirements of the person doing the job".
This involves taking a step back and looking carefully at what is required of a task, and at the person performing it, and asking, "What are the skills and tools that they have and is there a gap between those two?"
The next step is "about filling those gaps".
Iles says one of the workshop's key takeaways for employers is that work design is "not just for management", and managers must consult the people actually performing the role.
"If you actually have people who are really familiar with the role... and how things operate, you're much more likely to find those smaller solutions that mean you can have great people doing great work and without having to change the world or change the job completely," he says.
Another key take away is that there are a range of helpful resources out there to help employers with every step of the process, including the Future of Work Institute's SMART work design framework.
