About good work design
Good work is good for you. The design of our work affects the way we feel and can influence our motivation, engagement and stress levels at work.
What is work design?
Professor Sharon Parker from Curtin University’s Centre for Transformative Work Design describes how work design looks at the nature and organisation of work tasks, people’s responsibilities and relationships, and decision-making within a role or a set of roles. Work design approaches can be applied to both new and existing work.
Work design processes can be used by designers and people at all levels within a workplace. It can be applied across an organisation, within individual areas or teams and/or by individuals within a team. When workers undertake their own work design it’s known as job crafting.
Using SMART work design for prevention of psychosocial risks
Evidence from Safe Work Australia shows that good work design can be used to prevent harm to health and safety, promote health and wellbeing and support work participation and productivity.
Professor Parker’s SMART work design model can be used as a tool to optimise work design and address psychosocial risks.
SMART work design is an efficient and effective way to address psychosocial risks as it targets root causes for multiple risks at once – while growing wellbeing, performance and even innovation.
SMART work design offers practical strategies that empower people at all levels to make work better.
The SMART work design model
The model encourages considering the extent to which a person has:
- Stimulating work – requiring use of a variety of skills, performing a variety of tasks and problem-solving demands.
- Mastery at work – from having role clarity, getting feedback on performance, and taking a task from beginning to end.
- Agency – having a sense of autonomy and control over how work is scheduled, the methods used to achieve goals and making judgements and decisions.
- Relational work – feeling supported at work and connecting to others and to the purpose of their work.
- Tolerable work demands – that feel sustainable, particularly for time pressure, emotional demands and role conflict.
Three ways to do SMART work design
There are 3 main ways to improve work using SMART work design.
1 Leading for SMART
This is about the local leader behaviours including daily actions, conversations and decisions that shape SMART for people in teams. Leaders at all levels play a role in establishing norms that help people to thrive and create healthy and safe workplaces that support wellbeing, engagement, performance and innovation.
2 Work redesign using SMART
These are activities that reconfigure roles, tasks, processes, responsibilities, relationships or decision-making – using SMART to focus on what needs strengthening. Work can be redesigned by teams, groups or branches and whenever people work together.
3 Job crafting using SMART
People at any level can use the SMART framework to make small adjustments to their work, or how they do their work, to help strengthen SMART and ensure their work is a good match for their needs and interests.
Getting started with SMART work design
Use the SMART work design team talk (PDF, 1.7 MB) and begin conversations in your workplace about using work design to make work better.
Leading for SMART using good work design
As a manager or supervisor your daily actions shape work design and can help deliver good work for your team. This supportive leadership behaviour benefits your team members, helps you to meet your responsibilities as a leader and makes your job much easier.
Applying good work design to these 10 actions can improve WHS outcomes, participation and productivity:
Comcare's suite of videos will help you design good work for your teams.
Watch and share the videos on good work design.
Access our good work design microLearns
The microLearns aim to raise awareness and help people create psychologically safe teams, better manage psychosocial risks, and build capability to design good work for their teams.
To access the microLearns, create an account in Comcare LMS (see the steps to create an account). Then, select the training item you're interested in and login with your email and password.
More information
- SMART work design – Centre for Transformative Work Design
- Parker S K (2014), ‘Beyond motivation: job and work design for development, health, ambidexterity, and more’, Annual Review of Psychology 65:661-691
- Does the evidence and theory support the good work design principles? – Safe Work Australia
- Job crafting – Thrive at work
