Leaders’ Top Tips for Creating Sustainable Energy in Your Work Team

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There is a lot published about what makes Leaders of teams successful, but today let us focus on what is so often overlooked:

• Creating a positive working environment based on trust, transparency, and with genuine work/life balance.
• Enabling an engaged employee experience for your work team to thrive, grow and produce a great customer experience.

This is all about the leader role-modelling and enabling a positive culture in the work environment where a balance of energy, resilience to deal with deadlines, peaks, and high-volume demand, can be managed effectively.

So how do we categorise this area, this key principle for effective leadership, which sometimes feels like wrestling with something not tangible? You only feel it when you do not get it right – that is when you or your team experience burn-out.

Is it work/life balance or life/work balance? Is it a soft touchy-feely topic with no business value, or is it building resilience for stronger performance, sustainable over time?

My vote is that there is a strong business case for building resilience in your team and creating sustainable energy to deal with the ongoing demands of change, high volume transactional excellence, and the ever-present quest for continuous improvement…in all that we do. High achievers tend to set high targets for themselves and their teams. Conscientious individuals hate to say no to extra challenges, additional objectives, more opportunities to please the customer, or to stretch further the performance of the team and deliver success.

There’s a big adrenaline rush when we start-up our business, scale-up through growth and recruit the new team… all that planning, then the go-live, the management of new relationships. This creates a high energy feeling that, over extended time, can move:

• From pumped to drained.
• From eustress (positive stress) to distress.

Anne Pringle, a senior Occupational Health Professional, and a former colleague of mine at GlaxoSmithKline, advises that pressure is inevitable within our personal and professional lives, in fact, we need a certain level of pressure to perform.

However, we need to be aware of the level of pressure we are experiencing and the impact it can have. People perform best when they are in the "stretch" zone. It is inevitable, though, that you will tip into "strain" at some point. This is the zone where you start to experience signs and symptoms of stress. The key factor with resilient people is that they recognise when they are crossing into this zone and have a strategy to get back into either the "comfort" zone (if they have experienced a prolonged period of time in "strain") or back into the "stretch" zone. If this does not happen and people continue into the "crisis" zone, we tend to see exhaustion, serious health problems, breakdown in relationships/mental well-being, and burnout.

It is also important to emphasise that people do not have a separate pressure performance curve for home and work. They both interlink, which is why it is important for managers to know their people as people, and not just as company workers.

Look out for these indicators – in yourself and in your team:

1. Performance

• Missing deadlines
• Errors
• Memory lapses

2. Physical

• Sleep loss
• Heart and stomach problems

3. Interpersonal

• Withdrawal
• Bullying
• Moody and irritable
• Sensitivity

4. Other Behavioural Signs

• Increased use of alcohol, drugs, smoking and coffee
• Acting out of character – this can be a key sign that all is not well

So, our occupational health advice tips include:

Talk about how you feel to someone you trust. Be open with your team about work life balance/resilience as an issue to address, encourage team and individual responsibility to ensure we:

• Organise ourselves – The Urgency and Importance Matrix (originated by Eisenhower) is a good tool to help prioritise our time.
• Know our limits.
• Learn to relax.
• Give ourselves some space and regular breaks away from the PC or telephone.
• Are able to role model healthy, sustainable behaviours.

And:

• If you feel yourself getting stressed, take a step back and have some time out – take a walk or listen to some music.
• Go home at a sensible time – There is no record of anyone, on their deathbed, saying "I wish I'd spent more time at the office". Look after your health consciously.
• Be kind to yourself.
• Identify what causes you to feel stressed at work. Is it the work itself, your boss, demanding customers, unreliable suppliers ? Take steps to address the root causes. (This same approach can also be used to address non-work stressors too).
• If you are still struggling, see your GP or call the Employee Assistance Programme, if available. It is not a weakness to ask for help.

To add to this occupational health guidance, we have developed these additional leadership tips, which I strive to apply:

1. Measure outputs not hours at the desk. Trust people to deliver, rather than check their every move or record their presenteeism.
2. Virtual working is ok – since the Pandemic it is well recognised that for most office workers /knowledge workers there are times when your team can work from home to balance and manage external factors. Technology enables this so easily now. Recognise in yourself and your team when you have peaks and troughs of energy in your day. Every team has early birds and night owls – go with your energy.
3. When you have team meetings – provide time for regular breaks. Our concentration span is usually no more than 40 minutes anyway, so build into your meeting agenda breaks of 5 or 10 minutes every now and then. The body language of the group will usually signal when it’s time to do this!
4. Create a climate where fun and laughter are allowed – it’s a great stress buster to be enabled to share and show humour from time to time. Better to laugh than cry when the going gets tough.

True Confession: Burnout

It has happened to me at times in my career, particularly early on, in my late twenties, Dinky (dual income no kids yet) phase, when carving my career and spending long hours at the office. Also, I remember that time just after start-up of our new business operating model, when all the euphoria of building the new solution transforms into the downside of needing to make the inevitable adjustments to process or resources to get the right fit, and we all get sucked into the habit of just staying on a while, to get things fixed.

As a leader and as an employee we have all been there – when we feel overloaded, there are not enough hours and days in the week, or we are under-resourced.

Think back to the tough times – when did you get closest to burn-out and why? What can you do differently now to avoid a repeat performance? What are the key learnings for yourself that you can share with the team? What stories can you share as examples of what not to do?

Openness about these issues creates a culture of trust and can help to develop a whole team support network. This is where we help each other to build resilience and sustainable energy.

Leading and Managing Inclusively with Your Team in a Hybrid Working World

Post covid research shows that most knowledge based workers who previously worked 9-5 in offices, commuting to a common workplace daily Monday to Friday, now spend 1 to 3 days a week in the office and 2-4 days working remotely - from home or another working space close to home.

Depending on the type of business, how hybrid working is set up will be crucial, but good inclusive leadership and management is key to the ongoing success of hybrid working in an organisation.

Some pointers for managers:

• It is vital to ensure effective communication is in place.
• Arrange to have regular meetings, with some face to face where possible:
          • With individuals – so you can identify and provide any support they may need with their work, and also to ask how they are, and if they need any help with health and wellbeing issues.
          • With the whole team - during team meetings online, encourage people to have their cameras on, and to make sure that everyone has the chance to contribute.
          • Cross-functional projects, team collaboration days, and giving back to the community are some good employee experience initiatives.
• Encourage networking with other team members, through joint project work - see above.
• Ensuring that everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities.
• People may also need to be flexible to fit with organisational needs.
• Trust is essential for successful hybrid working – measuring outputs and not checking hours on line.

Mental Health

Following the COVID pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis with its associated financial uncertainty, around half of all work-related ill health is due to poor mental health and is costing the UK economy around £28 billion annually. It is therefore even more vital that we create open, safe, and supportive workplaces.

The NHS has recommended 5 steps to good mental health and managers can support their teams to embrace these every day, and find ways to promote these activities:

• Connect
• Be active
• Take Notice
• Keep learning
• Give

There is also a need to ensure that appropriate support is in place at work for when people need help – this may include:

• Health & wellbeing support information – both in-house and externally.
• Referral to the occupational health or welfare service.
• HR advice.
• Mental Health First Aiders – https://mhfaengland.org
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) – https://www.eapa.org.uk who can provide short-term solution focused counselling, critical incident and drug and alcohol support services.

Final Thoughts

Building and leading an effective business is a journey, and we evolve along that journey. Take time to enjoy the journey of life, be here in the day, rather than always striving for the end destination, which, in any case, other than death, does not exist.

This article was guest written by Simon Brown and Anne Pringle - August 2024.