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Webinar Title: Clarity amidst the complexity: Insights on job design and the workload management juggle for teachers
October 15th 2pm-3pm PST / 5pm-6pm EST
Language: English
Presented by: Jill Lowry and Sara Pazell
Workload is a major determinant of physical (e.g. MSD) and psychological health among workers. High mental workload is correlated with job stress and burnout, causing adverse organizational outcomes. This is a common phenomenon in service professions. In the teaching environment, this can impact on the engagement and retention of skilled teaching staff. Ultimately, this adversely affects educational outcomes among students.
This webinar presents human factors methods to analyse the workload exposures and job design of primary and high school teachers. Uniquely, these methods included review of existing wellbeing data on teaching staff. The practitioner/researchers used desktop, thematic review from several epistemological approaches: a salutogenic model; the job demand-control-support (JDCS) model; the model of stimulating, mastery, agency, relational, and tolerable demands (SMART), and a review of neurobehavioral work drivers. These methods informed a customized survey from which the researchers used digital solutions to capture their data. This data enabled agile work strategies; costing, time, and time-value analytics; and an ongoing job design medium. A preliminary literature review also provided insights on work intersections along a lifecycle journey map: by reviewing this literature, the researchers learned about workload impacts and teaching attrition trends. The findings from these approaches were important because they altered the central office’s focus on the intervention strategies. In this way, the approaches could be more targeted and meaningful to the teaching staff.
Key points:
- Human factors strategies offer a scientific approach to resolve real-world problems and add to the rigour of work re-design in service professions like teaching.
- Viewing data from multiple lenses can clarify work phenomenon and inform targeted work (re)design strategies.
- Digital media and data analytics can enable agile work strategies so that job design can occur dynamically
Sara Pazell’s Bio
Sara Pazell is a principal work design strategist. She helps corporates and communities articulate design opportunities, craft their problem-based design statements, and manage transformation with the introduction of new technologies, new environments, or systems changes. She asks, “How to design when humans are part of the system (work, product, technology, environment, or ecosystem), and what is the user experience? What if we did things a little differently? What can we dream that can become our new reality?”
Sara and her teams work across all industries in their consultancy and service coaching. Sara is an educator and a researcher, affiliated with five Australian universities. She specializes in transformative, participatory, action research to solve real-world challenges. Sara is a rabble rouser in the WhyWork Podcast, and an advisory on global and national wellness design accreditation and training programs.
Jill Lowry’s Bio
Jill Lowry is an Occupational Advisor: Health & Work and an Associate Ergonomist at ViVA health at work. Jill is an Occupational Therapist with over 15 years of diverse workplace experience in various sectors such as mining and construction (including FiFO work), the fitness industry, and healthcare. She is studying a graduate course in ergonomics. Jill's work focuses on human factors and ergonomics, to help organizations optimize their work systems; to resolve real-world workplace concerns; and to enhance worker physical and psychological well-being, health, and productivity.
Jill's understands the daily, real-life implications of work design in a multitude of industries. This drives her passion for using human factors methods to improve work exposures and job design. She uses digital solutions to enable dynamic job design and foster supportive, adaptive work systems and environments. Jill is ViVA’s program lead in representing some of these job design digital strategies.
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