A project to investigate whether ‘job crafting’ can help disabled workers stay in employment has been award a grant of £1.8M from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
Research has found that disabled workers are twice as likely to fall out of work than non-disabled workers, and disabled workers report a range of problems when trying to get workplace accommodations to help them perform to their best at work.
Job crafting emphasises the proactive role an employee can take in asserting control over their work to adapt their jobs to align better with their strengths, skills or interests, boosting satisfaction, productivity, sustainability and wellbeing in the workplace as a result.
Support workers
A multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional team headed by Strathclyde Business School’s Professor Adam Whitworth will examine whether ‘job crafting’ is an effective way to support workers with disabilities or health conditions and help keep them in the workplace.
The research team includes experts from across Strathclyde Business School and from the Universities of Sheffield, Oxford, Westminster, Leicester, King’s College London and East Anglia, as well as leading disabled people’s organisations including Breakthrough UK, Speakup Self Advocacy, Sick in the City, Disability Rights UK, Inclusion Scotland and Business Disability Forum.
Project lead Professor Whitworth said: “Workers with disabilities or health conditions are twice as likely to exit employment than their non-disabled counterparts. However, current workplace interventions struggle to effectively support many disabled workers due in part to their top-down, targeted and reactive approach. This leaves significant gaps in the research and effectiveness of workplace support for workers with disabilities and health conditions which is bad news for workers, employers and government.
“Most workplace interventions focus on trying to change workers. For lots of reasons that is not normally helpful – or fair – for disabled workers because it ignores the importance of the nature of work and workplaces as well as people’s differing needs and strengths. In contrast, our project emphasises changing the nature of work itself using a social model of disability that empowers disabled workers and that recognises the important interaction between disabled people and their work environments.
Our project, WISHES: Workplace Intervention for Sustainable Health and Employment Support, will trial whether job crafting can help workers with health conditions, disabilities or potentially other workplace support needs to make positive changes to their jobs and workplaces to improve their employment and health outcomes.
“Job crafting is quite a new idea. The emerging research evidence shows that job crafting interventions have a positive effect on burnout and work engagement. However, the evidence is limited in various important ways, including rarely being tested amongst workers with health conditions or disabilities and rarely with the ambitious range of outcomes and evaluation techniques that WISHES includes.
“We are excited to get started with this important project and to grow the international evidence base around how job crafting might play a role in supporting workers with health conditions and disabilities to thrive in their workplaces.”
Diverse organisations
The team will design and trial a large-scale job crafting intervention for disabled workers and those with health conditions in diverse organisations across the UK. They will investigate whether these interventions manage to improve different work health and wellbeing outcomes for different kinds of workers and in different organisational contexts. They will investigate the key factors that affect implementation, experiences and outcomes and will assess the financial costs and savings of the job crafting intervention.
Professor Whitworth added: “We plan to run a series of public events and create easy-to-use resources to share our findings and learnings so that other workers and businesses can easily do our job crafting intervention themselves in the future if they want to.
“Our multi-disciplinary project will be co-produced between academics, disabled people and disabled people’s organisations to ensure that lived experience feeds into all aspects of the research and that disabled people remain at its heart.”