#204 – Stacey Parker on Designing Work for Wellbeing, Motivation, and Performance

Yeah.

I, I like the, the use of the word proactive because it, it seems like, and I've, I've got no sort of backing to this, but it seems like the modern world has really genuinely put an emphasis on being proactive in the workplace and looking at these factors-

Mm

... as where maybe 30 years ago, 50 years ago, and I'm only speaking sort of generally 'cause, you know, uh, as 50 years ago predates me, um, and I certainly had no, no idea about the workforce at that time.

But it seems like there's a cultural shift.

Is that, i- is that true? Is there anything that, that underpins that, or is that a bit of a fallacy?

There's definitely been a lot of interest in what employees can do themselves to protect their wellbeing and, and enhance their performance.

Um, I, my background or training is in what's called occupational health psychology, and we actually mostly focus on the work environment, the job design, the employer's duty of care to protect employees' wellbeing.

Um, and I'm definitely an advocate for that, and I'm so glad to see that decades of that research, you know, which I've also contributed to now, is in legislation in Australia.

You know, the, there's a duty of care.

Employers need to look after employees in terms of their work design, and the employer needs to be the one that's proactive, monitoring those work stresses, making sure they're not too risky or harmful, and mitigating, um, those risks so that employees don't become burnt out from work in the first place.

But as I sort of went on, um, and reading the literature, it's very hard to do that level of job redesign.

Um, it's very hard, and I wanted to sort of move into studying things that employees could do themselves rather than waiting for their job to be redesigned, you know?

Mm.

So the little things on a daily or weekly basis, um, that we could do ourselves to protect our wellbeing and enhance our performance.

Yeah.

Yeah.And just to be, to be fair, because sometimes we can misread these things, you're not saying that an employer doesn't have-

No. [laughs]

Um, yeah, 'cause the, the, the whole point of these types of conversations is for nuance, right?

That's right.

But I know that sometimes the moment we focus on one area, sometimes nuance can be lost.

Mm-hmm.

And, and, and what, what, what's Stacy saying? I'm the only person...

You know, I'm the so on and so forth, versus, uh, what you're actually saying is a lot has been done from the employer perspective and continues.

Um-