Most organisations spend a lot of time thinking about strategy, talent, and culture. Far fewer spend deliberate time thinking about how the actual work is designed: the shape of roles, what they ask of people, what they give back, and whether they still make sense.
Job design is one of the most underused levers available to leaders. When it’s done well, it connects individual motivation to organisational outcomes. When it’s not done well, it quietly drives disengagement, burnout, and the kind of friction that no culture program can fix from the outside.
Here’s what the current research tells us, and what it means for anyone looking at their organisation’s roles right now.
Why Job Design Matters More Than Ever
Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that only around 23% of employees globally are engaged at work. In Australia, Safe Work Australia has documented that the total cost of poor psychosocial safety to employers sits at approximately $6 billion per year, through absenteeism, presenteeism, and reduced productivity. The most common causes of serious mental health-related workplace claims in 2023-24 were work pressure (24.2%), and harassment and bullying (33.2%).
These aren’t culture problems in isolation. Many of them are job design problems. Roles that demand too much without giving people enough control, meaning, or support are a root cause of the conditions that produce those numbers.
The total cost of poor psychosocial safety to Australian employers is estimated at $6 billion per year. (Safe Work Australia)
The Foundation: What Good Job Design Actually Requires
The most enduring framework in job design research comes from organisational psychologists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, whose Job Characteristics Model (developed in the 1970s and consistently validated since) identifies five core elements that make a role motivating and meaningful.
Skill variety: the role draws on a range of the person’s capabilities, rather than one narrow task repeated endlessly.
Task identity: the person can see a complete piece of work through from start to finish, rather than only ever handling a fragment.
Task significance: the person understands the impact their work has on others, whether that’s colleagues, customers, or the community.
Autonomy: the person has meaningful discretion over how they approach their work, not just what they do.
Feedback: the person receives clear information about how well they are performing, ideally from the work itself as well as from their leader.
A 2025 study published in Global Business and Organizational Excellence, drawing on data from organisations in Slovenia and Malaysia, confirmed that all five of these characteristics remain strong predictors of work engagement in contemporary workplaces. The model has held up across cultures and industries for five decades, which says something about its validity.
Importantly, Hackman and Oldham’s formula is multiplicative, not additive, when it comes to autonomy and feedback. A role can score well on skill variety and task significance but if people have no autonomy and no feedback, motivation collapses. The three states those characteristics create (meaningfulness, responsibility for outcomes, and knowledge of results) all need to be present for the model to work.
“Well-designed roles create the conditions for motivation. Poorly designed roles create the conditions for disengagement, regardless of how strong the culture around them is.”
The Psychosocial Safety Layer
Job design is no longer just a motivation question. Under Australia’s updated Work Health and Safety legislation, managing psychosocial hazards is a legal obligation, and how roles are designed is directly relevant to that obligation.
Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) research, much of it developed by Professor Maureen Dollard and colleagues at the University of South Australia, treats PSC as ‘the cause of the causes’ of work stress. It argues that the conditions under which work stress develops, including excessive demands, low job control, poor support, and unclear role boundaries, largely originate in how organisations design and manage work.
In practical terms, this means that a role that consistently requires more than a person can reasonably deliver, without the resources, support, or control to manage it, is a psychosocial hazard. It’s not just a wellbeing concern. It is a workplace risk, and leaders have a duty to address it.
The four elements of PSC that research has identified as most predictive of worker health outcomes are: senior management commitment to psychological safety, the organisation’s communication around psychosocial risks, the degree of worker participation in decisions about how work is organised, and whether policies and procedures genuinely reflect a priority for psychological health. All four have direct implications for how roles are designed and managed.
Roles That Can Evolve: The Case for Job Crafting
One of the most significant developments in job design thinking over the past two decades is the shift from treating roles as fixed structures to understanding them as living arrangements. The concept of job crafting, developed by researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, describes the proactive steps employees take to reshape their roles to better fit their strengths, interests, and values.
A 2024 study published in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal found that job crafting was associated with improved performance, work engagement, and job satisfaction, and that psychological safety was a key enabler. When people feel safe to adapt how they work, they do it in ways that benefit both themselves and the organisation.
For leaders and organisations, this has a practical implication: the goal isn’t to write a perfect job description and then defend it. It’s to create role structures that have enough stability to be clear, and enough flexibility to allow the person in the role to bring their best thinking to how it’s done.
Practical tip: Start with a role conversation, not a role description.
Rather than reviewing a position description in isolation, sit with the person in the role and ask: Which parts of this work do you find most meaningful? Where do you feel most stretched (in a good way)? Where do you feel underused? What would make this role more sustainable? Those conversations often surface design problems that no org chart review would catch.
Designing for the Organisation and the Customer, Not Just the Employee
Good job design has to serve more than the person in the role. It also has to serve the organisation’s strategy and the people the organisation exists to serve: its customers, clients, students, patients, or community members, depending on your context.
Research consistently shows that the link between employee experience and customer experience is not incidental. A 2024 study published in the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews found a significant correlation between employee engagement and service quality. Culture Amp’s data from 2023 identified ‘service and quality focus’ as one of the strongest drivers of engagement, while also noting it was among the areas that saw the steepest decline in that year. When roles don’t give people a clear line of sight to the impact of their work, engagement and quality both suffer.
This means effective job design asks: does this role allow the person in it to understand how their work connects to what we’re here to do? Can they see the customer or end user of their effort? Does the structure of the role create friction between serving the customer well and meeting internal demands?
“When people can’t see the purpose of their role in action, it’s harder to stay motivated. Job design is one of the most direct ways to make that line of sight visible.”
Five Questions to Ask When Reviewing Job Design in Your Organisation
If you’re looking at your organisation’s roles right now, here are five questions worth working through.
1. Does each role have enough variety and completeness?
Roles that are too narrow, where a person handles only one fragment of a process, score low on task identity and often skill variety too. Look for opportunities to redesign work so people can see what they’re contributing to, not just the part they touch.
2. Do people in each role understand why their work matters?
Task significance doesn’t require a grand mission. It requires that the person knows who is affected by what they do and how. This can be built through direct contact with customers or end users, storytelling about impact, and clear connections between team goals and organisational purpose.
3. Is there meaningful autonomy in how work gets done?
Autonomy doesn’t mean absence of structure. It means the person has genuine discretion in at least some dimensions of how they approach their work. If every process is prescribed, motivation and accountability both suffer. Ask: where could we give people more say in how they achieve outcomes, even if the outcomes themselves are non-negotiable?
4. Are the demands of this role sustainable?
Roles that have grown organically over time often carry a decade’s worth of accumulation without anyone stepping back to ask whether the total is reasonable. Apply a psychosocial safety lens: are the demands consistently outpacing the resources, control, and support available to the person? If so, that’s not a performance problem; it’s a design problem.
5. Does the role as written match the role as lived?
Position descriptions often bear only a passing resemblance to what the person actually does day to day. Regularly checking that gap, and either updating the description or redesigning the work, keeps roles honest and gives leaders accurate information about what they’re actually asking of their people.
A Note on Where to Start
You don’t need a wholesale organisational restructure to improve job design. Some of the most effective changes are targeted: adding a feedback loop that was missing, reconnecting a role to the customer it serves, giving a team more autonomy in how they organise their workload, or splitting a role that has grown too large for one person to carry sustainably.
The place to start is usually a conversation. Not a survey or a process review (though those have their place), but a direct conversation with the people doing the work about what the role asks of them, what it gives them, and where the friction is.
In our work with organisations across Newcastle, Sydney and the Hunter Region, these job design conversations often surface issues that no org chart review would catch.
Organisations that invest in thoughtful job design create conditions where people can show up motivated, stay sustainable, and deliver well for the people they serve. That’s not idealistic. It’s what the evidence consistently points to.
If you’re looking at how roles are structured in your organisation, or want to explore how job design connects to culture and leadership, get in touch. We work with leaders on exactly these kinds of practical, people-first challenges.
Stacey Kelly is Director at Seed People Consulting, a boutique organisational development consultancy based in Newcastle, Australia. Seed People Consulting works with leaders and organisations on leadership, team effectiveness, and culture.
