SMART work: How to beat the Great Resignation

Your employees need to feel they are in control of their workloads if you want to retain them.

Sharon Parker.Picture:Colin Murty The Australian

Intolerable workloads are a recognised source of mental health issues at work, but it’s not always possible to reduce that stress; think aged-care facilities, where there’s little chance of more staff at a time of such labour shortages. But a heavy load – and the chance your employees will resign rather than battle on – can be offset by more autonomy and stimulating work, according to an expert in job design, Curtin University professor Sharon Parker.

Across more than 30 years, Parker and her team have developed a model called SMART Work Design.

That acronym goes like this: S is for stimulating; M is for mastery; A is for agency (autonomy); R is for relational; T is for tolerable demands.

Get all five of those elements working in your company or organisation and you are likely to hit the jackpot in terms of happy, mentally healthy and productive workers. But adopting the model is not easy, says Parker, an Australian Research Council laureate fellow who heads Curtin’s Centre for Transformative Work Design.

In part that’s because in Australia we are still shaking some of those old “time and motion” ideas out of our managers’ heads. That system of scientific management, known as Taylorism after its inventor Frederick Taylor, defined much of the thinking about efficiency in jobs in the early part of the 20th century. But many of the ideas linger in the view, for example, that if work is broken down into discrete tasks, workers become proficient in specific areas and everyone is more productive.

That’s very different to more modern thinking about work design, with concepts such as agile teams increasingly popular in organisations.

Parker says many of these ideas come from an engineering perspective but SMART is based more on psychology and human need: “What do we value and want in our work in order to be healthy and productive?

“In some senses Taylorism was premised on the idea we want to bring workers in and train them really quickly. Let’s break the work down into the tiniest little pieces and give each person a tiny piece of that work. And then we can train them really quickly to do it because it’s so simple. We can monitor their performance really tightly ... And then let’s incentivise people on how many nuts or whatever they can turn in the hour.

“We’re really talking about trying to unravel some of that mindset.”

Parker says managers tend to design simple jobs because they think employees will become very efficient at particular tasks. But this approach fails to account for the need for broader motivation and the fact workers can get “bored to death” , with an obvious impact on performance and productivity.

Her research during the pandemic found that about 25 per cent of managers did not trust their remote workers; another study found about 20 per cent of managers had this mindset.

Says Parker: “There’s probably one-fifth of managers who have this mentality of ‘let’s simplify everything and make it as efficient as possible’ and not really trusting people or giving them autonomy and agency.”

Good work design is good for mental health, but also for performance and productivity, and especially for outcomes such as creativity and innovation, she says.

“By and large, if people are really stressed or if people find their work boring and meaningless, they’re not going to be creative and innovative,” she says.

Back to the SMART model.

Making work stimulating, says Parker, is about giving employees a “bit of variety in their work, a feeling that they’re developing themselves and growing and learning new skills, and that they have some challenges and problems to solve”.

There’s evidence too that humans thrive on novelty, so building new elements into a job can be helpful.

Mastery in jobs is about “really recognising that most people want to go to work and want to do well and want to master their tasks”.

“But to do that, they need to be really clear what it is that they’re expected to do,” says Parker.

“So we talk about role clarity. People need to know what are their roles, what are their responsibilities, and then of course, they need to get feedback on how they’re tracking on those things.”

A is for agency or autonomy, but Parker prefers to talk about agency because autonomy is so often wrongly confused with automation and reduction of human involvement in tasks.

She says: “Agency is about people feeling they have some control over when they do their work, where they do their work, how they do their work, and some influence on those aspects of work that affect them.

“Agency is really important from a stress perspective because if you wanted to actually cause someone stress, you would put them in a situation where they had a lot of pressure but no control. We want people to feel in control, and that’s good for their mental health.”

Parker says the concept of work being “relational” is about workers feeling connected and belonging to colleagues and their employers. “People want to connect with people at work, they want to feel part of something bigger,” says Parker. “They want that support from other people. Cultivating relational work is really important.”

The final SMART element is “tolerable” work.

“This is the big one in some senses right now,” Parker says. “All work has demands of some sort. It might be time pressure demands, it might be emotional demands, if you’re an aged-care worker, for example.

“Whatever the demands are, they need to be experienced as tolerable. In other words, you need to feel you can cope with them.”

Parker’s centre is looking at redesigning work in aged care, which she describes as “a bit of a basket case when it comes to quality of work for staff”.

“We can’t wave a magic wand and just say, instead of two staff dealing with 100 people, we’re going to give you four. We can’t do that. So sometimes it’s really challenging to reduce the demands in a workplace to make them tolerable.”

But research shows if you increase other elements – more agency, more stimulation – you can make the demands feel more tolerable.

“So, for example, if you’re an aged-care worker and you’re under a lot of pressure but you’ve got a really supportive boss and you’ve got good relationships with colleagues and you all help each other and you support each other (it can work),” says Parker.

Similarly, working from home can increase agency because you have more freedom. The downside is less connection with your colleagues.

Says Parker: “If you’re looking at creating good work from home, you’ve got to look at the whole model and think about all aspects of the model.”

She says there is strong interest around the world in the SMART framework, triggered in part by fears of the Great Resignation and burnout levels.

“There’s so much more awareness these days and at the same time there’s growing awareness that sending people off for counselling if they’re stressed or burnt out is good, but it’s not dealing with the root cause,” she says.

“So there’s an enormous appetite to say, how do we actually create work that doesn’t cause people to get stressed in the first place? But because agency is in some senses about giving people more control, more influence, that can be quite challenging.”

Parker says SMART work design requires input from workers and is not just about managers deciding what is needed.

“In general, finding out the best ways to make smart work is going to require involvement of workers, and that can be challenging for some organisations,” she says.