It’s the end of the road for efficiency – what we need are humanly sustainable systems. Read on to find out why increasing the slack in your system actually makes it more robust, and might be the most important thing you do this year.

For the past 50 years business and political leaders have been obsessed with efficiency and have restructured, merged, right-sized, down-sized, retrenched, re-organised the way we work. All with the goal of getting people to go faster and do more with less.  This efficiency drive has overtaken our public services, schools, healthcare and even the way we think about ‘optimising’ our daily lives.

Globalisation, mobile technologies that let you work anywhere any time, plus the arrival of social media, enabled the hyper-connected, 24/7, ‘always on’ perfect storm we are currently living through.

We’ve wrung the last possible drop from most people. We have nothing more to give.

It’s time to stop fracking human resources – because you and I are not inter-changeable, replaceable, widgets on some org chart. We are people with lives that will always be more important than our jobs.

It’s time to reconnect with our humanity and come back to ways of working that enable us to be at our human best. We need work that is humanly sustainable.

Where does wellbeing fit in all of this? The truth is that many of us have seen wellbeing become yet ‘another bloody thing’ on the unending list of things you must do today. (I haven’t done my pilates/meditation/gratitude list/yoga/ had quality time with each of my children – agh failing again!).

Another hard truth – most adults I know don’t need another wellbeing programme. If they could access a living wage, a humanly sustainable workload, and the conditions to support family and community, these people tell me they could take care of their own wellbeing, thank you very much!

While wellbeing has helped many people look after themselves, it’s not a replacement for effective work design, humanly sustainable workloads, supportive workplace cultures, and payment of a living wage.

Individual behavioural change cannot address systemic or structural issues. The burnout research has made that clear for a long time, but organisations continue to lag behind in making structural change.

We need new ways of working, not just new ways of coping with work.

That’s what prompted me to go in search of organisations that were taking action to make work better for their people. These organisations are making work better for their people, by listening  by co-designing solutions to the challenges they identify at work, and by adopting new ways of working.  They build genuine cultures of care and support, acknowledging the importance of purpose and belonging to staff wellbeing and engagement. Crucially, they are growing future-fit leadership that is empowering, connecting and adaptive.

The themes and stories of this research, shared in the Making Work Better Report  and the accompanying podcast series, released in November 2024, are still relevant and waiting to change your workplace!

French bio-physicist Olivier Hamant puts the problem succinctly – ‘systems that maximise performance are inherently fragile’.
Systems that can withstand large fluctuations are robust.

We know this intuitively. When you have some slack in the system (Nana can take care of the sick child who can’t go to day care) you can cope with a ‘system fluctuation’ (spanner in the works to you and me). When everything and everyone is maxed out as a default way of working, then we are fragile and not robust.

Things that matter need to be robust. Commercial airlines have multiple back-ups or redundancy built into their systems because we don’t want planes falling from the sky. You want firefighters available and not so busy they can’t attend your emergency.

Don’t our family systems matter to us? Don’t we want family to be robust?

If you can’t persuade your organisation to change, what could you do to build some robustness (ie slack) into your system, as a person, a family, or a team?

If that feels indulgent in this era of maximum efficiency, try it this way – How can you make your system more robust and more able to withstand those ‘curve balls’ that inevitably come our way. Whether it’s injury, illness, mechanical breakdown, weather events… we know they will keep happening.

What could you stop doing that would create more space, allow you more recovery, or enable more connection with the people you care about?

It’s your life. No one else can take this action for you.

Until, next time, take care, and build a little slack in your life!

Image caption: Dr Denise Quinlan, part of Expert Panel discussing the future of wellbeing science at European Conference of Positive Psychology.