Does your business have an 'always-on' culture? Do you champion rest and recovery to maximise your team's performance?
If there is one thing that technology embodies it’s the unreasonable demand that it has on cultures to be ON all day, all night. Staff retention and productivity is an issue as individuals feel a lack of control over their schedule and an expectation to be constantly connected. Toxic and ‘always-on' cultures are no longer acceptable, nor are they the way things should be done. One big lesson I have learnt this year is the necessity to recover. Rest and recovery are the key inputs for high performance. So it begs the question, how do we as leaders foster rest and recovery in our teams? How do our people practices empower recovery, disconnection? Do they? Do yours? Or are you a leader that has rigorous rules and expectations of how your people work? Do your people need to be seen to be working?
It’s simple for me. Your people need to feel control over their time. If they don’t, it breeds unproductive cultures. If you have people that burn time being unproductive, check your work practices first. Then check their capability. If you have the right work practices and they have the right capability, then you can manage them on attitude. But look in your own backyard before you fire the gun at a member of your team for being unproductive. Stats tell us it’s the culture, not the people.