Job Design for People with Disabilities: Lessons from the Danish Flexjob Program

Mainstream labour market research considers jobs as given and predefined implying that individuals must adapt to jobs. However, to make the labour market more inclusive, jobs need be adapted to individuals with different capacities and limitations. This basic idea was acknowledged in the early job design literature and later in the job crafting literature. In the disability literature, ideas about job design are alluded to in the literature on vocational and occupational rehabilitation, supported employment, customized employment and individual placement and support. However, the job design approach has not previously been explicitly applied on the case of job design for people with disabilities. In this article, the case of the Danish flexjob program is used as an example of deliberate job design. The flexjob program is an employment program that integrates persons with permanently reduced work ability in the labour market by adapting their work hours, job functions, work intensity and wages.
The primary data is a survey among employees in flexjobs compared to employees in standard employment relationships. The survey makes it possible to compare the job characteristics of employees in flexjobs to employees in standard employment and assess the implications for work motivation, growth opportunities and job satisfaction. We find that the deliberate job design of flexjobs is a successful way of including people with disabilities in the labour market. By comparing them to employees in ‘ordinary’ jobs, we find that employees in flexjob experience a high degree of work motivation and job satisfaction, but lesser growth opportunities within the job. We discuss the lessons of the case of flexjob to disability employment and the contribution of job design theory to the literature on disability and employment.