Wellbeing is a person’s ongoing state that allows them to thrive or not. Just like physical health, we all have it. Moreover, wellbeing is a continuum – ranging from thriving, to going ok, to struggling, to being unwell. Work has a significant impact on a person’s wellbeing but not all work is equal. There are many work-related factors with the potential to cause physical and/or mental harm. A psychosocial hazard is anything that relates to the design or management of work, the work environment, plant and equipment, or workplace interactions and behaviours. If not effectively managed, psychosocial hazards can cause psychological or physical harm. Well-designed work enables people to thrive, while toxic work can take a significant toll.
Managing wellbeing at work involves both obligations and opportunities. The Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) requires organisations to manage risks to workers – including risks to their mental health and wellbeing. The guiding principle of the HSWA is that workers and other persons should be given the highest level of protection against harm to their health, safety, and welfare from work risks, by eliminating or minimising those risks to the extent that is reasonably practicable. ‘Health’ is defined under the HSWA as both a person’s physical and mental health. The opportunities arise when work is designed, organised, and managed to protect wellbeing, enabling people to thrive. Thriving is related to a person feeling and functioning well across multiple areas of their life.
The Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum Mental Health and Wellbeing at Work sense-making framework – developed in 2021 – identifies four approaches to meeting these obligations and opportunities. An effective wellbeing strategy uses all four approaches.
Despite job redesign – which focuses on fixing work not workers – having been identified as the most effective intervention approach to develop a mentally healthy workplace (Committee for Economic Development of Australia, 2022), until recently, most mental wellbeing interventions have focused on individual interventions (i.e., those related to the foster, reclaim, and support approaches).
Although these interventions may provide short term relief, they will not result in long term, sustainable improvements in the wellbeing of workers. That requires an assessment of psychosocial risks, as well as the (re)design of work. The publication of the ISO 45003 (psychological health and safety at work) guidelines in 2021 increased awareness of the importance of identifying and managing work-related psychosocial risks. In Australia, this approach is reflected in various codes of practice (e.g., Safe Work Australia’s Model code of practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work, 2022; NSW’s Code of practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work, 2021; Queensland’s Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work code of practice, 2022). These guidelines have seen a rapid increase in organisations completing psychosocial risks assessments using a variety of methods.
However, as important as thorough psychosocial risk assessment is, it is only part of the process required to create mentally healthy work (the point of difference for the protect approach). To enable people to thrive at work requires the design of better work not simply the identification of psychosocial risks.
Better work design is the key control for managing psychosocial risks as it addresses hazards at source and can give the highest level of protection from harm. It focuses on the content and organisation of tasks, processes, and systems as well as the physical work conditions, equipment and resources, relationships, and responsibilities. To be effective, it is important to be specific about who the redesign strategy will target, what it will include, and how it will be done; to communicate the rationale for change (e.g., to increase autonomy) and the conditions required for the change to be successful (e.g., support from supervisors); and to identify how the impact of the redesign strategy will be monitored and evaluated.
Leading Safety’s intent in developing the Better Work By Design (BWBD) process – the phases of which are shown in the following diagram – is to improve work, so that workers thrive and organisations succeed.
The discovery phase of the BWBD process involves either an in-person facilitated BWBD workshop or an online BWBD workshop. In the workshops, people doing similar work identify factors posing a risk to their wellbeing as well as factors protecting their wellbeing and discuss ways to reduce the significant risks and embed the protective factors. These insights are explored further in the design phase. If the focus is solely on doing a psychosocial risk assessment, then the design phase is significantly underplayed in terms of both time and resources.
The BWBD process adheres to the following principles:
- Take account of organisational context
- Focus on work, especially those work factors that have the greatest impact on wellbeing
- Do not just fulfil the obligation to protect people from harm; get after opportunities to help people thrive
- Workers take the lead because they understand the work best
- Leaders are committed to, and actively support, the process
- Collaborate and build capability, wherever possible
- Invite, respect, and be open to all perspectives
- Do not shy away from challenges
- Learn as you go about how to get the most from the process
The point is to continue to improve work, so that workers thrive and the organisation succeeds. Key to the successful work (re)design is:
- Support from senior leaders. This is gained by providing leaders with evidence that the change will work, as well as communicating that the impacts will extend beyond wellbeing.
- Engagement of the people doing the work.
- Identification of short, medium, and long-term changes so that more straightforward changes can be actioned while those that require more time are explored and planned for.
Get in touch with us to find out more about the BWBD process.
[Published in the January / February 2024 edition of Safeguard Magazine]