'Burnout is really rife right now, and a lot of people want to change or reduce their workload'
With current work health and safety laws requiring businesses to “minimise or eliminate” psychosocial risks, it’s critical that human resources professionals ensure they have strategies in place to protect workers.
Psychosocial risks refer to “anything that could cause psychological harm”, and can range from high workloads and poor support, through to more serious issues such as workplace harassment and bullying.
To reduce psychosocial risks, businesses should consider looking at “work design”. This involves understanding and measuring your risk levels, then recrafting your roles, teams and organisation to manage those risks effectively.
The first step is knowing what your hazards are. This can be done through surveys such as People at Work, which you can send to employees. Based on the employees’ answers, the survey can determine whether a business is at low, medium or high risk for situations such as burnout or conflict.
Once you understand what level your business is at for psychosocial risks, you can look at the work design process and address the issues.
“Work design is all about who, why, how, what and where work is getting done,” Stephanie Reuss, co-founder of work design platform Beamible, said.
“A typical example is where you might have gaps in the team, and that puts a lot of pressure on the team remaining. We often see managers wearing multiple hats, covering the gaps as well as doing their own role, which is already at capacity. Work design can really help managers work through a coverage plan.”
After you’ve found areas in your business where there is high pressure, you can figure out exactly what everyone is doing. From there, you can identify the critical work that needs to be done and the work that you can pause, reduce the amount of time spent on, or stop altogether.
There are significant benefits to implementing work design. Teams across Australia have increased productivity by up to 21% while reducing the risk of overload, burnout and emotional exhaustion.
“Burnout is really rife right now, and a lot of people want to change or reduce their workload,” said Reuss. “People are really crying out for a way to do that, so being able to visually break down what’s been done is really powerful.”
