When examining many organisations' strategies to prevent burnout and foster engagement and human sustainability, a common trend emerges—‘perks’. These can range from mental health days and flu shots, to EAP’s and relaxation spaces.
While well-intentioned, they rarely address the root causes of engagement and wellbeing. More importantly, they fail to cultivate the self-reliant behaviours needed for long-term employee wellbeing and optimised performance, and instead encourage mindsets of entitlement and expectation.
The true impact of a wellbeing and engagement strategy lies in the breadth and depth of its systemic reach.
Here are some ways you can start that process.
ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY FOR SUSTAINABILITY
Building a truly sustainable business starts with designing an organisation that supports both long-term human sustainability and operational efficiency.
Some factors to consider include:
Organisational Structure:
Consider circular project teams V hierarchy
Think functions v titles
Align roles and responsibilities to strengths and passions
Ensure clarity, accountability, and flexibility, allowing for agility and adaptation as the business grows
Outsource relevant tasks to technology and use the human for higher value and more satisfying work (reward team for being resourceful with solutions)
Talent Acquisition Strategies for Role Concordance: To enable both personal fulfilment and organisational sustainability, create talent screening tests to show:
congruence with your organisation’s culture, values, and strategic goals, AND
alignment of the role with their passions, interests, values and strengths
Communication Playbook:
Establish a framework for clear, open lines of communication that promotes transparency and reduces misunderstandings
Educate your team on the navigating the dynamic nature of personalities and default behaviours under stress
Look for opportunities to insert subliminal messaging and cultural/behavioural touch points
Decision-Making Processes: Define decision-making pathways to avoid unnecessary delays. Empowering teams to make decisions within their scope improves efficiency and enables faster problem-solving.
Delegation Process: Create a company delegation framework to eliminate ambiguity and lost time in cognitive confusion. Most people fail to provide the level of clarity required for swift execution.
Workflows and Processes: Optimise workflows to eliminate inefficiencies. Well-defined processes ensure consistency while allowing flexibility where necessary, fostering a more adaptive and resilient workforce. (Repeat: reward team for being resourceful with solutions)
Through our approach, we design agile, organisational growth frameworks that allow your business to scale sustainably while maintaining speed and adaptability. This strategy not only mitigates the risk of leaders becoming bottlenecks, but also enhances team synergy, enabling smoother workflows and increasing overall impact.
ELMINATE THE 'PERK' CULTURE
Shift your focus away from perks that provide short-term satisfaction and think long-term. Elite athletes don’t rely on perks to maintain their performance—they engage in consistent training, reflection, and recovery without needing external rewards. Employees should be empowered to do the same.
Embedding wellbeing into daily operations is essential. Develop rituals and an organisational language that aligns with your company’s ethos, ensuring that everyone feels part of a shared purpose. By focusing on wellbeing as a day-to-day practice, you promote mutual respect, self-discipline, and continuous improvement, creating a high-performing, sustainable workforce.
METRICS THAT MATTER
Establish consistent expectations and behavioural metrics rooted in the science of human fulfilment. This not only drives a culture of self-disciplined, intrinsic motivation but also aligns your business goals with the wellbeing of your workforce.
To drive sustainability, consider:
Metrics that encapsulate the relevant behaviours that drive your desired culture, wellbeing outcomes, AND commercial objectives – It’s time to rethink traditional performance reviews!
Role clarity and task allocation: Ensure tasks are clearly aligned with individual competencies, giving employees control over their responsibilities. This approach prevents the perception of overload by minimising cognitive load, contributing to a sustainable, manageable work pace.
Workload management: Develop clear succession and delegation processes, along with realistic workloads to avoid stress spikes and allostatic overload. Where unavoidable sprints, developing sprint-recovery plans via A Human Edge coaching approach assists in meeting both human needs and commercial objectives.
Build in meaningful rewards for meeting both role outcomes and cultural objectives
Performance Optimisation V's Performance Reviews......a conversation of its own!
CONGRUENT TALENT: KEY TO WELLBEING
Invest in your talent strategy early.
In a competitive talent market, organisations need impact players—employees, contractors, and partnerships—who are not only congruent with the role, brand, and culture but also ignite trust, camaraderie, and effectiveness. These high high impact players are pivotal in building a resilient workforce and eliminating petty team conflict and resentments. Being concordant ensures that intrinsic motivation is maintained at a higher frequency, which in turn strengthens wellbeing.
LEADERSHIP SUPPORT: A FRESH APPROACH
These days, organisational leaders need more than workshops on leadership and strong communications skills to fulfil the leadership and commercial burdens on them. They would benefit from an external support partner who can act as a buffer, helping complex situations land effectively. Leaders often face overwhelming people challenges, especially during times of change or pressure, and maintaining emotionally intelligent leadership is crucial. In fact, emotionally intelligent leadership can increase employee engagement by 37% (Harvard Business Review, 2020).
This is where a fractional people operations partner plays a vital role. Unlike internal employees who may be influenced by the existing workplace culture and dynamics, a fractional partner offers an objective, fresh perspective while still being deeply aligned with the organisation’s goals. They are not a traditional consultant—disconnected from the daily context—but rather an extension of the team with deep insight into the company’s culture and challenges.
A fractional partner brings behavioural science and people intelligence to help leaders navigate high-stress moments with clarity and purpose. They can help leaders handle difficult conversations, manage team dynamics, and ensure that emotionally charged situations are addressed in ways that foster trust, collaboration, and long-term engagement.
Further, a fractional partner offers a middle ground—they’re neither a full-time employee with potential biases nor a detached consultant. This unique positioning allows them to deliver balanced solutions that reflect both the operational context and the human needs of the team, supporting leaders to stay connected, drive innovation, and build psychologically safe environments where employees can thrive.
MASSAGE A CULTURE OF MUTUAL RESPONSIBILITY
Preventing burnout and driving engagement is not just the employer’s responsibility or the employee’s alone—it’s a mutual responsibility.
Organisations need engage in a consistent narrative that encourages an individual to be responsible in developing their sense of personal-agency and intrinsic motivation.
Their probability of success is then strengthened when an organisation provides access to the tools, education and/or coaching they need to sustain their own mental, emotional, and physical health over the long term.
When integrated with relevance, these strategies empower individuals to take ownership of their own wellbeing and performance, rather than waiting for external rewards or solutions to magically fix something. At the same time, your organisation benefits from a more engaged, resilient workforce.
Taking Human Sustainability Further: Our Approach at A Human Edge
At A Human Edge, we help differentiate your organisation and your approach to employee engagement/wellbeing through the development of a bi-directional human sustainability framework, specifically tailored to your organisation and industry. We don’t offer one-size-fits-all solutions—our strategies go beyond perks, embedding sustainability into every layer of your business.
We take away the impossible burden that leaders often face when trying to balance commercial growth and employee wellbeing. As an extension of your team, we use behavioural science and people intelligence to help you lead with clarity and purpose.
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