Work and Wellbeing: From Balancing Act to Working well
- Pooja Sachdev
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Performance and self-care are often positioned as things to “balance” but what if they are not competing priorities, but mutually reinforcing ones? Here's a fresh look at how work & wellbeing intersect.
Photo by Myles Bloomfield on Unsplash
In my daughter’s primary school, the children already talk about “Wednesday hump day” and “Fri-yay.” She’s nine years old.
Without realising it, they are absorbing a powerful cultural message: work (or school, in her case) is something tiring and undesirable, that we have to ‘put up with’ for five days, and wellbeing begins when work stops.
The same assumption is evident across the modern wellbeing industry. We are encouraged to rest and recover, to switch off, escape, take breaks, and practise self-care – to counterbalance the exhausting effects of our jobs. Work sits on one side of the scale, while wellbeing sits on the other.
But this is an incomplete picture.
Yes, work can be demanding and tiring, but – under the right conditions – work can also be a source of meaning, joy and purpose and it can enhance our health and life satisfaction.
As children, we fantasize about what we want to be when we grow up – and as adults, the first question we often ask people we meet is what they do. Work holds an important place in our sense of self and how we relate to the world around us.
And stopping work – as promising as that sounds – doesn’t always bring us greater wellbeing (1). Many retirees talk about how they miss the daily structure and work relationships, and retirement is associated with higher risks of many physical and mental health conditions.
Beneath the deadlines, pressure and politics, there is a “twinkle” of meaning in the work we do – a desire to contribute, create, solve, build, care, lead, or make a difference in some way.
Yet the conversation about work and wellbeing has become narrowly focused on survival and recovery, rather than also exploring the conditions under which work can actively help human beings flourish.
Beyond Burnout: Work and Wellbeing
Much of the literature and conversation about work and wellbeing sits within the bucket of stress management and burnout prevention. And there’s a good reason for this. Burnout is a real risk in many organisations. Poorly designed work can damage mental and physical health. Toxic leadership, lack of autonomy, unrealistic workloads, and constant uncertainty all take a heavy toll.
But there is another side that receives less attention. Work can also provide:
• meaning and purpose,
• identity and self-worth,
• belonging and connection,
• sense of achievement and fulfilment,
• structure and rhythm, and
• opportunities for growth and contribution.
In other words, work can either diminish wellbeing or enhance it. The relationship between work and wellbeing is not binary, but a spectrum.
At one end lies depletion: chronic stress, disengagement, anxiety, exhaustion, and burnout.
At the other lies flourishing: energy, meaning, creativity, connection, and fulfilment.
And somewhere in the middle is what many people experience most days: “happy enough” functioning - neither deeply fulfilled nor deeply distressed but getting by. (2)
Different people, at different times, might ebb and flow through the spectrum.
But one thing many organisations fail to realise is that the absence of burnout is not the same as the presence of wellbeing - surviving work is not the same as thriving.
The False Trade-Off Between Performance and Wellbeing
One of the most persistent assumptions in organisational life is that performance and wellbeing are competing priorities.
Leaders frequently speak about “balancing” business performance with employee wellbeing, as though the two exist in tension. Push too hard on performance and wellbeing suffers; focus too much on wellbeing and performance declines.
But this positioning is incorrect and limiting.
Increasingly, evidence and experience suggest that performance and wellbeing are not opposites but mutually reinforcing.
In their book Do More in Four, Joe O’Connor and Jared Lindzon remind us that the 5-day week is a relatively recent construct (Henry Ford standardised this in 1926) and the concept of time-based pay is a carry-over from the industrial age, when productivity was directly correlated with time spent at the factory line.
In the knowledge economy, that formula doesn’t work. Hours spent “in the office” or “at the desk” may not necessarily translate into how much we get done. The same report can take us 2 hours or 10 hours to write, depending on our state of mind, and the environment around us. Factors like how tired we are, our stress level, how much ‘headspace’ we have and how supported we feel, are stronger predictors of both the quantity and quality of work we produce.
In other words, our wellbeing actually drives our performance.
And the opposite is also true. Doing good work can itself contribute to wellbeing. There is satisfaction in solving problems, making progress, developing mastery, collaborating effectively, or contributing to something larger than oneself.
So rather than just trying to “do more hours” we should be trying to do better hours. The goal is not to “balance” productivity and wellbeing, but to enhance both simultaneously, by:
enabling people to focus their attention more effectively and sustainably
creating space for reflection and creativity, and
reducing unnecessary stress and complexity.
The irony is that many workplaces undermine the very conditions required for the performance they seek. Constant urgency, excessive meetings, fragmented attention, and unrealistic workloads create the appearance of productivity while slowly eroding effectiveness.
From Wellbeing Initiatives to Human-Centric Work Design
So the question is: How do we design work in a way that supports both human flourishing and organisational performance?
This moves the conversation beyond isolated wellbeing initiatives and towards something more systemic: human-centric work design. Rather than asking, “How do we help people recover from work?” we ask:
• How is work being experienced here?
• What conditions are we creating for people to “be at their best”?
• What assumptions underpin our systems and structures of work?
• How well do we understand and support our people’s energy levels, motivation, and sense of agency?
This has implications across multiple levels.
For leaders and managers:
This means thinking beyond operational oversight and deepening our understanding of what people need to flourish.
Leaders need to be aware of their own ways of working and how they impact the work climate. They need to notice how their teams are doing, not just in terms of output but also: clarity of purpose, sense of agency, cognitive load, space for rest and reflection, opportunities for growth, psychological safety and ability to focus amidst complexity.
At the Organisational Level:
It means recognising that wellbeing is a systemic rather than an individual issue. No amount of mindfulness training can compensate for chronically unsustainable workloads, unclear priorities, or dysfunctional cultures.
Organisations need to consciously adopt a human-centric lens across the employee lifecycle and re-think how we design: performance metrics, reward systems, meeting cultures, communication norms, career pathways and more fundamentally, how success itself is defined.
AI, Identity, and the Future of Meaningful Work
The exponential rise in AI adoption adds another layer of complexity to the conversation.
As AI increasingly automates routine, repetitive, and administrative tasks, many jobs will inevitably change. In some ways, this creates exciting possibilities. People may spend less time on mechanical work and more time on creativity, judgement, relationship-building, and strategic thinking.
But there is also a deeper psychological question emerging, and that is: What happens when work - one of our primary sources of identity, competence, and meaning - begins to shift beneath our feet?
For many people, wellbeing is closely tied to feeling useful, capable, and needed. If AI removes parts of our role that once gave us a sense of achievement or contribution, organisations cannot assume employees will simply adapt emotionally overnight.
The challenge is not only technological transformation, but existential transformation.
This means leaders and coaches may need to help people to find meaning in new ways and reconnect with forms of value that are distinctly human: creativity, empathy, ethical judgment, curiosity, connection and imagination.
Perhaps the future of wellbeing at work is not about competing with machines on efficiency, but re-discovering what makes human contribution uniquely valuable.
Implications for Coaches and Leaders
For leaders and coaches, this is an invitation to shift away from seeing wellbeing purely through the lens of stress reduction or resilience-building. Of course, people need support to cope with pressure. But coaching conversations can also help clients explore:
what energises them,
what gives their work meaning,
where they experience agency, and
how their identity and purpose intersect with work, particularly against the rapidly evolving technological landscape.
It’s about unearthing that “twinkle” we once had about work – that’s buried underneath the deadlines, pressure and bureaucracy – that really drives our motivation, our wellbeing and our clarity about why we do what we do.
Working well
The future of organisational success may depend less on extracting maximum output and more on creating environments where people can sustainably contribute their best thinking, creativity, and humanity.
People tend to perform better when they experience psychological safety, autonomy, clarity, trust, recovery, and a sense of meaning. Creativity and innovation rarely emerge from chronic cognitive overload. Sustainable high performance depends on human capacity, not just human effort.
The opportunity for organisations, leaders, and coaches is not merely to help people recover from work, but to redesign work itself - so that performance and wellbeing are no longer seen as opposing forces, but as part of the same story about growth and progress.
When work is designed well, it doesn’t just extract energy, it can also give energy back.
NOTE: A version of this article was first published in Coaching Perspectives, the magazine of the Association For Coaching, in July 2026.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pooja Sachdev is the co-author of 'Rewire: A Radical Approach to Tackling Diversity and Difference', published by Bloomsbury and described by the FT as "the most refreshing approach to diversity I have read."
She is a coach, counsellor, consultant, and founder of Rewire Consulting.
Specialising in organisational development, diversity & inclusion, and leadership, Rewire helps build positive work cultures that enable people, teams and organisations to fulfill their potential.
Retirement, health and wellbeing - chapter from 'The Psychology of Retirement': https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/retirement-health-and-wellbeing
‘Happy Enough: Re-thinking Wellbeing at Work’ by Pooja Sachdev: https://www.rewireconsulting.com/post/happy-enough-rethinking-wellbeing-for-individuals-teams-organisations
O’Connor, J., & Lindzon, J. (2026). Do More in Four: Why It's Time for a Shorter Workweek. Harvard Business Press.
