Work design: Stimulating

SMART work is stimulating

Stimulating work has 3 aspects:

• You use a wide range of skills and abilities (skill variety).
• You do a wide range of tasks and activities (task variety).
• You have challenges and problems that you have to solve (problem solving). 

Highly stimulating jobs are likely to address all 3 aspects.

By contrast, jobs with a low degree of stimulation will likely involve:

• few opportunities to use your skills
• a narrow range of tasks, which are often monotonous and repetitive
• few, or menial and unchallenging problems.

People working in highly stimulating jobs are:

• more engaged, and have higher job satisfaction and access to professional and personal development
• less prone to injuries (e.g. from highly repetitive physical tasks).

Stimulating workplaces:

• have higher productivity
• less absenteeism and presenteeism
• higher retention and lower turnover
• fewer physical and mental injuries and illnesses.

Tips to make work more stimulating

Workers

Some ways you could make your current job more stimulating include:

• Ask your manager for new challenges and skill development opportunities. This is something you could discuss as part of a professional development plan. 
• Find out if there are opportunities to swap or rotate roles with someone else in your team or organisation. It may only be swapping a few tasks, and your colleagues may also be excited to learn something new. 
• When planning your week, see if there are ways to organise your work to provide a little variety throughout each day. 

Managers

If you are a manager, here are some ways you can make your organisation a stimulating workplace:

• Provide opportunities for job shadowing or job rotation, so your team can learn something new in a different part of the organisation.
• Check in with workers about their tasks, and whether they feel they have enough variety in their workload.
• Plan work allocations to ensure each person on the team has a variety of tasks to complete.
• Regularly ask people what skills they would like to develop that could benefit their role. Be sure to allow time for skill development.