Your Employees Don’t Leave Life at the Door

Your Employees Don’t Leave Life at the Door

By Fliss Hoyle of Lived Experiences Inspire

Workplace wellbeing often focuses on what happens at work. But people’s health, responsibilities and experiences outside work do not remain neatly separated from how they feel and function within it.

When we talk about burnout and workplace wellbeing, the conversation often centres on workload, deadlines, workplace culture and training. Burnout itself is specifically associated with chronic workplace stress, but our capacity to cope with that stress does not exist in isolation. Work matters, but so does what the person is already carrying alongside it.

We often talk about our “work life” and “home life” as though they are two separate things. We might try to create boundaries between them, but we are the common denominator in both. We don’t stop being a parent, carer, partner or person managing our own health when we start work. Equally, the impact of a difficult working day does not necessarily disappear when we go home.

This matters because our capacity is affected by the whole picture. Someone may be managing a reasonable workload but also dealing with poor sleep, caring responsibilities, financial pressure, physical pain, relationship difficulties or changes in their health. None of those things needs to be caused by work to affect how much that person has available to cope with it.

I understand this through my own lived experience. Before being medically retired from my branding and marketing role aged 27, I was highly productive, ambitious and had been offered a promotion. From the outside, I appeared capable and successful at work.

But my life outside work had become increasingly difficult, and the way I was working was adding to what I was already carrying. I worked long hours, rarely took holiday and continually pushed myself. Much of that was driven by my own ambition, but because I was performing well, it was congratulated rather than considered in the context of my overall wellbeing. Meanwhile, my functioning was deteriorating. I couldn’t follow my thoughts, I forgot things, I couldn’t sleep and I knew something was wrong without understanding what. I developed an eating disorder as a way of coping, which eventually became clinical
depression and led to further complications.

It would be too simplistic to attribute what happened to one cause. It was an accumulation across my health, work and wider life. It was the beginning of a much more complicated health journey and a powerful example of how someone can continue to perform while their overall capacity is deteriorating. Being able to perform is not always evidence that somebody is coping.
Looking at the whole person does not mean employers are responsible for everything happening in someone’s life. Nor does it mean asking managers or colleagues to take on a therapeutic role. It means recognising that what happens outside work can affect someone’s capacity within it, just as work can affect their life outside it.

For organisations, that wider understanding can change the questions we ask. Rather than waiting for performance to drop or someone to reach crisis point, we can create opportunities for earlier conversations, encourage people to recognise changes in their own capacity and make it easier to ask for support.

Workplace wellbeing will always involve looking at the workplace. But if we only look at what happens between the start and end of the working day, we risk missing a large part of the picture.

We cannot neatly divide people into home life and work life. For sustainable living and functioning, we need to look after the person who is living both.