Happy, Healthy & Productive Employees

A sustainable career enables employees to remain healthy, productive and employable throughout their working lives. For organisations, supporting sustainable careers helps create the conditions for sustainable performance: long-term performance that benefits both the employee and the organisation.

This connection between employee wellbeing, employee productivity and sustainable performance was at the heart of Zest for Work’s “Happy, Healthy and Productive Employees” webinar on 21 June 2024. Together with  Professor Beatrice Van der Heijden PhD, we moved from the underlying science to the practical implications for organisations, including a concrete case study.

Professor Van der Heijden has dedicated much of her scientific career to understanding careers. During the keynote “Sustainable Careers for everybody…?!”, she shared a scientific process model explaining how sustainable careers can contribute to a happy, healthy and productive workforce.

From the employee perspective, a sustainable career is about staying happy and healthy in life and work while retaining the ability to contribute throughout the lifespan. From the organisational perspective, it means maintaining an effective workforce with the resilience and agility to respond to changing requirements.

Sustainable careers therefore connect individual development with organisational outcomes. When employees have the resources, skills and opportunities to adapt throughout their careers, they are better positioned to protect their wellbeing and remain productive over time.

A Shift from Traditional Careers to Sustainable Careers

Beyond describing the model and its different dimensions and indicators, which we explore in more detail in our article Building Sustainable Careers, Professor Van der Heijden highlighted several elements that distinguish sustainable careers from more traditional career models.

A Sustainable Career is a Non-normative Concept

A sustainable career does not follow one standardised trajectory, whether vertical, horizontal or otherwise. Instead, it is a unique sequence of career experiences that can cross social contexts, jobs, departments and organisations.

Careers therefore need to be understood as individual trajectories rather than something that can be normalised according to age, marital status, gender or initial education. It is similar to moving from ready-made clothing to something tailor-made for a specific person at a particular moment in their life.

The scientific term for this is idiosyncratic: something that is specific or unique to an individual. Understanding whether a career is sustainable therefore requires looking at a person’s needs, challenges, strengths and limitations throughout their lifespan and within their particular life circumstances.

One example is the career of Yvon Golbach, founder of Zest for Work. After studying chemistry, she moved from chemical process engineering into health and wellbeing and then entrepreneurship, with future career steps still to come. Other career paths might temporarily shift between professional roles and caring responsibilities at home.

There are as many possible career paths as there are individuals. For organisations, this means that supporting sustainable careers requires flexibility rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to career development.

A Whole-Life Approach to Wellbeing and Work

A sustainable career takes an integrated, whole-life perspective. Work and private life do not exist in isolation. Different areas of life affect each other, which means that employee wellbeing at work is also influenced by what happens beyond the workplace.

Throughout a career, people encounter disruptive events at work and at home that may trigger deliberate career reflection. Professor Jos Akkermans refers to these events as “career shocks”. In today’s volatile world of work, employees may face organisational change, technological developments, changing personal responsibilities or unexpected life events.

Career shocks can be positive or negative, but both can reshape a career at any point in life.

This whole-life perspective is important for workplace wellbeing. A healthy workplace does not assume that every employee has the same needs at every stage of their career. Instead, organisations create enough flexibility and support for people to adapt their work and career as their circumstances, capabilities and priorities change.

The Individual as the Most Important Owner of a Sustainable Career

Nobody else can determine whether a person’s career is sustainable for them. The individual is the primary actor in their career and makes choices, in interaction with others, that shape meaningful work and career experiences.

Those stakeholders include not only managers and colleagues, but also peers, friends, relatives and the wider institutional context.

Individual ownership, however, does not remove organisational responsibility. Employees need the skills and agency to shape their careers, while organisations need to create an environment in which meaningful choices are possible.

This balance between personal ownership and organisational support is central to sustainable careers. Career Resilience can help employees better understand what motivates and energises them, navigate change and take greater ownership of their employability. Organisations can support that process through career dialogue, flexible career opportunities and work that remains aligned with changing strengths and needs.

Career Sustainability and Employee Wellbeing at All Ages

Research into ageing at work also shows why sustainable career policies need to move beyond calendar age alone. Organisations typically have a range of HR practices, but the combination that best supports employee wellbeing, productivity and employability may differ between people and across life stages.

Professor Van der Heijden therefore emphasised the importance of a broader conceptualisation of age. As she explained, calendar age alone does not predict many important job and career outcomes.

Several perspectives on age can help organisations better understand employees’ circumstances:

• Calendar age: A person’s chronological age or year of birth.
• Organisational age: How long someone has worked in a particular job, organisation, department or profession.
• Lifespan age: The person’s stage of life and circumstances outside work, such as raising young children or caring for ageing parents.
• Psychosocial age: How people perceive the amount of time and opportunity they have ahead of them. Their time perspective may become more open or closed depending on their circumstances.
• Functional or performance-based age: A person’s physical health and capabilities and how these affect their ability to perform their work.

Looking at employees through these different lenses gives organisations a more useful basis for workplace wellbeing and career support than making assumptions based on chronological age alone.

It also reinforces an important principle of a healthy workplace: support should respond to the employee’s actual circumstances, capabilities and needs rather than to a predetermined view of what someone of a particular age should need.

Theories to Understand Sustainable Careers, Wellbeing and Performance

For those who want to explore the underlying science in more depth, Professor Van der Heijden also discussed three foundational theories used to understand sustainable careers.

Together, they help explain why employees’ needs, motivations and resources can change over time and why organisations benefit from flexible approaches to employee wellbeing, career development and performance.

Conservation of Resources Theory

(Hobfoll, 1989, 2001)

Conservation of Resources Theory proposes that people seek to obtain, retain and protect resources that are valuable to them. Losing resources generally has a stronger impact than the equivalent benefit of gaining additional resources.

Over time, the relative importance of gaining and protecting resources may change. This helps explain why people may focus differently on growth, maintenance and the prevention of loss during different stages of their working lives.

In a workplace context, relevant resources may include energy, health, skills, confidence, supportive relationships and autonomy.

One practical implication for organisations is to consider whether work continually consumes these resources or also provides opportunities to maintain and restore them. This is relevant to both employee wellbeing and long-term performance. Emotional Resilience, for example, can help employees recognise their personal stress signals and develop strategies to respond before prolonged pressure undermines their health or effectiveness.

Lifespan Theory

(SOC, Baltes et al., 1999; SST, Carstensen, 1996; FTP, Lang & Carstensen, 2002)

Lifespan theories help explain how goals and priorities can change throughout life. Growth may become relatively less important at certain stages, while maintaining existing strengths and regulating losses may become more important.

Research identifies general patterns in these changes, but they should not be used to predict what an individual employee wants or needs based on age alone. This distinction is particularly important within the sustainable career perspective, which treats careers as individual and dynamic.

The practical implication is that career development needs to remain flexible. Different employees will value different forms of growth, maintenance and contribution at different moments in their careers.

By responding to those changing needs rather than relying on age-based assumptions, organisations can better support employee wellbeing, employability and productivity throughout the working life.

Self-Determination Theory

(Deci & Vansteenkiste, 2004; Ryan & Deci, 2000)

Self-Determination Theory identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence or mastery, and relatedness. Meeting these needs contributes to motivation and a fulfilling life.

Their relative importance and the way people experience them may change over time. For example, relatedness may become more important during certain periods or life circumstances.

These psychological needs are highly relevant to workplace wellbeing. Employees are more likely to experience sustainable motivation when they have appropriate autonomy, feel capable in their role and experience meaningful relationships with others.

For organisations, one practical implication is to consider how job design, leadership, development opportunities and workplace culture support these needs. This helps create conditions in which people can remain motivated and effective rather than relying solely on individual effort.

An Integrated Perspective on Careers, Wellbeing and Performance

An Integrated and flexible perspective on careers

Visual adapted from De Lange, Van der Heijden, & Kooij, 2015.

For organisations, the main takeaway is that sustainable careers, workplace wellbeing and sustainable performance are closely connected.

Sustainable employee productivity depends not only on what people can deliver today, but also on whether they have the health, resources, skills and working conditions to keep contributing as work and life change.

There are five areas organisations can start with:

1. Look at the changing fit between people and their work.
Consider the fit between an employee and their changing role, workplace and profession. Robotisation, digitalisation and other technological developments can transform not only individual jobs but entire professions. Maintaining that fit requires continuous attention rather than a one-off career decision.

2. Align HR, talent and workplace wellbeing practices.
HR, talent management and health and wellbeing initiatives are more effective when they support the same sustainable career perspective. Rather than treating career development and workplace wellbeing as separate programmes, organisations can consider how both contribute to long-term employability and sustainable performance.

3. Build the skills people need to remain motivated, resilient and employable.
Employees need more than technical expertise to navigate modern careers. Career ownership, energy management and resilience all contribute to the ability to respond to changing demands. Behavioural Resilience focuses on managing energy, while Mental Resilience supports employees in navigating adversity and adapting to stressful change. Career competencies help people make deliberate choices as their work and circumstances evolve.

4. Take a critical look at job design.
Job Crafting can help employees create more meaningful and personalised job content within the possibilities of their role. More idiosyncratic jobs can help organisations respond to changing circumstances while making better use of an individual’s strengths, interests and capabilities.

5. Develop supportive leaders and a healthy workplace culture.
Managers strongly influence how employees experience work. Stress-wise leaders who take a genuine interest in people, recognise changing needs and create space for open conversations can help employees address challenges before wellbeing or performance deteriorates.

Sustainable careers therefore require a shared effort. Employees need the skills and ownership to adapt throughout their working lives, while organisations need to provide an environment in which people can remain healthy, employable and productive.

Together, these conditions help create sustainable performance without compromising long-term employee wellbeing.

Written by Caroline Thomas, Partner at Zest for Work.

References

“Sustainable Careers…?” keynote by Professor Beatrice Van der Heijden, PhD, at Zest for Work’s “Happy, Healthy and Productive Employees” webinar on 21 June 2024.

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