Audio Interview

SMART work: implementing better work design

Published on September 4, 2022   31 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Interviews with business leaders and scholars

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Interviewer: Today I'm interviewing Professor Sharon Parker, Director of the Center for Transformative Work Design, and a John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Organizational Behavior at Curtin University, Australia. A link to the biography accompanies this interview. Professor Parker is the joint author with Dr. Gwenith Fisher of Colorado State University of an article in the March 2022 MIT Sloan Management Review, "How Well-Designed Work Makes Us Smarter". Listeners are expected to have read the article before listening to this interview. Professor Parker, thank you for spending the time for this interview. Towards the end of the article, you introduce your smart, S-M-A-R-T, program, for developing well-designed work. May we first focus not on what needs to be done, but on how you envisage managers being trained to do what needs to be done, and why it is good economics to do so both for business and for society as a whole? Professor Parker. Prof. Parker: Thank you, Neil. I guess the first thing is that for managers to create SMART work, they need to understand what SMART work is. That means coming to grips with each of those acronyms, S-M-A-R-T. I'm not sure if you would like me to go through those, but I guess that's the first thing, is they need to understand, what do we mean by work design? That's not a trivial issue because I guess, traditionally,

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