SAFETY SATURDAY: WORK DESIGN

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

 - Bertrand Russell.

Work is one of the inescapable realities of life. The only two things that are certain in life are Death and Taxes, as the saying goes, but Work is another certainty as well, because there is always something to be done. The philosopher Plato acknowledged the centrality of work to social and personal life (Plato, -375), and many contemporary societies are employment-centered (Gorz, 2010). Work then is another inevitability in life, among Death, Taxes, and the fact that I will write Safety Saturday Articles. Historically and socially, work and labour have been respected within cultures - the Ancient Greeks admired skilled craftsmanship, the Confucian tradition embraces hard work, perseverance, professionalism, and the Christian tradition considers work the means to manifest one's status as elect in the eyes of God - that's where we get the Protestant Work Ethic from. 

Work is not only paid work - there are other elements of human life that are understood in relationship to work because of the centrality of work and effort to the human mind. Parenthood is a job. Couples work on their relationships. Gymgoers work on their bodies when they work out. Less attractively, formal work where a worker is employed is one in which a worker exchanges time and effort for a wage with an employer. Sometimes the employer is also the worker, the proprietor, or the sole trader. This is how jobs and the labour market work - people do things. However, in the doing of this work, the making of goods, exchanging of money and the parlay of the finite time we have in our lives, there are assumptions about how work is done. Often, the way work is done, and the way jobs are design just happens or has evolved over time (Worksafe Queensland, 2021). How work is performed, the arrangement of tasks, the systems of work and so much more arise from a series of decisions, made consciously and unconsciously to achieve an aim. This series of decisions is design - the mindful or meandering plan by which work is organised (Grant et. al., 2011). The earliest examinations of these ecosystems of decisionmaking were when Smith (1776) and Babbage (1835) presented systems by which work could be organised to improve efficiency by streamlining tasks, increasing focus, and minimising variance in tasks. Work design principles developed through the 20th Century, where Taylor (1911) and Gilbreth (1911) applied scientific methodology and analytical rigour to improve the efficiency of workers' tasks to improve productive output. 

However, these workspace and design analyses examine the worker as an element of the work-system. Efficient work is simplified work, but repetitive work is stressful work (Lundberg & Johansson, 2000). Workers may perform better when supervised, but supervision that is used to ensure that deliverables are met can cause stress despite increasing performance (Aiello & Kolb, 1995). Streamlining workers' tasks improves their efficiency, but workers who are allocated to one task alone and deprived of job control or decisionmaking capacity are more at risk of stress and consequent depression (Ganster & Rosen, 2013). When work is designed in a way that prioritises the output of that work process then the worker is relegated to a fleshy element of the work system, and placed at risk. Where work is then made more complex because of technical, operational, or political reasons, the worker is again exposed to hazards owing to operational factors - where job design fails to consider cognitive and psychosocial elements of human operation, those unaccounted factors have the potential to become sources of harm (Clegg, 1984). Workers are diverse, with different basic capacities and inclinations. Work is uniform and requires completion of a task in line with an operating procedure, scope, or otherwise determined outcome. This is an important notion - a worker's abilities are engaged within a system whose goal is the transformation of that ability into an output - dirt moved, patients treated, documents signed. Balancing worker abilities and resources against organisational demands is work design - to organise the "content and organisation of one’s work tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities" to best meet this balance (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1991; Parker et. al., 2014a). Where this balance is met, performance is smooth and continuous; investigation into what constitutes a good job finds that workers value more than wages; they also value work that is good, that engages them, and which is of quality (Clark, 2015). Where this balance is upset or this value is unfulfiled, workers experience stress, are at risk of increased injury, and increased likelihood to leave their jobs. (Nahrgang et. al., 2011). Worker consultation and representation have been identified as key drivers of good work design outcomes (Safe Work Australia, 2015a; 2022). Concordantly, countries that have stronger worker employment policies and high trade union representation in government have better quality work design and better worker outcomes (Holman, 2013). Where businesses favour competitive strategies that decrease the cost of production, the quality of work design is degraded (Payne & Keep, 2003).

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that large firms or even small operators will adapt their processes of work to engage with good work design principles, where those processes are already established, where the firm would have to expend an inordinate amount of money to reorganise their work, or where the workplace or work organisers are either indifferent to or ignorant of the necessity of considering antecedent factors of worker health. This is doubly unlikely in the current economic climate. However, good work design is still possible. Where consideration is given to good work design as a proactive step in a business undertaking, it is possible to use work as a health-supporting measure. Work is, generally, understood to support health and wellbeing, by reducing social isolation, and alleviating poverty in those cases where workers receive fair pay for their labours (Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine [AFOEM], 2011). Good work design, applied well, provides workers with the resources they need to meet the demands of their work, and allow them surplus such that their health may be protected as well (Parker, 2014b), where supporting workers through better engagement improves their individual capital and engagement with job resources (Schaufeli et. al., 2009). Providing workers with additional assets with which to meet the demands of work, in the form of information, training, instruction and support improves the balance of resources toward the side of the worker, buttressing them against the imposition of job demands and improving their performance (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Bluff, 2019). Failing to account for the diverse and differing demands of the workforce actually completing the work increases the risk to which workers are exposed, and this risk profile may change across the lifespan of the worker, as workers experience different vulnerabilities across different industries as well as at different life stages (Fraade-Blanar et. al., 2017). Good work design requires, understanding and accommodating cultural and identity diversity to support individual health, wellbeing, engagement and productivity. Good work design can also be used to overcome barriers to participation for workers with physical and cognitive disabilities or with otherwise diverse needs (Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine [AFOEM], 2011). By providing resources to the worker that facilitate their sustainable participation in their duties of work, or by reducing the demands of job roles through human-centered work and environmental design, the difference between a worker’s capacity and the demands of work can be reduced, thereby improving participation in job roles and reducing the needs of the worker to leverage their own or other extra-occupational resources to support their continued engagement with work. This means that good work is work that has moved beyond the conceptual notion of merely preventing injuries but looks at work as a point of intervention that can support the health and wellbeing of the worker doing that work (AFOEM, 2013). Good work design offers businesses and employers the opportunity to pre-emptively assess the need for and consequently distribute the allocation of job resources to address vulnerabilities that may arise from the interaction of people, processes, plant, and practice in normal job operations. Given that the demands of work are often dynamic and elastic, ongoing consultation and review with workers is an essential element of work design in the preparatory and propagative phases, to the extent that Safe Work Australia identifies consultation and collaboration with workers and stakeholders as an enabler of safer and healthier work overall that minimises the incidence of adverse events and controls the exposure of workers to hazards (SWA, 2023).

Work design that supports good work is not a simple thing to discuss or summarise. Beyond discussing the benefits of work as an activity or the effect that good or bad working practices have on individuals or industries, good work design requires a manager, organisation or firm to identify the context of their work, work processes, their capabilities, and threats from within and without the organisation. This requires re-evaluation of assumptions regarding the way things are done and the manner in which work is carried out, as well as review of the effectiveness of design decisions that have been made as part of the work development process (Karanikas et. al., 2021), and often requires trade-offs between different priorities of intervention (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006). Additionally, changing business as usual to business as can best be done to support worker job autonomy, minimise repetition, improve the utilisation of skills and providing supportive and proactive feedback are all process interventions that require time, resources, and the ongoing input and support of management (SWA, 2015b). Work design that supports good work requires manager and operational buy-in from the initialisation phase all the way through to review and beyond. This is an ongoing process which is threatened by changes in technology, resourcing, and by the business’ place in the broader economic and social context (Knight et. al., 2021), making it all the more necessary to present sound evidence-based approaches to facilitate buy-in and investment (Parker & Jorritsma, 2021).

The world is full of assumptions, that things should be done or should exist in the way that they are or do because of regularity, simplicity, or inevitability. Accidents and adverse outcomes happen when assumptions of life and society fail - people may lift more than they might be able to handle, take on tasks beyond their capability, work in a manner that doesn’t account for all the variables, or fail to account for change. Things are the way they are because decisions have been made that have arrived at this point, and those decisions have been made consciously and unconsciously. Work design is work consciousness - an awareness of what is being done, why, and the impacts of those decisions on workers and end-stakeholders. The greater the considered awareness of the task at hand, the larger the number of opportunities to engage with work, workers, and work tasks to ensure their safety as a proactive measure, and maybe even make decisions to arrange work practice in such a way that hazardous tasks become healthy. Design is the process of technical problem solving through which decisions are made to achieve an outcome, and the application of that process to the inevitability of work can soften its impact on its participants. 

None of this information constitutes medical, legal, occupational health and safety, best guidance, standard, or other guidance, instruction, or prescription. 

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References

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