SMART work design: The key to beating burnout

Burnout and disengagement are pressing challenges for workplaces worldwide, but latest research from the Centre for Transformative Work Design (CTWD) at Curtin University shows changing the way jobs are designed could improve employee well-being and boost productivity.

Based on decades of research and shared in MIT Sloan Management Review, a new SMART model for improving work design highlights five key themes to help workplaces create healthier and more engaging jobs: Stimulating work, Mastery, Autonomy, Relational work, and Tolerable demands (SMART).

CTWD Director, John Curtin Distinguished Professor Sharon Parker, said when jobs include positive characteristics such as autonomy, variety and social support, employees are more satisfied, motivated and committed to an organisation and they perform better.

“Often when managers aim to boost productivity and morale, they tend to focus on fixing the person, such as offering productivity tips, boundary-setting advice or mindfulness training, but these approaches rarely tackle the root cause of stress – such as long hours and unreasonable workloads,” Professor Parker said.

“A better approach is to create healthier and more sustainable jobs and our SMART work design model captures the most important characteristics for a thriving workplace.”

The themes for SMART work are:

• Stimulating work – Providing task variety, the chance to develop skills and solve meaningful challenges.
• Mastery – Ensuring people understand their roles and responsibilities, receive feedback and see how their work fits into the bigger picture.
• Autonomy – Giving employees control and influence over when and how they work, including schedules and daily decisions.
• Relational work – Recognising the human need to belong, which is vital to feeling engaged and performing well, by building into jobs opportunities for connection, social support, and teamwork.
• Tolerable demands – Keeping job demands such as workloads manageable. Job demands can become intolerable when workers must routinely put in excessive overtime, suffer abuse or are given conflicting priorities.

Professor Parker said the new model can be implemented company-wide or one team at a time.

“Work design problems are often systemic in organisations and workers shouldn’t be left to cope on their own with poorly designed jobs that cause disengagement and burnout,” Professor Parker said.

“A greater focus on the design of work can have a huge impact on the bottom-line, increased innovation and employee well-being.”

The full article, Design Work to Prevent Burnout, is available in MIT Sloan Management Review. Free resources about the SMART model can be found here: www.transformativeworkdesign.com/smart-work.