Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace survey found that only around a third of employees worldwide say they are genuinely thriving in their lives overall, and that four in ten experienced significant stress on the day before they were surveyed. Read that second figure again. Not stress about one hard week. Stress on an ordinary day, reported by four in ten people, everywhere Gallup asked the question.

Numbers like that rarely trace back to a single bad meeting or a difficult manager. They trace back to what happens outside the building, in the hours nobody at work ever sees. This is the part of performance most leaders never measure and rarely manage. It sits underneath almost every other leadership problem you are trying to solve: retention, engagement, the person who is suddenly underperforming for no obvious reason.

So here is the real question. How do I actually make sure my team, and I, are managing wellbeing outside of work, rather than just having a policy that says we do. Most of the problems above start to look a lot less mysterious once you take that question seriously.

The reassuring part is that this is one of the better researched areas in occupational psychology, and the answers go a good deal further than “encourage a healthy work life balance.” Below are eleven of them, each grounded in a specific piece of research, each with three concrete moves you can actually make. Six are about how you lead. Five are about how the team works.

Ideas for the Leader

Leadership here is not a policy. It is a set of behaviours only you can model: the conversations you start, the example you set, and what you personally choose to notice.

1. Ask each person how they want the work and home line drawn

Some wellbeing advice assumes the healthiest boundary is the strictest one: a firm stop at 6pm, no exceptions, phone away. For some people that is exactly right. For others it is the wrong prescription entirely.

Ashforth et al.’s (2000) work on boundary theory describes people sitting along a continuum from segmentors, who want a clean, total separation between work and home, to integrators, who are genuinely comfortable blending the two and feel no cost from checking a message over dinner. Clark’s (2000) Work Family Border Theory adds an important detail here: how well someone manages that border depends partly on whether the people around them, including their manager, understand and respect the border they have chosen. Neither segmenting nor integrating is the healthier option. What matters is fit, whether the pattern someone lives matches the pattern they would actually choose.

The common mistake is assuming there is one correct answer and applying it to everyone, usually based on the leader’s own preference. A segmentor forced into an always reachable team culture burns out quietly. An integrator handed a rigid rule about never being contacted can end up feeling needlessly cut off from work they would rather stay lightly connected to.

Three leadership moves:

  1. Spend a few minutes with each person on your team asking directly whether they want a firm stop or are happy blending work and home.
  2. Turn those answers into a short written agreement the team can refer back to.
  3. Revisit the agreement when someone’s role or personal circumstances change, rather than treating it as fixed forever.

2. Model your own recovery, do not just permit it

You can write the most generous wellbeing policy in the sector and undo it entirely by being the person who answers messages at midnight and mentions, even lightly, how little leave you took last year.

Hammer et al.’s (2009) research on Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviour identifies role modelling as one of four core supervisor behaviours that support a team’s life outside work, alongside emotional support, day to day practical assistance and creative restructuring of the work itself. People do not learn what is acceptable from a policy document. They learn it from watching what their manager actually does, especially under pressure.

Three leadership moves:

  1. Take your lunch break somewhere your team can actually see you doing it.
  2. Say out loud that you are logging off, rather than assuming your absence will be read correctly.
  3. Go properly offline on leave, and let people see that you did.

3. Make it safe to talk about what is happening outside work

Most people do not tell their manager when things are difficult at home, not because they think their manager will not care, but because they are not sure it is allowed.

The emotional support pillar of Hammer et al.’s (2009) FSSB framework describes exactly this: a supervisor who makes it comfortable for someone to raise a work and family conflict, and who responds with genuine respect rather than a checklist reaction. This is not about a manager becoming a counsellor. It is about removing the assumption that personal pressure has to be hidden to look professional. Someone who feels safe saying they are having a rough few weeks at home can be supported early. Someone who does not feel safe will simply push through in silence, right up until they cannot.

Three leadership moves:

  1. Ask how someone is doing and then stay quiet long enough to actually hear the answer.
  2. Respond to a disclosure about home pressure with flexibility first, and only ask clarifying questions second.
  3. Avoid requiring a detailed explanation before agreeing to something reasonable.

4. Check in on control, not only workload

Workload conversations are common. Control conversations almost never happen, and they are arguably more useful. Two people can carry an identical task list and the same hours, and recover completely differently, purely because one of them has real say over how the work gets done and the other does not. This follows the same logic from Meijman and Mulder’s model (1998): it is not the sheer volume of demands that predicts fatigue, it is the level of control someone perceives over meeting them.

Three leadership moves:

  1. Add “how much say did you have over how you did this” to regular individual conversations, alongside “how much did you have to do.”
  2. Notice when the two answers move in different directions, and treat that gap as the real issue.
  3. Give someone more control over method or sequencing even when their overall workload cannot be reduced right now.

5. Notice the switch, do not just survive it

There used to be a built in ritual that helped people move from work mode into home mode: the commute. Sitting on a train, walking from a car park, even the simple act of leaving a building gave the brain a clear signal that one part of the day had ended and another had begun.

Remote and hybrid working has quietly removed that ritual for a great many people, and few have replaced it with anything. Barnes’ research on sleep and self regulation (2012) and Sonnentag and Fritz’s work on recovery experiences (2007), covering relaxation, mastery and genuine psychological detachment, both point to the same underlying idea: recovery depends on a real cognitive shift out of work mode, and that shift is far easier to make with a clear marker than without one.

Three leadership moves:

  1. Build a short personal ritual for the end of the working day and use it every day, not only when you remember to.
  2. Encourage each person on the team to define their own version rather than prescribing one ritual for everyone.
  3. Ask periodically whether the switch is genuinely happening, or whether work and home have quietly become one continuous stretch with no edge to it.

6. Do the things that actually recharge you

Demerouti et al. (2009) looked specifically at what helps people recover once they have left work, not what people assume helps. Leaders are often the worst at protecting any of this for themselves, filling recovered time with catching up on email or running tomorrow’s problems through their head instead of actually being present.

Their research points to ten specific activities worth building back into your week.

  1. Get a proper night’s sleep, not just enough.
  2. Take a short nap or a real break when the day allows it.
  3. Do something physical that raises your heart rate, even briefly.
  4. Practise a deliberate relaxation technique, breathing, stretching, whatever actually works for you.
  5. Spend time with people where work does not come up.
  6. Pursue a hobby or creative activity with no link to your job.
  7. Actively stop thinking about work, not just physically leave it.
  8. Find something that makes you properly laugh.
  9. Leave email and admin alone outside working hours.
  10. Notice the switch from work mode into home mode, and actually pause there for a second instead of just carrying straight through it.

Three leadership moves:

  1. Over the next two or three weeks, try to hit as many of the ten as you genuinely can in a single week.
  2. Compare that week honestly against an ordinary week, rather than assuming you already know the answer.
  3. Treat the size of the gap between the two as the clearest signal of how much recovery you have actually been skipping.

Ideas for the Team

Systems outlast good intentions. These five are the structures and norms that keep protecting recovery even on the weeks you are too busy to notice it yourself.

1. Treat recovery as daily, not annual

Plenty of organisations still treat annual leave as the main event for recovery, the idea being that two or three weeks away lets someone bank enough rest to coast through the rest of the year. Meijman and Mulder’s Effort Recovery model (1998) describes why this does not hold up. Effort spent at work produces fatigue, and that fatigue is meant to clear again fairly quickly, within a day or two, once the demand has passed. Demerouti et al. (2009) built directly on this to show that what predicts wellbeing over the long term is not how someone spends their holiday, it is what happens between one shift and the next, day after day. When recovery does not happen consistently at that daily level, the fatigue does not wait patiently for the summer break. It accumulates, and a fortnight away cannot undo months of under recovery.

For a leader this means the annual leave policy, generous as it might be, is not the main lever. The real question is whether someone has anything left by the time they log off on an ordinary Tuesday. A team that is “saving itself” for the summer is a team already running a deficit for the other eleven months.

Three moves for the team:

  1. Put a protected recovery window into the shared team calendar every day, even ten minutes with no meetings.
  2. Ask each person once a month what their week looked like for small resets, not only for workload.
  3. Stop pointing people toward their annual leave balance as the answer when they mention feeling tired.

2. Give people real say over how and when they work

If one factor shows up again and again in recovery research, it is control, not how much work someone has, but how much say they have over its shape. Meijman and Mulder’s model (1998) places perceived control alongside task demands as one of the two central drivers of how much effort a task actually costs someone. When people can choose the order they tackle things in, when they start and stop, or how a task actually gets done, the same volume of work leaves them less depleted. Take those decisions away and hand them down instead, and an identical workload leaves people more drained by the time they log off, and that is the tiredness that follows them home.

For a leader this is good news, because it is one of the cheapest changes available. It does not need budget. It needs giving up some of the small decisions you have been making on your team’s behalf: meeting times, task order, which method gets used.

Three moves for the team:

  1. List everything you currently decide for your team without asking them first.
  2. Share that list and ask where people would genuinely like more say.
  3. Hand back at least one category of decision this month and watch what changes.

3. Watch for the trap of thinking a good week cancels out a bad one

There is a quiet assumption that stress balances itself out, that a brutal week gets forgiven by a calmer one afterward. Hobfoll’s (1989) Conservation of Resources theory, later expanded by Hobfoll et al. (2018), shows this is not how it actually works. Resource losses hit far harder than equivalent gains help. A genuinely difficult week, one where someone’s time, energy, confidence or goodwill has been depleted, leaves a mark that a good week afterward does not fully erase. Hobfoll and Lilly’s later work (1993) on how people categorise and protect their resources reinforces the point: recovery is about replenishing what was actually lost, not simply averaging good weeks against bad ones. Left unchecked, this is how strain quietly builds over months while everything looks fine on paper.

Three moves for the team:

  1. Follow up specifically after someone has had a genuinely hard week, do not assume the calmer week that follows has already fixed it.
  2. Ask directly: that was a rough one, how are you doing now it is over.
  3. Notice patterns for individuals, not only the team average, so a slow build up of strain is visible early rather than late.

4. Make emails and admin off limits outside working hours where you can

Psychological detachment, genuinely not thinking about work rather than merely being physically away from it, is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone recovers between shifts. Wendsche and Lohmann-Haislah’s (2017) meta analysis found detachment correlated with lower exhaustion, better sleep and higher life satisfaction. Karabinski et al. (2021) went further and found that interventions specifically designed to build detachment produced a real, measurable improvement, meaning this is something organisations can actively train, not just hope for.

The problem is that small tasks that resemble work, a quick reply to an email at 8pm, reset the detachment clock straight back to zero, even when they take only a minute. This is rarely a stated policy. It is an absorbed expectation, picked up from watching what everyone else does, including the leader.

Three moves for the team:

  1. Set an explicit window when contact is not expected, and put it in writing rather than leaving it implied.
  2. Use delayed send so late night messages land the next morning instead of arriving on someone’s phone at 10pm.
  3. Handle genuine emergencies through a separate, clearly rare channel so the general rule keeps its credibility.

5. Keep overtime voluntary and worth it

Overtime itself is not the problem. Imposed overtime is. Demerouti et al. (2009) identify voluntary, well rewarded overtime as one of the line manager levers that barely affects recovery, while overtime that simply lands on someone because there is no one else to do it erodes recovery quickly, particularly once it becomes a pattern rather than an occasional ask. Part of what makes imposed overtime so damaging is that it removes the same sense of control described earlier. Choosing to stay late for something you care about is a very different experience to being told there is no choice, even if the hours are identical.

Three moves for the team:

  1. Ask before you assign extra hours, rather than defaulting to whoever happens to be available.
  2. Explain the reason for the request every time, not only the deadline.
  3. Check that recognition for extra effort is consistent, not just occasional praise for whoever stayed latest.

Bringing it together

Go back to that Gallup number for a moment. Four in ten people, stressed on an ordinary day, not a bad one. None of these eleven ideas need a large budget or a culture overhaul to start closing that gap. Most of them are conversations, small adjustments to control and expectation, and a willingness from leaders to model what they are asking for rather than simply announcing it. What they share is a single underlying idea. Recovery does not happen automatically once someone leaves the building. It is either protected deliberately, in the small moments of a working day and the boundary around it, or it erodes quietly, week by week, until it shows up as fatigue, disengagement or someone leaving altogether.

This is also why outside of work wellbeing sits right at the start of the Sustainable Performance journey rather than as an add on to it. Nothing else in that journey, ownership, feedback, resilience, growth, execution, holds up for long if the people underneath it are not arriving recovered in the first place. Get this component right and you are not only being a considerate employer. You are building the foundation everything else depends on.

Three questions worth sitting with, as a leader

  1. When did you last change how you managed someone’s workload because of what you knew was happening in their life outside work, and how did you actually find that out in the first place?
  2. If your team described your own relationship with switching off, would they describe someone modelling healthy recovery, or someone who talks about it without visibly practising it?
  3. Where in your team is workload being tracked while control over that workload is not, and what might you learn if you started asking about the second thing as often as the first?

Sources

Ashforth, B.E., Kreiner, G.E. and Fugate, M. (2000) ‘All in a day’s work: boundaries and micro role transitions’. Academy of Management Review, 25(3), pp. 472 to 491.

Barnes, C.M. (2012) ‘Working in our sleep: sleep and self regulation in organizations’. Organizational Psychology Review, 2(3), pp. 234 to 257.

Clark, S.C. (2000) ‘Work/family border theory: a new theory of work/family balance’. Human Relations, 53(6), pp. 747 to 770.

Demerouti, E., Bakker, A.B., Geurts, S.A.E. and Taris, T.W. (2009) ‘Daily recovery from work related effort during non work time’. In: P.L. Perrewé, D.C. Ganster and S. Sonnentag (eds.) Current Perspectives on Job Stress Recovery (Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being, Vol. 7). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 85 to 123.

Gallup (2025) State of the Global Workplace Report. Washington, DC: Gallup.

Hammer, L.B., Kossek, E.E., Yragui, N.L., Bodner, T.E. and Hanson, G.C. (2009) ‘Development and validation of the Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors (FSSB) scale’. Journal of Management, 35(4), pp. 837 to 856.

Hobfoll, S.E. (1989) ‘Conservation of resources: a new attempt at conceptualizing stress’. American Psychologist, 44(3), pp. 513 to 524.

Hobfoll, S.E., Halbesleben, J., Neveu, J.-P. and Westman, M. (2018) ‘Conservation of resources in the organizational context’. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, pp. 103 to 128.

Hobfoll, S.E. and Lilly, R.S. (1993) ‘Resource conservation as a strategy for community psychology’. Journal of Community Psychology, 21(2), pp. 128 to 148.

Karabinski, T., Haun, V.C., Nübold, A., Wendsche, J. and Wegge, J. (2021) ‘Interventions for improving psychological detachment from work’. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(3), pp. 224 to 242.

Meijman, T.F. and Mulder, G. (1998) ‘Psychological aspects of workload’. In: P.J.D. Drenth and H. Thierry (eds.) Handbook of Work and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 2. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 5 to 33.

Sonnentag, S. and Fritz, C. (2007) ‘The recovery experience questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work’. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), pp. 204 to 221.

Wendsche, J. and Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2017) ‘A meta analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work’. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, article 2072.