The Future of Work: Emerging Risks and Opportunities for Health and Well-Being

ABSTRACT

COVID has transformed work for many people. Projections are that higher levels of work from home will continue into the future as hybrid models become more common. This change, whilst giving rise to opportunities for workers such as greater job autonomy, also creates new - or heightens already well-understood - psychosocial risks for workers (such as social isolation, exclusion, increased work demands). At the same time, the digital agenda also has major implications for how people work. Algorithmic decision-making, for example, is pervading work contexts beyond the gig economy. Increasingly autonomous forms of automation likewise have significant implications for the roles humans carry out at work. In this presentation, I describe a work design perspective for understanding the implications of these large-scale future changes (e.g., increasing work from home, accelerated digitalization) on workers’ health and well-being. I introduce the SMART model of work design to describe both positive and negative potential implications of future work. SMART is a model of work design based on a higher-order factor analysis of more than 20 work characteristics, involving five higher-order elements Stimulating, Mastery, Agency, Relational, and Tolerable. Using this model, I make the case that there are few deterministic impacts of digital technologies and other large-scale future work changes. Rather, there are positive choices that can be made (e.g., about the design of technology, how change is implemented, and leaders’ work design behaviors), complemented by appropriate health and safety policies, that strongly shape the impact of digital technologies and other such changes on worker health and well-being. Without a proactive approach in which positive evidence-based choices are consciously adopted, the risks to workers’ health and well-being are high. I conclude with suggestions for research directions and opportunities for change in practice and policy.