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Section 2: Employee Experience.
What’s it like to work in a Queensland independent school?
This section explores the nature of work in Queensland independent schools to understand how work is designed, planned, and organised, and how staff develop and progress their careers.
Role design is the process of defining and structuring job responsibilities, expectations, and boundaries within an organisation. Effective role design matters because it provides clarity, structure and purpose for employees, and can set an employee up for success by ensuring that expectations are clear and attainable with appropriate support.
Recently introduced Australian workplace regulations require employers to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate psychological risks in the workplace, such as high job demands, low job control, poor support, and role ambiguity. For independent schools, this means role design must be proactive and explicit in how it addresses these potential risks.
Role clarity and support.
We asked survey participants to rate their agreement with a range of statements about the expectations of their role, how it contributes to the school’s purpose and the feedback they receive in order to continuously improve; results are presented in Chart 6.
Results were especially positive in relation to staff’s understanding of what’s expected of them in their work (88% agreed or strongly agreed); staff’s visibility of how their role contributes to the school’s purpose (80%); and perceptions of the support and resources available to them (74%).
Results were less positive by comparison in relation to staff’s perceptions of leader support to develop a professional growth plan (58% agree/strongly agree) and their perceptions of the feedback they received (64%).
Chart 6: Role clarity and support questions – overall responses.
Employee voice and role autonomy.
Role autonomy is the degree of independence and discretion employees have in performing their work. One way to make incremental improvements in role autonomy is by inviting staff voice into decision-making processes that affect how work is done. Research has shown that when educators feel heard and valued, it can lead to enhanced job satisfaction, increased engagement, and improved retention rates (Nguyen et al., 2024).
In our survey, we asked staff for their perspectives on the autonomy they had in their work, and the input they had over decisions affecting how they worked. Chart 7 shows a breakdown of their responses overall. Of these questions, staff were most likely to indicate having input into a) how their jobs were aligned to their skills and interests (71% either agreed or strongly agreed with this statement); and b) what professional development opportunities they pursued (68%).
Respondents were least likely to report having input into how staff work at the school (50%), how to manage their own workload (52%), and the decision-making processes that affect them (56%).
Chart 7: Role autonomy and staff voice questions – overall responses.
Flexible work practices.
In most parts of the education sector, heightened attention and debate about flexible work has not translated into changed practice in line with other industries. This is partly due to the implications for already-complex school timetabling; the expectations of parents and other stakeholders; and the need to prioritise the student experience and student outcomes.
When done well, though, flexible work arrangements can lead to improved outcomes such as greater work-life balance, job satisfaction, and employee performance (Çivilidağ & Durmaz, 2024).
We asked participants to indicate which flexible work arrangements are currently available to them, using a list based on the Workplace Gender Equity Agency’s framework (Workplace Gender Equity Agency, 2019)—see Chart 8.
A considerable majority of participants did not access any flexible work arrangements at all. Among those that reported any flexible work options, the most commonly-cited option was varying work start and finish times (16% of responses in the overall sample).
Chart 8: Prevalence of flexible work arrangements overall.
Workload and work intensity.
In the organisational psychology field, workload and work intensity are distinct but closely related concepts. While workload refers to the volume of work staff are expected to complete within a given timeframe, work intensity relates to the subjective experience of doing the work: the level of effort required (e.g. emotional labour); the complexity of the work; and the feeling of pressure (e.g. time pressure) the employee experiences.
To quantify staff perceptions of work intensity, we provided participants with a definition of the term and asked them to rate their perceived work intensity this week on a scale from 1 (lowest intensity) to 10 (highest intensity). The average work intensity rating in the sample overall was 6.8. We then broke their responses into bands (1-2 = low intensity, 3-5 = low-medium intensity, 6-7 = high-medium intensity, 8-10 = high intensity). A majority of respondents (53%) reported high work intensity during the week they took the survey. Only 16% of respondents reported low or low-medium levels of intensity.
Breaking these ratings down by school size, we found that staff in smaller schools (500 students or fewer) tended to report lower intensity ratings—in these schools fewer than half of respondents reported a high work intensity rating.
Interestingly, we found a roughly linear pattern between the number of years an employee had worked in the education sector and their perceived level of work intensity. Chart 9 shows this pattern broken down into bands. We excluded respondents in leadership roles from this chart, cognisant of the high degree of work intensity reported by that cohort.
Respondents with more than 20 years’ experience in the sector were much more likely to perceive high work intensity than those in their first five years in the sector.
Chart 9: Perceived work intensity – breakdown by years in education.
Key takeaways.
Examining elements of job design and practical aspects of the employee experience in Queensland independent schools, we found that:
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Leaders in the sector might consider:
Reviewing the design of key roles with a particular focus on the degree of role autonomy afforded to staff.
Finding opportunities to invite staff input into decision-making that affects them. Providing more personalised professional learning planning may be a quick win.
Investigating the specific drivers of workload and work intensity in their school to understand the specific risks that may need addressing.