We often hear phrases like: “We just need to hire more people” or “If we could clear the backlog, everyone would be fine.” or “It’s just a busy season.”
And sometimes, yes, workload is genuinely the problem. But more often than not, when we sit down with a team that’s exhausted and disengaged their workload is only part of the story.
It’s not just about how much work they have on. If they don’t feel like they belong they can’t do their best work.
Here are the types of teams we see over and over again:
| Team A: Manageable workload, burnt out anyway The hours look fine on paper but the exhaustion is real. | Team B: Long hours, but thriving Feels trusted, valued and part of something. The effort feels worth it. |
| Team C: Talented people, quietly checking out Not because the job is too hard but because they don’t feel like they fit. | Team D: Energy spent in the wrong places Managing politics, second-guessing and performing instead of doing the work. |
The main component here is, if you don’t feel like you belong, you can’t do your best work, it doesn’t matter how brilliant and capable you are. The energy that should be going into ideas and collaboration gets rerouted into just getting through the day and therefore performance drops.
These issues can’t be fixed with a simple wellbeing app or an extra day off, as lovely as those things are. You fix it by getting the culture right and having employees happy and thriving.
So what does “getting the culture right” actually look like? We know that can sound big and vague, so here are some places to start.
- Look at belonging before you look at balance. Ask a different question, do people feel like they can bring their full selves to this team? Do they feel safe enough to disagree, to ask for help or to simply say “I don’t know the answer to that”. If people are saying no, this is your starting point.
- Notice where energy is going. Sit with your team and ask where their energy goes in a normal week. You might find it isn’t the work itself, it could be unspoken tension, the unclear expectations, the many meetings that exist because no one trusts anyone to make a decision without them.
- Build small habits, not big initiatives. Culture isn’t changed by a strategy document or one away day. It’s changed by what leaders do and say everyday. How they open a meeting, how they respond when someone gets something wrong, whether they ask people how they’re actually doing and most importantly whether they wait and listen for the answer.
- Get honest about what high performance actually means. People do their best work when they feel challenged, trusted, included and have a clear understanding of their purpose. Culture can’t be the soft add-on, it is the mechanism that gets you to your goal.
Why we care so much about this
This is exactly why we started Heart Leadership. We got tired of watching brilliant, hardworking people burn out in systems that were never built to hold them, and then watching those same organisations respond with surface-level fixes that didn’t touch the real problem.
We believe the systems are broken, not the individuals inside them. We believe that once you get culture right, everything else like performance, retention, innovation and wellbeing all starts to fall into place.
That’s the work we do with leaders every day. We help them build the everyday habits and honest conversations that shape a culture people don’t want to escape from.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you’re looking at your workload numbers and still not understanding why your team feels so tired, send us a message, we’d love to chat.
From the heart, Gemma & Hetal.
Find out more about our Heart Leaders programme here: https://heart-leadership.co.uk/heart-leaders/
