In this blog series we are exploring the components that come together to create Sustainable Performance. Using the Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework as reference, we will explore how elements come together and have a causal effect that builds into healthy work cultures that enable performance and productivity in organisations.
As a reminder, we define Sustainable Performance in the workplace as “the ability of an organisation, team, or individual to consistently achieve high levels of productivity, effectiveness, and well-being over the long term, without compromising future performance or the health of its people.”
In part 1, we start our journey by looking at Building Foundations of Wellbeing.
If you want to create high performance in your workplace, the organisation needs to firstly create and enforce a set of behaviours that promote positive health and trust across all teams. Enabling a mentally fit employee base sets up the opportunity for the organisation to engage its workforce so that they buy-in to the strategy and narrative to use their own agency to bring about success for all. We must get to a point where our work environments feel supportive, yet challenging. Where employees turn up to work ready to make a positive impact and where trust flows in two directions.
If we can do this then our people will subconsciously give “permission” for their own internal motivations and needs to become accessible to the organisation. If we do not lay the groundwork for this to happen then any storytelling or narrative that you try to engage your people with will falter and fail in the long term. Internal comms initiatives will be short term at best if you cannot access your people’s individual motivational needs and connect with them. Performance gains will happen only while attention is focused from leadership and behaviour will slide back to previous norms when focus is elsewhere. In other words, not sustainable.
So how do we build foundations of wellbeing on our journey towards Sustainable Performance? In our research for the Sustainable Performance Framework we distilled the evidence down to three component areas:
- Outside Work Wellbeing
- Inside Work Wellbeing
- Psychological Safety and Trust
Let’s work through each in turn.
Outside Work Wellbeing
For employees in an organisation to be able to perform they need to “arrive” at work in the best possible mental and physical state. So the first stage on our journey to Sustainable Performance actually starts outside the organisation. And, yes, the organisation has a role here. It was Sue Clark in 2000 who published a paper on a new theory of work/family balance – what we would now call “work, non-work” balance. Each day we cross a “border” between work and non-work. How we do this, who we are and how we manage many expectations, all have an impact on to how we return across the border the next day to work. Sue Clark called this “Work/Family Border Theory.” From an organisation’s viewpoint, how do we help manage these borders? Does the organisation cross the border and expect our employees to be accessible outside of work hours? With remote and hybrid working so common now, how do we ensure there is a border at all when work equipment is now set up in the home? Commuting used to be a great border crossing “agent” for us to transition from our work thoughts to home thoughts.
To build on this, Evangelia Demerouti et al, in 2009, pulled research outcomes together to produce a flowchart model of how we recover from work on a daily basis. They argued that daily recovery was more important than holidays away from work over the long term. They highlighted a number of factors that impacted our psychological and energetic state when entering the workplace. This includes the amount of negative strain from the last work shift, the demands on us, the resources we can pull on at home and outside of work, and sleep patterns among others. Without frequent recovery between work shifts, workers leave themselves open to “prolonged fatigue, psychological distress, and cardiovascular complaints,” all of which will then impact on workplace productivity. There are more studies now emerging in this field which are revealing the substantive impact of mental and physical health and wellbeing outside of work on the performance of workers inside of work. Organisations need to ensure that their people have access to education on recovery, exercise and nutrition initiatives to enable the “raw material” (i.e. your employees) for business performance on starting work each day in an ever-intensifying workplace.
Inside Work Wellbeing
If we have employees starting their work shift in a well-recovered state at the start of the day, the next challenge on the journey to Sustainable Performance is to try and maintain that level of enthusiasm and vigour throughout the working day for as long as possible. There are a number of factors at play here and we will touch on quite a few in this blog series. At this stage we will be looking at the demands of the job on the individual and the resources that the employee has at their disposal to deal with these demands.
Extensive work has been done over the last couple of decades here, led by the work of Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter among others. Christina Maslach’s approach in the early 2000’s onwards has been focused on the causes and effect of burnout at work. Burnout is an increasing challenge for organisations as work intensifies. There is growing evidence that intensive work is causing people to shift from coping in their role into overwhelm and, in more extreme cases, burnout. Overwhelm and burnout is an issue for performance in organisations as it can affect even the highest of performers if not managed. Effects include emotional exhaustion leading to chronic fatigue that cannot be recovered from day to day, depersonalisation where we disconnect our empathy with our work and colleagues leading to cynicism, and a perception of a lack of personal accomplishment where we sow doubt into our own performance beliefs.
Organisations need to train senior leaders and line managers to create work environments where overwhelm is designed out of the job role or, if this is not fully possible, to have an early warning process and a system of support for those in high-risk roles.
As you can see from above, our study into high performance found that two of the twelve components of our Sustainable Performance Framework were based around employee wellbeing, outside and inside of work. These are the fundamental prerequisites if you want your people to be able to fully engage into work activities that create high performance over a period of time.
Psychological Safety and Trust
Once healthy practices are in place inside and outside of work and the wellbeing of your people is buoyant, then the third area to build foundations of wellbeing is then to create a culture that is psychologically safe and which enables trust to build between workers and between workers and management and leadership. Psychological safety refers to the context in which an individual interacts with others. It refers to the feeling of being able to speak up, take risks and make mistakes without fear of negative consequences. It is about being able to bring the real you to the workplace and to be accepted for who you are.
Psychological safety is another growing area of knowledge. Such authors and speakers as Amy Edmondson have articulated the factors creating psychologically safety well. Her book, The Fearless Organisation, summaries current thinking and creates a compelling argument of the necessity of building psychological safety.
If our people have quality levels of wellbeing inside and outside of work and arrive mentally fit for work, then they will actively engage in activities that go beyond the task in hand. Psychological safety is the process where, if wellbeing is in place, an individual will then feel that they can open up their own emotional vulnerability at work, which is when the organisation can then access and connect to someone’s real drivers and motivators as a human and can then align the organisation’s needs and create a compelling narrative to take the employee and the organisation on a journey together, a sustained journey involving performance.
In summary, building the foundations of wellbeing must be the first part of your journey to Sustainable Performance. Wellbeing behaviours that senior leaders and line managers must role model is so important. The oldest form of learning is imitation. If the organisation’s message is to ensure work and home is separated, yet they get contacted frequently by their manager out of hours, then work non-work borders are eroded, team members perceive that work is “always on” and recovery suffers. Overwhelm leads to a level of chronic exhaustion that effective recovery ceases. Self-protectionism subsequently kicks in and psychological safety cannot be established leading to trust diminishing over the long term.
However, if we can create healthy recovery practices in our teams through role modelling and good education, then employees with bring their real selves to work, psychological safety will be established and trust becomes an open part of the culture.
This then allows us to move on to part 2 of our journey to Sustainable Performance where we look at how to create ownership built on these foundations and how collective ownership, combined with emotional intelligence, forms high performing teams.
