Reference no: EM133277728

Your goal is to develop a behavioural change intervention to encourage workers to return to work- after a long absence which may be due to COVID-19 work-from-home directives or illness/injury. Your solution needs to be innovative, creative, feasible, realised and founded in behavioural science and what you have learned during the course.

Your idea will be evaluated on three dimensions- potential impact, feasibility of implementation, and the plausible use of behavioural insights.

The problem:

It is widely recognised that long-term absence from work is harmful to physical and mental wellbeing (Black, 2008). Returning safely and quickly to work has strong benefits for the individual, their family, employer and the broader sustainability of the workforce (and workers compensation system).

Returning to work after illness/injury can be cumbersome. Workers often have to lodge documents to process a workers compensation claim, work with medical practitioners to develop an injury management plan and may have to negotiate an adjustment of their responsibilities and duties at work, as well as hours worked.

Returning to work after following work-from-home directives to minimise transmission of COVID-19 can be similarly challenging. As reported by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (2020), "bringing people back to work is not as simple as flicking a switch". Many workplaces are experiencing a reluctance by staff to return, for various reasons.

Your intervention needs to:

Question 1. Understand why and what challenges individuals face returning to work. You may choose either illness/injury or work-from-home problems. Some research is needed here.

Question 2. Identify a target cohort. Workers are not all alike, you might like to focus on specific demographic.

Question 3. Decide on an appropriate intervention that will change the behaviours/attitudes identified in (1).

Question 4. Decide on a measure of success. How will you know if it works? Describe a process that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention.

Question 5. Evaluate how feasible your intervention is. That is, how much will it cost? Remember that the goal with behavioural interventions is to be VERY low cost or cost nothing. (e.g. moving the salad to the front of the buffet).

Question 6. Impact- is it likely to work for your target cohort? Are there similar interventions that have been evaluated and how successful were they? Would it work for another cohort? Is it scalable?