It’s Psychology week (Yay!) and this year the focus is ‘Working Minds’.
We know mentally healthy workplaces are good for people, and good for business. Employee wellbeing (ie the ability to feel good and flourish) has been linked to greater job satisfaction, better performance, and decreased likelihood of burnout or turnover.
This week the University of Melbourne released their report into the workplace wellbeing of Australian workers.
The authors outlined the Australian context:
- During the pandemic few reported consistently thriving in their jobs (only 10.7% in 2020).
- COVID moved Australian workplaces to remote working overnight – the impossible became the norm for many.
- Just as workplaces changed, so did people’s expectations and beliefs about work, with over 40% of employees reporting intentions to leave their workplace, and actively seeking “work that meaningfully enriches their lives”.
The research found that workplace wellbeing can be increased by:
- Job crafting (defined as the informal ways you can shape your job so that it better aligns with your strengths, values and interests (Slemp, 2016). Job crafting can be achieved through Task crafting (changing aspects of how you perform work, including re-designing, adding or removing tasks), Relational crafting (proactively changing how, and who, you engage with at work), and Cognitive crafting (reframing how you think about work, including its value, purpose or the meaning it brings to you personally and professionally).
- Harnessing passion (defined as the enthusiasm, love, and drive you have for your work). Including: harmonious passion (your job is in harmony with your broader life) and obsessive passion (your job is in conflict with your broader life) (Vallerand, 2015).
- Increasing psychological safety (defined as your belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks in your organisation, like speaking up and asking for help (Edmondson, 1994). Psychologically safe workers are more likely to job craft, experience harmonious passion (and passion more generally) and have greater wellbeing.
The COVID disruption has created an opportunity to reshape our working lives.
So if you’d like support to creatively job craft, channel greater passion for work, or reconsider your work options, please get in touch – we’d love to help!
