Here is an excerpt from an article written by Sharon K. Parker and fCaroline Knight for the MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others,  sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration Credit:  Tang Yau Hoong

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A new model for improving work design supports change that increases employee engagement and reduces stress.

Managers are responsible for keeping employee morale and productivity high. Yet when they try to reduce burnout and improve worker well-being, many report not knowing where to start or what to do.

Absent clear solutions, they tend to focus on fixing the person, such as by offering the overworked employee productivity tips and encouragement to assert healthy boundaries, or providing stressed-out workers with training in mindfulness techniques or yoga classes at lunchtime. However, fix-the-worker strategies do little to resolve stress caused by long hours and unreasonable workloads.

The problem is not new but remains urgent and costly. HR leaders are painfully aware that disengagement and burnout are significant threats to productivity and talent retention. In the U.S., 67% of workers report feeling disengaged from their work, and 49% intend to leave their current job.1 Meanwhile, burnout is rampant. In a 2023 survey of U.S. adults, the American Psychological Association found that younger workers, especially, are at risk: Fifty-eight percent of 18-to-34-year-olds said that their daily level of stress is overwhelming.2 Disengaged, stressed-out employees do not perform at their best, and when one of them quits, it costs an estimated 30% to 200% of that employee’s salary to recruit and train their replacement.3

A better approach is to create healthier and more sustainable jobs through good work design. Decades of research show that when jobs include positive characteristics such as autonomy, variety, and social support, employees are more satisfied, motivated, and committed to the organization, and they perform better.4 Meanwhile, minimizing work characteristics that harm people, like excessive time pressure, is crucial to preventing burnout.

But herein lies the challenge: Really improving work design requires leaders to consider more than three dozen positive and negative work characteristics. This level of detail enables them to gain a nuanced understanding of work design, but deciding which characteristics are most important to address can be overwhelming. Furthermore, the two most common models for designing work are difficult to apply and are incomplete in crucial ways.

The Job Characteristics Model, first introduced by organizational psychologists Greg R. Oldham and J. Richard Hackman in 1976, identified five important characteristics for work motivation and well-being.5 However, many more characteristics have since been identified, and the model does not cover job demands that drive burnout, such as workload. The 2001 Job Demands-Resources model captures job demands, but it defines job resources (which are similar to “work characteristics”) broadly and expands the list to more than 30.6

In this article, we’ll introduce readers to our SMART Work Design model. This model captures and synthesizes the most important characteristics for worker well-being and performance from both the Jobs Characteristics and Job Demands-Resources models into five dimensions: stimulating work, mastery, autonomy, relational work, and tolerable demands (thus the SMART acronym).7 HR leaders, managers, and employees can use the model to identify aspects of work that lead to disengagement and burnout and then create a healthier work environment and improve performance. (See “A Model for Making Work Smarter.”)

The Key Elements of Good Work Design

Jobs that workers are more likely to find engaging and fulfilling have the following positive characteristics.

Stimulating work provides task variety, the chance to develop and use one’s skills, and the opportunity to solve challenging and meaningful problems. Jobs that lack stimulation involve highly repetitive tasks that give individuals no chance to improve their skills or gain new ones. Because stimulating work makes employees feel challenged and allows them to grow, it fosters job satisfaction, engagement, and well-being.

Mastery occurs when people understand their roles and responsibilities, get feedback from peers or supervisors, and see how their work fits into the bigger picture. Most workers want to perform well, yet to do that, they need to know what they are trying to achieve and how well they are doing. A lack of mastery is stressful and undermines worker performance.

Autonomy ensures that workers have control and influence over when and how they work, including their schedules, opportunities to take initiative, and their daily decisions. Workers with high autonomy develop a sense of ownership, making them more creative and innovative and more likely to apply effort.

Relational work recognizes the human need to belong, which is vital to feeling engaged and performing well. It provides opportunities for connection with other people through social support, social contact, and teamwork. It also offers workers the sense that they are making a difference in the lives of others. When workers have support from their boss and peers, they cope better under pressure. Lack of connection and support at work can contribute to loneliness.8

Tolerable demands refers to the level of effort that workers consider manageable. Job demands can become intolerable when workers must routinely put in excessive overtime to meet them, suffer abuse from customers or colleagues, or are given conflicting priorities. These conditions create extreme pressure that can overwhelm people’s ability to cope. Ensuring that demands are tolerable is one of the most powerful ways to prevent worker burnout.

These five categories are interrelated and should be considered together when making work design decisions. For example, high job autonomy is most appropriate for workers who have attained a certain degree of mastery — not for those who are still learning their roles. Heavy workloads can feel more tolerable if workers have autonomy over their tasks and the support of their colleagues.

The SMART Work Design model can provide insights and guidance to individuals and managers seeking to fix a problematic situation with job crafting (more on that later). But work design problems are often systemic in organizations, and the model can have greater impact when leaders use it to diagnose work design issues, align work design with corporate policies, manage change, and improve performance management.

The model can be used in multiple ways. Once leaders and managers have surveyed employees to identify the dimensions in need of change, they can develop appropriate strategies. These might be local or organizationwide work redesigns with complementary corporate policy and practice changes.

SMART work design can also be built into leadership competency frameworks and change management models so that managers and bosses learn how to lead people and manage change more effectively. Employees and managers can be trained in job crafting to improve work from the ground up. Whatever strategies organizations adopt, employees, managers, and other stakeholders should collaborate to develop new work designs.

In this time of widespread disengagement, healthy and productive work is urgently needed. The SMART Work Design model can help organizations achieve it.

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