Sustainability in the Workplace is About More than the Environment

Organisations need to think about sustainability when it comes to employees, not just the environment, Writes Stephen Wood

Sustainable organizations may be narrowly defined as those with a concern for the environment in a way that leads them to what is called Green Human Resource Management. In this, all aspects of personnel management are geared to reinforcing and delivering the organization’s environmental sustainability goals. But organizations, where the vast proportion of the population spend much of their day, can play a key role in ensuring that work itself is sustainable. This means allowing people to develop new skills, sustaining their well-being, and ensuring amicable and cooperative social relations throughout their lives.

It is useful to think of the sustainable organization in terms of its opposite, which Pfeffer calls the toxic organization. These organisations are characterised by poor social relationships, bullying and verbal abuse, alongside giving people little control over their work and making heavy demands on them and their time. Pfeffer coins the term social pollution to describe what needs addressing. Like its environmental equivalent it is associated with an excessive focus on economic goals and an economic evaluation mind-set.  Social pollution affects employees’ mental health, just as air pollution affects their physical health.

Calling for a sustainable organization is part of a long line of calls to give more recognition to the “human factor” in organizations, in contrast to economics or technology, that ranges from the human relations movement to the concept of high-performance work systems.  Pfeffer indeed equates the sustainable organization with high-performance work systems, which involve the coherent use of a set of sophisticated practices including extensive training, information sharing, decentralization and job security.

But I would go further than this. Not least as the high-performance work systems literature has its problems. The sets of human resource practices research included in this system vary so much that it is not clear that a consistent concept of management is being tested. Particularly noticeable is the neglect of employee involvement in many studies of high-performance work systems, even though high-involvement management is often equated with high-performance work systems. However high-involvement management is centred on employee involvement, whereas the concept of high-performance work systems do not prioritise this.

High-involvement management firstly entails providing employees with opportunities to make decisions concerning the conduct of their jobs (role involvement) and to participate in the business as a whole (organizational involvement, and it is this that primarily yields competitive advantage). Second, employee involvement is a principle that is extend to the whole organization and the design of all elements of HRM. It is not so much a matter of prespecifying a set of distinctively sustainable practices (as in the high-performance work system model) but of reframing existing human resource and operational management practices and tailoring them to particular situations, as well as inventing new ones. For example, training and development needs to be focused on supporting the requirements of involvement, team working, creativity, and diagnostic skills, and built into day-to-day activities. Appraisal processes should include frequent feedback and be focused on development and not ensuring obligations are fulfilled or a means of determining pay increases.

The argument and evidence for the effects of high-involvement management on performance and on well-being, I have argued, may be stronger than for the high-performance work systems. Its key element, the design of jobs with high discretion, has been found to have strong performance effects, particularly on innovation and creativity. Moreover, its link to high levels of well-being and job satisfaction is one of the strongest results in the social sciences. There is also sufficient evidence that capturing employees’ ideas, a core element of organizational involvement management, can contribute to innovativeness of organizations alongside technological change and formal research and development.

In contrast, there is as yet no stream of research on sustainable organization linking it to favourable outcomes. In the absence of this, or a grand study that shows that sustainable organizations do better than others, we can in the meantime construct an agenda that builds on the high-involvement notion and takes the toxic organisation as a negative benchmark. Such an agenda would take topics for which recent research exists which identifies factors that affect the health and performance of individuals and organizations. These include the negative features associated with toxic organizations, burn-out, abuse, discrimination, long hours, zero-hour contracts, and positive concepts such as psychological safety, detachment and recovery from work, work-life balance, life-time learning, distributive leadership, as well as the job design and employee involvement so central to high-involvement management.

Crucially, more attention must be paid to the interface between the organization and external entities must be central, so areas such as partnership supplier relationships, homeworking’s effects on transforming home life, employers’ role in education, youth unemployment, democratic deficits, ageing and performance are central. Also, we need to consider the creeping dominance of electronic technology in our lives which generates distance between people and bureaucratic routines not only in the workplace but in many relationships in our lives, e.g., with supermarkets and local authorities.

Sustainable organisation is then concerned with minimising losses of human and social capital, and maximising the recovery of such losses and the development of fresh capital. Mental ill health or stress is one symptom of unsustainable practice. It would be useful to identify others. Policy must address the underlying causes of these symptoms directly. For example, all too often well-being programmes are concerned with managing stress, not its causes, and at best are trying to erect a carapace around individuals and interpersonal relations. The challenge is to formulate an approach that allows organizations to develop into sustainable organisations; the route to do this is not clear.

Piecing together a concept of sustainable organization from all the disparate strands of relevant search is a mammoth task. A more promising path might be action research. This would define a concept of a sustainable organization, in broad terms, with some principles for its application, and then help organizations engage with it. Refinements of the concepts and approach to sustainability could emerge from this action research. The current discussion in the wake of the pandemic, of millennials wanting a purposeful and decent life, and of reports of widespread job quitting at least in the USA (encapsulated in by the term the Great Resignation coined by Anthony Klotz at Texes A & M) makes such a development timely. Taking a cue from this, the sustainable organization agenda might then be viewed as concerned with meaningful organizations, meaningful work, meaningful relations and meaningful skills.

Professor Stephen Wood is Professor of Management at the University of Leicester School of Business.  He can be contacted at: s.j.wood@le.ac.uk

For more of his work on this topic, see:

Wood, S. (2019), High-involvement design: the time has come, London: IPA, 2019.

Wood, S. (2020) The HRM–Performance Research Stream: are we all on the same page? International Journal of Management Reviews, 22, 408 – 426.

For the references to Pfeffer, see:

Pfeffer, J. (2010). Building Sustainable Organizations: the Human Factor, Academy of Management Perspectives,

Pfeffer, J. (2018) Dying for a Paycheck, New York, Harper