Five job design questions every HR leader should be asking

Job design has historically sat in the background of HR practice: addressed at induction, revisited at restructure, and otherwise left in a position description. The regulatory environment around psychosocial risk has changed that. Role clarity, workload, and job demands are now formal hazards under WHS legislation across every Australian jurisdiction. How work is designed is a risk management question. 

At our panel discussion in Sydney around psychosocial safety and performance, Dave Burroughs, Principal Psychologist at Australian Psychology Services, shared a recent consulting project with some stark figures: 

"Work overload was associated with lack of role clarity, and the lack of role clarity was associated with

poorly managed organisational change. Across over 100 leaders, there were thousands of hours every week lost to hindrance work.

We could quantify that to over $20 million a year cost saving for that organisation." 

Here are five questions to help you assess your organisation’s job design and how it might be affecting employee wellbeing. 

1.  Do your people know exactly what their job is? 

Role ambiguity is one of the most consistently identified psychosocial hazards in the research literature and one of the most underestimated in practice. It shows up as friction, duplicated effort, and decisions that never quite land. 

The SMART Work Design model, developed by Professor Sharon Parker at Curtin University's Future of Work Institute, frames Mastery — knowing what's expected, having the skills to deliver it, and receiving clear feedback — as a core determinant of employee wellbeing and performance. When Mastery is low, the cause is usually structural. 

ACTION:
Ask your managers: can you describe your team members' roles in two sentences? If the answer varies significantly from person to person, or from what people say about their own roles, that gap is worth examining. 

2.  How much time is lost to work that shouldn't exist? 

Dave's case study introduced a useful concept: hindrance work. This is work generated by unclear accountability, poorly managed change, and structural confusion rather than genuine demand. The meetings that exist to relitigate decisions already made. The reports produced for audiences who never read them. 

Unlike visible operational costs, hindrance work goes largely unmeasured and is rarely attributed to its actual source. 
 
ACTION: 

Ask your leadership team to estimate what proportion of their week moves things forward versus manages the friction of unclear roles and processes. 

3.  Are your managers equipped to have job design conversations? 

Most manager capability frameworks focus on feedback, goal-setting, and accountability. Fewer equip managers to notice when the structure of a role is generating an issue, rather than the person in it. 

At the panel event, Danielle Odd, Director of Wellbeing, Health and Safety at PwC, shared how her team addressed this through the SMART framework — a structured check-in tool covering Stimulation, Mastery, Agency, Relationships, and Tolerable Demands.

When a manager used it in a routine one-on-one, he discovered a team member was overwhelmed, struggling academically, and quietly considering leaving. He helped with all three. Afterwards he told Danielle: 

"If I didn't have that framework and that language, I would not have asked her about uni,

I would not have asked her about her (work) relationships, and we would have lost an amazing talent." 

ACTION:
Build the job design lens into your manager capability programs. 

4.  Is your definition of high performance based on outcomes or inputs? 

This is a job design question as much as a culture one. If your organisation rewards visibility, availability and hours over quality and impact, the role itself is signalling the wrong things. 

Jo Cairns, Chief People Officer at Team Global Express, described a talent review where a leader had identified top performers based on weekend availability and hours worked. P&C challenged that definition and the panel agreed: high performance should be defined by outcomes. Deloitte's 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 44% of Gen Zs and 40% of millennials have turned down an employer because of insufficient support for work-life balance. How roles are designed, and how performance within them is measured, is increasingly a factor in whether your best people stay. 

ACTION:
Take a cue from Margherita Maini, Managing Director of Culture, Leadership and Talent at PwC, who embeds wellbeing expectations into annual goal-setting: alongside what your team are working on this year, ask what a genuinely good outcome looks like, and how they plan to look after themselves to deliver it. 

5.  How is your job design holding up through change? 

Organisational change is one of the strongest predictors of role confusion. When structures shift and decision-making rights become unclear, the work people end up doing often diverges significantly from the job description. 

SafeWork NSW's Psychological Health and Safety Strategy 2024–2026 lists poorly managed organisational change as a formal psychosocial hazard that organisations are legally required to identify and control. Dave's case study traced that $25 million productivity cost directly to this. 

Jo Cairns, describing a major restructure underway at Team Global Express, was direct about the tension: the business wants to move fast, but the cost of moving without clarity shows up later in confusion, friction and attrition. "Sometimes you've got to slow down to speed up. Get the role design right, get the decision-making right, and provide a little transparency to people — you'll actually get better business outcomes." 

ACTION:
At every significant change milestone, ask what the change does to how people understand their roles. Treat that as a risk question and a people one. 

The answers to these questions may take time to surface. When done well, job design rewards ongoing attention. Dave Burroughs put it succinctly at the event: 

"The more we identify and remove the barriers to wellbeing, the more we're also removing the barriers to

performance, productivity and engagement. There's almost a false dichotomy in trying to put them into two different camps." 

If you'd like to talk through how your organisation is approaching job design, and are looking for either permanent or temporary HR support, get in touch with The Next Step team.