High-performance cultures - job demands

FREE WEBINAR (ZOOM)

Monday, 25 March 2024
11.00am to 12.00pm (AEDT)

We are back with our second webinar on decoding psychosocial risks in the workplace, with a specific focus on job demands.

Following our insightful discussion on eliminating the risk of low job control in the first webinar, Stephen Bell, Managing Director, and Consulting Psychologist and guest speaker Steven Booker are back to dissect the impacts of job demands — whether excessively high or too low — on the psychological and physical wellbeing of employees, and their performance in the workplace.

Safe Work Australia defines high job demands as requiring elevated levels of physical, mental or emotional effort needed to accomplish the job while low job demands involve sustained low effort, often leading to idleness (due to lack of tools or resources to complete the task) or employee’s engaging in monotonous work (which deprives them off opportunities to improve their competencies).

The intent of running this webinar is to assist stakeholders with the tools to manage these risks, provide guidance on early intervention, and offer effective consultation and support, internally or externally, to mitigate these risks as far as reasonably practicable.

"Most employers know they have an obligation to identify and eliminate or control psychosocial risks; but, it can be harder to know how to identify and address those risks in practical terms”, says Steven Booker, Consulting Psychologist, and subject matter expert.

What you will learn

Job demands, such as:

  • excessive workloads
  • prolonged work hours
  • tight deadlines
  • Monotonous tasks
  • lack of role specific tasks to improve competency

can lead to increased stress levels among employees, resulting in a range of physical and mental health problems like anxiety, depression etc. If job demands are consistently high or low, it can cause burnout as well.

According to a study published in the National Library of Medicine in 2022, high or low job demands, if not adequate, can cause exhaustion in employees and trigger undesirable states such as health and wellbeing issues.

Thus, there is a greater need for employers to prevent job demands from turning into a workplace hazard, however, it can be rather challenging to:

  • identify and benchmark the level of this psychosocial risk in your workplace.
  • prioritise any identified areas for intervention.
  • develop practical intervention strategies that are achievable within the organisation’s context, stakeholder expectations, existing WHS structures and budgets.

Who is this for

  • WHS professionals

  • HR professionals

  • Senior managers

What to expect

Quick refresher on:

  • the legal obligation to identify and control psychosocial risks 

  • the 14 key psychosocial risks in the workplace

  • what are the legal requirements for managing psychosocial risks

  • the methods available to employers for identifying psychosocial risks in their workplace 

Deep dive into the risk of 'high and low job demand'

  • what are low and high job demands

  • what percentage of Australian workers report high or low job demands

  • which industries/occupations are most at risk

  • what’s the link between high and low job demands and health, wellbeing, performance, employer brand and profitability

  • how can we measure high and low job demands and identify reasonable versus harmful levels

  • what interventions improve high and low job demands at individual, team and organisational level

  • what’s the ROI of the interventions in terms of wellbeing, engagement, performance and productivity

Question and answers

Meet our experts

Stephen Bell, Managing Director

Stephen’s HR proposition is that the quality of a workplace culture is paramount in determining the success of employee engagement strategies.

In hosting this webinar, Stephen will draw upon his years' of experience in providing advice to organisations on the power of workplace cultures and its relationship to employee performance, wellbeing, engagement, and risk mitigation. 

Steven Booker, Consulting Psychologist

Steven's focus is to help employees and employers alike in resolving workplace situations with empathy, fairness and non-discriminatory outcomes.

He does this by providing a mixture of training, coaching, mediation, employee counselling, proactive advice to managers, critical incident management, outplacement, team building, and cultural/team reviews.