MIT Sloan Management Review Examines How Improved Work Design Can Prevent Burnout, Reduce Stress, and Improve Productivity

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Dec 10, 2024, 08:00 ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Leaders are painfully aware that employee disengagement and burnout are significant threats to productivity, talent retention, and the bottom line. Fix-the-worker strategies do little to resolve these issues. MIT Sloan Management Review examines a better, holistic approach to changes in work design to improve employee well-being and promote creativity and innovation.

A Model for Making Work Smarter: Grouping the specific tools of work design by the job characteristics that managers seek to improve can make it easier to identify the most effective tactic ina particular situation.

"Smart work design is an untapped leverage point for leaders," says Sharon K. Parker, director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design at Curtin University. "Research suggests one of the most positive effective ways to attract talent, increase engagement and ready organizations for digital advances is often the neglected area of work design."

In "Design Work to Prevent Burnout," Parker and coauthor, Caroline Knight, senior lecturer at the University of Queensland Business School, share their research and guidance on assessing work design issues and offer a new model that can be implemented company-wide or one team at a time.

The SMART Work Design model captures five key interrelated categories that should be considered when making work design decisions:

Stimulating work provides task variety, the chance to develop and use one's skills, and the opportunity to solve challenging and meaningful problems.
Mastery occurs when people understand their roles and responsibilities, get feedback from peers or supervisors, and see how their work fits into the bigger picture.
Autonomy ensures that workers have control and influence over when and how they work, including their schedules, opportunities to take initiative, and their daily decisions.
Relational work recognizes the human need to belong, which is vital to feeling engaged and performing well, and so involves workers being connected, supported, and part of a team.
Tolerable demands refers to workers' having task requirements that are manageable, as opposed to being overwhelmed by excessive workloads, role conflict, emotional pressures or other intolerable demands.

Work design problems are often systemic in organizations. The SMART model can be applied at the corporate or team level. Using it in multiple ways, with an emphasis on collaboration between employees and their managers, may deliver the most benefits. Companies can redesign teams' work; align people management systems; develop leaders who understand SMART work; guide and evaluate operational change using a work design lens; and encourage and support employee job crafting.

"Workers shouldn't be left to cope on their own with poorly designed jobs that cause disengagement and burnout," says Knight. "More of a focus on the design of work can have a huge impact on the bottom-line, increased innovation and employee well-being."

The Research
The authors conducted three studies to develop and validate the SMART Work Design model.

First, to categorize a range of job characteristics, they surveyed 1,107 professionals globally who were participating in an online work design course. They then used higher-order factor analysis to determine the structure of the SMART model.
To validate the model, the authors conducted a longitudinal study involving 709 workers recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. In the first survey, they asked participants about their work characteristics and used higher-order factor analysis to confirm the model structure. In the second survey a week later, they asked participants how meaningful and challenging their work was and their sense of connection and belonging. In the third survey a week later, they again asked how satisfied respondents were with their jobs. Path analysis determined the connection between SMART work characteristics, meaningful and challenging work, and job satisfaction.
Finally, the authors surveyed 108 professionals in an MBA program about the work design of their jobs and asked the students' managers to rate their performance. A regression analysis showed significant correlations between most of the SMART categories and job performance

The MIT Sloan Management Review article "Design Work to Prevent Burnout" publishes at 8 a.m. ET on December 10, 2024.

About the Authors
Sharon K. Parker is director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design at the Future of Work Institute, Curtin University and a John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Curtin Faculty of Business and Law. Caroline Knight is a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland Business School.

About MIT Sloan Management Review
MIT Sloan Management Review is an independent, research-based magazine and digital platform for business leaders published at the MIT Sloan School of Management. MIT SMR explores how leadership and management are transforming in a disruptive world. We help thoughtful leaders capture the exciting opportunities — and face down the challenges — created as technological, societal, and environmental forces reshape how organizations operate, compete, and create value.

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