King's College London

The project 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.

A multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional team headed by Strathclyde University 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 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.

King’s Professor Ben Geiger will be responsible for leading on a parallel survey of workers to compare these intervention sites to.

Researchers will investigate whether these interventions manage to improve different work health and wellbeing outcomes for different kinds of workers and in different organisational contexts, and look at the key factors that affect implementation, experiences and outcomes. They will also assess the financial costs and savings of the job crafting intervention.

Project lead Professor Adam 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.”

The research team also includes experts from the Universities of Sheffield, Oxford, Westminster, Leicester, 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.

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.”

The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. 

NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Its work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK international development funding from the UK government.