Dr R. Gerards
Research Theme: Sustainable employability in the 21st century
Keywords: Employability; well-being; job performance; resilience; adaptation; HR policy
Summary: External pressures coming from multiple directions increasingly challenge individual workers and HR policymakers to maintain workers’ well-being and sustainable employability in three ways. First, technology driven developments in the workplace such as New Ways of Working, robotization, digitization and artificial intelligence continuously challenge workers’ resilience and adaptability. Second, institutional changes such as increasingly flexible labor relations have made societies more individualized and have shifted more pressure to remain employable onto individual workers, further increasing the resilience and adaptability required. Third, technological developments that manifest in workers’ private domain, such as increasingly digitized systems of taxation, government subsidies, banking and insurances have put the maintenance of healthy personal finances under increasing pressure, which in turn challenges workers’ well-being and employability.
To maintain their well-being and sustainable employability, workers need to be resilient to cope with the multitude of changes and HR policymakers are looking for novel ways to facilitate this. To increase workers’, companies’ and policy makers’ insights in the drivers of and threats to this resilience, this research theme focuses on workers’ well-being and sustainable employability in the context of changes in the workplace, societal institutions and private domains.
“Money on my mind": The dynamics of financial worry
A research project into dynamics of financial worry, for which we were awarded a long-term research grant by the ThinkForwardInitiative. Together with Bert Schreurs (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Riccardo Welters (James Cook University).
Dr R. Gerards
Coordinating senior researcher