By the APS Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Unit (APSC)
Australian Public Service (APS) agencies are flexible, agile and responsive to the needs of government and the community. This involves being able to deliver outcomes with increased levels of productivity, streamlined processes and using new technologies. The dynamic landscape of the APS has resulted in an increased focus on work design, meaning how we design work to get tasks done, and also to enhance employee mental health, wellbeing and engagement.
The APS Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Unit (the Unit), within the Australian Public Service Commission, notes that work design is a key action item supporting the Prevent Harm domain of the APS Mental Health Capability Framework (the framework). The framework provides a bespoke and systems-based approach to building mental health and suicide prevention capability within the APS. It acts as an overarching architecture for agencies to use as a base from which to build mental health capability, while remaining flexible and adaptable to agency-specific needs. Agencies are encouraged to develop roles using the principles of job quality and good work design to focus on the prevention of workplace injury or illness.
Work design can occur for a single role, a team, job family or across an entire agency. Success will be determined by the level of investment in employee consultation and sound change management. Changes in job design can have an impact on an employee’s mental health and wellbeing directly or indirectly. Work design elements can also have a lasting impacting on employee psychological safety.
Work design elements that can impact employee mental health include:
- Demand and control [1] – the physical, emotional and cognitive demands of a job role on an individual and their ability to control these demands (high demands such as time pressure and low control over prioritisation, delegation or capacity management) can influence stress.
- Resources and engagement – providing employees access to adequate resources, support, constructive feedback, work variety and development opportunities can increase employee engagement and provides opportunities for employees to exert some control over their tasks and how their job is designed.
- Job characteristics – skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback are core factors that contribute to employees attaching meaning to their work, feeling that they have responsibility over outcomes and having knowledge of what results look like. These in turn lead to better job outcomes in the form of intrinsic motivation, job satisfaction and better job performance [2].
- Emotional nature of the work – how well the impacts of exposure to emotionally impactful events/material are mitigated by organisations to ensure there’s support, intervention and acknowledgement.
Another useful model to consider work design with is the SMART Work Design model, which themes include stimulating work, mastery at work, agency, relational work, and job demands. More broadly, work design elements can be grouped into two different categories – job resources and job demands. Job resources are aspects of work design that help to manage job demands, support the achievement of work-related goals, and foster personal growth and development. If these demands result in sustained stress, they can have negative effects on an employee’s physical and psychological wellbeing.
The Unit is providing practical implementation support and coaching to APS agencies as they align their practices to the framework, and helping to show that there is a lot agencies can do to meet the spirit of the ‘Prevent Harm’ domain. The concept of designing work to minimise harm, particularly in a psychosocial context, is starting to gain momentum in the APS. Agencies are doing work to embody this, such as re-positioning policies to focus on principles of autonomy and flexibility in how work is structured in relation to flexible working arrangements or implementing job sharing arrangements to accommodate part-time workers.
Under the Prevent Harm domain, other practical examples that can support good job design include:
- create detailed role descriptions and communicate information about any psychological or emotional demands inherent to the role to enable applicants to make informed choices about the position before applying for it
- consider arrangements for staff commencing in psychologically demanding roles to allow for a period of adjustment and assessment of job fit between the person and role
- build in structured on-boarding and off-boarding procedures for staff working with objectionable or emotionally demanding material
- embed routine formal and informal check-in processes for staff working in demanding areas
- share information on principles of good work design with staff and managers, using information promoted by trusted sources such as Safe Work Australia as a starting point, and
- build the work design capability within HR teams by engaging with the Workforce Planning Centre of Excellence.- external site.
Taking a person-centric approach, engaging and consulting with employees who are performing the tasks, following processes and using systems is important. From an operational perspective, it provides an opportunity for decision makers to understand how work is performed as well as the relevant inter-dependencies between people, systems and technology. By involving employees in work design, agencies can support employee mental health and wellbeing by providing an opportunity for inclusive practice and validation of employee knowledge and experience which can also lead to better outcomes.
In a competitive employment market, roles need to fit the agency and provide challenging, stimulating and rewarding opportunities for prospective and current employees. This makes good business sense.
For more information on the APS Mental Health Capability Framework please contact MHSP@apsc.gov.au.
For more information on good work design in the APS contact goodworkdesign@comcare.gov.au.
APS Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Unit. “The APS Mental Health Capability Framework provides a bespoke and systems-based approach to building mental health and suicide prevention capability within the APS.
Footnotes
[1] Karasek, R., & Theorell, T. (1990). Healthy work: Stress, productivity, and the reconstruction of working life. Basic Books.
[2] Hackman, J. R. & Oldham, G. R. (1974). The job diagnostic survey: An instrument for the diagnosis of jobs and evaluation of job redesign projects. Yale University, School of Organization and Management.
Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.499
Parker, S. K., & Knight, C. (2024). The SMART model of work design: A higher order structure to help see the wood from the trees. Human Resource Management, 63 (2), 265–291. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22200
Parker, S. K., Morgeson, F. P., & Johns, G. (2017). One hundred years of work design research: Looking back and looking forward. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102 (3), 403–420. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000106