Is your team performance being slowed down by one or more sleep deprived or disengaged members? You are not alone. The pace of work along with balancing or integrating home and work life has been taking its toll on workers across the globe and some of our most basic needs, such as the need for high quality sleep are being eroded in ways that impact on both health and performance.
Poor sleep is an individual mental health issue that cannot be ignored. A whole new industry has grown to address the needs of individuals ranging from coaching to specialist clinical services run by psychologists or sleep physiologists. The internet is awash with tools, strategies & services to help the sleep deprived. And, there is now a special day dedicated to sleep awareness, World Sleep Day in 2018 was on March 16th.
Too little sleep is often related to mental overload in response to excessive or competing demands at home and work and one of the most visible organisational responses to the issues of poor health and wellbeing at work is the provision of wellness programmes in the workplace. These include offering employees a range of options from healthy food cafes or a smorgasbord of ‘health’ related perks like lunchtime yoga classes.
These organisational initiatives can be beneficial. So, what is missing? And, what can we do to address these issues at the source?
Excessive work demands lead to stress. And, stress leading to poor health & work outcomes is an almost inevitable result of too little focus in organisations on factors such as job & task design. Organisational reality also means that the fast pace of change and increasingly unpredictable demands make some of the more traditional forms of work design impractical.
It is through the immediate context of the team where our most significant pressures are generated and where there is also the most scope for supporting people to manage their workloads and perform well. When the essential conditions for team effectiveness are put into place, leaders can then improve the situation significantly using coaching for individuals as well as the team as a whole.
The Team Diagnostic Survey which is the tool associated with the 6 conditions framework enables you to measure, diagnose issues & support your teams effectively. Everyone will sleep better & enjoy a relaxing session of lunchtime yoga when all six conditions are in place.
If you are interested in finding out more about the 6 Conditions Framework & how you can create & maintain happy, healthy, joyful teams who are engaged and perform well under conditions of uncertainty and high pressure, then undertaking our Level 1 & 2 certification is the first step. We also offer expert supervision from specialist organisational & business psychologists to HR professionals & Team Leaders for teams in crisis.