When people struggle at work, organisations often respond by trying to make them stronger.
We offer resilience training, wellbeing apps, mental health days and advice about boundaries. These initiatives can help, but they cannot compensate for excessive workloads, poor leadership, limited autonomy or systems that make it unnecessarily difficult for people to do their jobs.
In my recent Future Fit Leadership conversation with organisational psychologist Dr Kat Page, we explored a more confronting question: what if the problem is not the person, but the way the work has been designed?
Kat has spent almost two decades researching workplace wellbeing, mental health and work design. Her book, Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out, challenges leaders to stop treating wellbeing as something that sits beside the work. The work itself is one of the greatest influences on how people feel, perform and live.
Work can give, and it can take
Kat grew up on a 40-acre property near Benalla as the daughter of two police officers. Although her parents had retired by the time she understood what having a job meant, she saw how deeply work had shaped their identities.
She also inherited their commitment to community service. From a young age, she understood that work could provide meaning, connection and the opportunity to help others. But she also saw that it could leave a lasting mark.
At 21, Kat discovered research into happiness and wellbeing. It gave her a way to explore a question that would shape her career: what makes work genuinely good for us?
Happiness at work, she explains, is more than the absence of stress or burnout. It is the presence of something positive. People want to enjoy their work, feel cared for, align their work with their values and know that their contribution matters.
“Not miserable” is hardly an inspiring organisational ambition.
One warning sign leaders should notice is cynicism. Kat describes cynicism as what can happen when a passionate person has been disappointed too many times. When someone who was previously energised becomes withdrawn, pessimistic or stops contributing ideas, the question should not immediately be, “What is wrong with them?”
The better question may be, “What has happened around them?”
When the research became personal
After years of studying wellbeing, Kat was made redundant.
Because her identity had become so closely connected to her career, she did not experience it simply as losing a job. It felt as though she had lost part of what made her worthwhile.
Knowing the research did not protect her from the emotional impact. But the experience helped her recognise that she had drifted away from her original sense of purpose. She had built a career, but lost touch with her calling.
Rather than rushing into another role, Kat examined her values and scored her previous jobs against them. That process became a blueprint for what she wanted to create next.
It is a useful exercise for leaders, too. Understanding what people value allows us to shape opportunities, projects and relationships that help work become more meaningful. This does not always require a new job description or expensive program. Sometimes it begins with a better conversation.
Resilience is not a substitute for good design
Kat is not opposed to resilience. There are difficult parts of life and work that we cannot remove, and people need the capacity to navigate them.
The problem begins when organisations use resilience to help people tolerate preventable dysfunction.
A paramedic may need resilience for the emotional demands of frontline work. They should not have to spend that resilience navigating broken systems, unnecessary bureaucracy or poor management. When we exhaust people with avoidable organisational friction, they have less capacity available for the work that genuinely requires it.
Kat encourages leaders to examine four elements: load, latitude, love and leadership.
Load is not only the volume of work. It includes its complexity, emotional intensity, cognitive demand and variety. Latitude is the agency people have over how they respond to those demands. Love captures connection, community and what people value about their work. Leadership shapes and amplifies the experience of all three.
Knowledge does not work in hours
Many organisations still measure productivity using ideas inherited from an industrial era. Hours once had a more direct relationship with output. But much of today’s work depends on judgement, creativity, problem-solving and relationships.
As Kat puts it, knowledge does not work in hours.
A better decision does not necessarily emerge because someone sits at a desk longer. In fact, creativity and judgement often deteriorate when people are depleted. Sometimes the breakthrough comes when we step away from the problem and give the mind enough space to make a connection.
This becomes even more important as AI removes repetitive tasks. If technology saves someone two hours, organisations can either fill those hours with more activity or reconsider what productivity should mean.
Kat argues that the real opportunity lies in using AI to remove bureaucracy and redesign work at a system level. But leaders will need to create the air cover that allows people to benefit. Otherwise, every efficiency gain will simply return to the system as another expectation.
Leadership is work design
Leaders are also carrying increasing pressure. Organisations regularly respond to new challenges by placing another responsibility on managers, often without removing anything else.
Kat’s advice is simple: when we add, we must also subtract.
Psychosocial safety regulation is forcing important conversations about workload, role clarity, support and harmful behaviour. But Kat warns that organisations can become so focused on compliance that they move backwards, replacing human judgement with documents and checklists.
Policies matter, but they cannot create good work on their own.
Work is one of the most significant determinants of health available to us. Leaders therefore have both the privilege and responsibility of designing work that gives people agency and shows them they matter.
That does not mean removing every challenge or making work easy. It means reserving people’s resilience for the challenges that matter, rather than wasting it on problems we have the power to fix.