Last week was a busy one and reminded me of something I often discuss with leaders.
Not because of a difficult client. Quite the opposite actually. The work itself was fantastic.
Tuesday to Wednesday was an overnight trip to Wales, with my return journey ending up being 8.5 hours instead of 5.
Thursday was a 5.30am start to facilitate an Inclusive Leadership programme in Bath, followed by several hours of driving.
The sessions were energising. The conversations were meaningful.
The feedback was exactly why I do this work.
But somewhere between the train delays, the motorway miles and my third coffee, I found myself asking a question I come back to regularly:
What will any of us actually care about at the end of our lives?
It probably won't be the extra meeting we squeezed in, the lunch break we skipped or the email we answered at 10pm.
And understandably, by Thursday evening, I was exhausted.
Not the "I need an early night" kind of tired.
The kind of tired that remains even after nine hours of sleep.
It made me wonder how many employees and managers are operating in exactly the same way every day.
Because we're all trying to navigate an increasingly complex, fast-moving and unpredictable world.
For years, leadership conversations have focused on performance, productivity, resilience and growth.
All really important.
But in many organisations, wellbeing is still treated as something separate:
In reality, wellbeing is a business issue.
If your people are overwhelmed, exhausted, disengaged or constantly operating at full capacity, performance will eventually suffer.
Yet many organisations are still surprised when performance drops after asking people to sustain that pace for months on end.
And honestly... the data is difficult to ignore.
UK employees now take an average of 9.4 days of sickness absence per year, the highest level reported in more than a decade. Nearly 150 million working days were lost to sickness absence across the UK last year.
The economic impact is significant. Estimates suggest sickness absence cost the UK economy approximately £141 billion in 2025 alone.
And that is before we consider presenteeism.
The people who are technically at work but operating at 50%, 60% or 70% capacity because they are stressed, burnt out or mentally exhausted.
In my experience, most leaders genuinely care about their people.
The challenge is that many organisations have become so busy managing today's priorities that they rarely stop to ask:
These are not "soft" questions.
They are leadership questions.
And increasingly, they are commercial questions too.
We live in a world where uncertainty, complexity and constant change have become normal.
The problem is that many workplaces still act as though people have unlimited capacity.
They don't.
And those who succeed will be the organisations that understand a simple truth:
It's hardly revolutionary: people perform better when they're not exhausted.
So I am genuinely interested.
How are other leaders ensuring employee wellbeing remains a genuine priority rather than another item on an already overcrowded agenda?
The irony?
Many organisations will spend thousands fixing problems that could have been prevented by investing in managers earlier.
The organisations that get ahead of these challenges rarely do so through another policy, awareness week or wellbeing campaign.
They do it by investing in their people, equipping managers to lead well and creating environments where people can thrive rather than simply survive.
If that's a conversation you'd like to have, you know where to find me.
Experienced consultant passionate about people. I help organisations reduce the hidden costs of workplace conflict, employee turnover and tribunal risk by addressing what’s really getting in the way…
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