More than one in five employees around the world experience symptoms of burnout. The implications extend beyond individual wellbeing – when people feel exhausted, organisations also risk losing productivity and performance. Improving employee health and wellbeing could unlock more than $11 trillion in annual economic value globally, with better productivity and fewer people working while unwell accounting for up to 77% of that opportunity, according to McKinsey.
At FAIRER, we talk a lot about performance and creating high-performing cultures. How can organisations improve productivity, build better leaders and help people perform at their best – and, importantly, what enables people to sustain that performance? These questions are becoming increasingly important as organisations navigate new and evolving challenges, and they sit at the heart of the conversation we’ll be exploring at FAIRER Conference London.
While flexible working and technology have made it easier for some to achieve a better work-life balance, at the same time, changing priorities, increased demands, uncertainty and pressure to deliver can all affect how people experience work. We need to think differently about what sustains performance. Wellbeing cannot sit alongside performance as a separate initiative. It needs to be considered as part of the conditions that allow people to perform, and inclusion is central to those conditions.
As FAIRER MD Dan Robertson explains, “We see a strong relationship between wellbeing, organisational health and productivity. When people feel valued, respected, included and able to contribute, they are better placed to bring their energy and capability to their work. When they are spending energy navigating exclusion, uncertainty, poor relationships or a lack of psychological safety, that can have a very different effect.”
1.1 million UK workers have left a job in the past year because of a lack of flexible working, according to CIPD research. Flexible working can give people greater control and create opportunities to integrate work with the rest of their lives, but when the boundaries are not clear, work can quickly seep into everyday life. Sustainable performance depends on people having genuine choice over how they work, how they switch off and protect recovery time.
Author Tony Schwartz's work on energy and performance provides a useful way of understanding employee energy. He identifies four different energy zones: performance, survival, burnout and recovery. The performance zone is characterised by high positive energy – people feel confident and positively challenged. Survival is high negative energy, where people may feel threatened, fearful, anxious or angry. Burnout is low negative energy, characterised by exhaustion and helplessness. Recovery is low positive energy, where energy is restored and people are able to return to performance.
The four energy zones, according to Tony Schwartz
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Positive energy |
Negative energy |
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High energy |
Performance – Confident, hopeful and challenged. Energy is directed towards achieving and performing. |
Survival – Threatened, fearful, anxious or angry. Energy is directed towards coping and responding to pressure. |
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Low energy |
Recovery – Energy is restored and replenished, creating the conditions to return to performance. |
Burnout – Exhausted, depleted and helpless, with limited energy available for performance. |
We find the common client challenges on this topic are often around workload and capacity, unclear priorities, always-on expectations and a lack of recovery time. The aim is to move between the two positive zones, as high performance requires rest and recovery to regain energy. Organisations therefore need to consider the working conditions, expectations and relationships that either protect people's energy or deplete it.
Some energy can be consumed by the experience of work, not just the work itself. For example, Daniel Pink's work identifies autonomy, mastery and purpose as important sources of motivation, while Zach Mercurio's work on mattering highlights the importance of people feeling noticed and validated to fuel performance.
As Dan Robertson explains, when people experience belonging and respect, they are better able to contribute and engage. When those things are absent, people can spend energy working out whether – and when – they can speak, whether their contribution will be taken seriously, whether they belong and whether they have the same opportunities as others.
At FAIRER, we identify five dimensions that can contribute to exclusion and burnout, shaping the conditions in which performance happens:
Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino's work on covering describes the ways people may downplay aspects of their identity or modify their behaviour to fit into dominant – or more “accepted” – workplace norms. When people feel they need to adjust how they communicate or present themselves in order to fit in or progress, there is a hidden energy cost. Deloitte’s research found that 60% of US workers had felt the need to cover at work in the previous 12 months, while 60% said covering negatively affected their wellbeing and 54% said it negatively affected their ability to do their jobs. .
This research demonstrates why inclusion and wellbeing must be linked. A person who feels psychologically safe and able to be themselves at work has a very different experience of work from someone someone who is constantly monitoring how they are perceived. If people cannot challenge an idea, admit a mistake, ask for help or raise a concern without worrying about the consequences, this becomes a performance issue as well as a wellbeing issue.
If sustainable performance depends on the conditions people experience at work, what does that mean in practice? Explore five areas leaders, HR managers and inclusion professionals can focus on.
1. Prioritise time, not pressure
Our PAUSE framework starts with Prioritise your time. In an always-on workplace, there is a constant stream of emails, messages, meetings and competing demands. Leaders have a role in making priorities clear, protecting time for focused work and helping people distinguish between what genuinely needs attention and what simply feels urgent. This also means looking at workload rather than assuming that individuals can continually absorb more. Sustainable performance requires people to have enough capacity to focus on the work that matters.
2. Create the conditions for psychological safety
“People need to be able to admit and learn from mistakes without fear of negative consequences. They need to be able to ask for help, challenge ideas and raise concerns,” says Dan. Building psychological safety requires leadership accountability. One of the questions we often ask clients is: can your leaders address exclusionary behaviour, even when it comes from high performers? If performance is consistently prioritised over behaviour, people receive a clear message about what the organisation really values.
3. Build belonging and respect into everyday work
Sustainable energy is difficult to maintain when people are spending it trying to establish whether they matter. Organisations need to consider whether inclusion exists as an organisational commitment, examining how it is experienced in meetings, relationships, career opportunities, feedback and decision-making. Who is getting left behind? Whose voice is not being heard?
It’s also important to view inclusion from an intersectional lens. An organisational average can hide very different experiences between groups. Understanding where people experience barriers to belonging, voice, career opportunity or psychological safety allows organisations to address the conditions that are consuming energy in the first place.
4. Make recovery part of performance
Employees should not be continuously operating at maximum capacity. It’s important to unplug properly and schedule recovery time. People need opportunities to disconnect from work and restore their energy. Organisations need to consider the signals they send around availability, response times, holidays and out-of-hours communication. Managers need to model healthy boundaries rather than unintentionally rewarding constant availability.
We often advise our clients to focus on the practical signals that shape whether recovery is genuinely possible, such as expectations around availability and response times, or how managers model boundaries themselves. Spillover Theory, a concept often associated with John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, reminds us that experiences and emotions in one area of life can spill over into another. What happens at work does not necessarily stay at work. Creating sustainable performance therefore means creating enough space for people to recover and return with energy, rather than treating recovery as time taken away from performance.
5. Managers should influence the experience of work
At FAIRER, we believe managers are one of the most important influences on how people experience their working environment. They shape priorities, work allocation, relationships, recognition and how mistakes are handled. They also create the micro-cultures in which people experience organisational policies and values.
“An organisation may have a strong inclusion strategy, flexible working policy and extensive wellbeing provision, but the day-to-day experience can still be very different depending on the manager,” says Dan. Our approach is built around a ‘Triple A Framework’: awareness, application and action – understanding the issues, applying that understanding to leadership practice and taking action to change behaviour and systems.
This approach is reflected in our work with clients. For Lloyd's of London, our executive Inclusive Leadership programme focused on role modelling, leadership bias and action planning. With HaysMac, our work looked at how inclusion could be embedded across leadership, recruitment, talent development and learning.
For more information on sustaining employee energy and performance, explore our Driving Business Performance through Inclusion and Wellbeing programme, which examines the organisational conditions that shape wellbeing and performance.
We'll also continue this conversation at FAIRER Conference London on 22 October 2026, where senior HR, DEI, L&D and wellbeing practitioners will explore people-centred leadership, sustainable wellbeing and what it means to put people at the centre of performance-driven and inclusive cultures.