This session hosted by Dr Kim Hamrosi , CEO of our Australia Chapter the Corporate Mental Health Alliance ANZ , featuring Dr Laura Kirby , Chief Mental Health Officer, Commonwealth Bank, Carlo Caponecchia , Associate Professor, University of NSW and Alistair Carmichael , Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company, aimed to understand how organisations can go beyond initiatives that aim to ‘fix’ the worker and instead focus on work that protects workers, minimises harm and promotes well-being. 

In this excerpt from the session Dr Laura Kirby, Chief Mental Health Officer at The Commonwealth Bank discusss employee experiences and the systematic root cause of poor workplace mental health.

Key takeaways from the event included: 

• Many organisations are focusing on interventions and support for individuals but not fixing the things that they’re in control of – working practices, systems and expected behaviours . 
• The approach to redesigning work is about evaluating what large or small changes you can make in the processes, systems, resources, environment and interactions involved in that work. 
• In large and complex organisations, diverse and bespoke solutions may be needed to address specific work design issues that are causing stress in individual teams or locations. 
• Work redesign skills can be developed in organisations with individual tasks or scenarios, before scaling across the wider business. Leadership can empower and enable individuals to re-craft their own roles. 
• Clarity across the business on the direction of the organisation and the individual’s role in that is an essential foundation piece upon which understanding job purpose and effective work redesign must be built.