Design for Care State of Affairs Breakfast 3

Creating better work to improve carer’s mental health in aged care and disability organisations

One in two Healthcare and Social Assistance (H&SA) employees with poor work design report experiencing burnout. But poor work design isn’t inevitable- large differences exist in the quality of H&SA employees’ work design and those differences are clearly linked to mental health in the workplace. To address the challenge of poor mental health in aged care / disability care / out of home care (the HS&A industry), the Design for Care research project has partnered with eight aged care, disability care and out-of-home care organisations to co-discover solutions to improve work design and employee wellbeing.

Design For Care will be launching their third report at the Design for Care State of Affairs Breakfast on Wednesday 3 April in Sydney. The industry event invites Senior Leaders, Human Resource Professionals, Leaders in People and Culture and Work Health and Safety to hear first-hand the key learnings, insights and success stories to emerge from the project so far.

Professor Anya Johnson and Professor Helena Nguyen from the University of Sydney Business School will provide an overview of the research process, the PARRTH to SMART Work Design created by ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Sharon Parker. They unpack what this looks like on the ground and describe three of the work redesign interventions that are already making a difference to mental health and wellbeing of employees.

The insights are based on workshops with leaders and frontline staff and carers in partner organisations where they have co-created work redesign interventions. In these workshops, front line carers learn about the principles behind SMART Work design; the five characteristics that are important for how we experience work: Stimulating, Mastery, Agency, Relational and Tolerable. SMART work is Stimulating and has some variety and opportunities to learn and use skills. Good work also enables Mastery, where it is clear how to work effectively and there is feedback to help achieve success. Agency is vital, or some control over how and when work is done. Work should be Relational, or embedded in effective and supportive relationships, with colleagues, supervisors and clients, residents or patients. Finally, good work has Tolerable demands. All work has demands, but these should not be more than can be managed in a work shift.

In order to improve mental health outcomes in the healthcare and social assistance industry, leaders need to focus on improving work design rather than “fixing” the individual worker.

Redesigning work can be as simple as creating a small team to manage tasks that used to be isolated from each other, having team huddles to discuss what needs to be done, and hearing suggestions for how to do it more effectively. Workers often know how the work could be done better but are prevented from acting by systems and processes that are inflexible. The challenge is for leaders to create opportunities for work to be a place where their staff can thrive. This can only be good news for the most vulnerable in society who depend on this care.

At the breakfast, speakers will be providing examples of the changes that front line carers have made that have made a difference. The will detail three examples that carers and social workers have trialled, such as creating a process for providing more clarity and transparency for the work that needs to be completed at the beginning of each shift. Increasing support for new carers as they enter the profession and improving the social and relational environment to make the emotional demands more tolerable.

The Design for Care State of Affairs event will feature a panel of H&SA employees from Whiddon, Key Assets and Bankstown City Aged Care who participated in the Design for Care workshops and interventions themselves. They will discuss their experience of co-creating strategies to redesign their work, roles and tasks to improve staff wellbeing and mental health.

Design for Care is a research project aimed at developing and assessing work design interventions to create mentally healthy work in the NSW healthcare and social assistance (H&SA) industry. The project is led by Professor Sharon Parker at Curtin University’s Centre for Transformative Work Design, with Professors Anya Johnson & Helena Nguyen at the University of Sydney, and Professor Alex Collie at Monash University. The project is supported by a team of research and professional staff across the three universities and is funded by icare NSW.

Register at https://events.humanitix.com/design-for-care-changing-work-design-to-improve-mental-health-in-the-healthcare-and-social-assistance-industry

The breakfast is free to attend.