Many organisations still allocate significant budget to improve wellbeing, engagement, and retention through wellness initiatives, resilience training, and employee support programs. While there will always be a need for employee-focused programs, research suggests that increasingly organisations are looking to address the root cause rather than the symptoms.
In 2021, researchers from Harvard University and MIT Sloan developed the Work Design for Health framework. They argued that employers should focus less on changing individual behaviours through wellness initiatives, and more on creating workplace conditions thatsupport wellbeing.
Their research highlighted factors such as job design, workload, scheduling practices, autonomy, supervisory support, and organisational systems as critical determinants of workforce health and performance.
More recently, and we’ve written about this before, Fleming's 2024 paper suggested limited evidence that individual-level mental health interventions improve employee wellbeing.
Together, these studies reinforce a growing consensus: organisations seeking sustainable improvements in wellbeing, engagement, and performance should focus on redesigning work. Not simply helping people cope with poorly designed work.
Where Organisational Psychologists Create Significant Value
Historically, organisational psychologists were most associated with talent assessment, employee selection and psychometic testing, leadership development, employee surveys, and organisational change. Their expertise was often concentrated within large organisations, government agencies, military settings, education, and professional services firms.
Today, however, the profession is undergoing a significant shift. I/O Psychologists have a broader role involving organisational strategy, technology and large-scale change.
As organisations become more complex and workplace legislation evolves, organisational psychologists are increasingly becoming strategic advisors across organisational design, culture, psychosocial risk management, and governance.
Australia provides the clearest example. Recent psychosocial risk legislation has elevated psychological health and safety from a wellbeing initiative to a regulatory obligation. Organisations are now expected to identify, assess, monitor, and manage psychosocial risks in the same way they manage physical safety risks. This has created growing demand for expertise in work design, leadership behaviour, organisational culture, job design, and psychological safety.
The Netherlands, UK, and Canada are also moving in a similar direction as governments, regulators, boards, and insurers place greater emphasis on psychosocial risk, burnout, workplace wellbeing, and psychologically healthy workplaces.
At the same time, the nature of work itself is changing. Hybrid work is now commonplace. AI and automation are reshaping jobs and workflows. Organisations are grappling with how people and technology work effectively together, often across remote locations and timezones, while ensuring inclusion, collaboration, innovation, and employee wellbeing are maintained.
As a result, organisational psychologists are increasingly focusing on questions that barely existed twenty years ago:
New specialisations are emerging in response, including culture risk specialists, organisational design specialists, psychosocial risk advisors, and governance advisors.
Organisations that see this gap and bring I/O Psychologists and OD's into their capability will be the ones that are best set up for the next stage in business.
Having access to the right data to understand the structural drivers of cultural risk is the first step. At Helder Insight we collect and analyse cultural risk intelligence data to support I/O Psychologists and Organisation Design professionals. If you're a practitioner and interested to know more, get in touch.