For a long time, it was assumed that the question of personal energy was alien to the workplace. Over the past decade, however, organizations have undergone a radical rethink.

major change: they have recognized the existence of a link. A person's vitality is influenced as much by their private life as by their professional life.

The impact on the well-being, resilience and productivity of teams is clear. Modern organizations are integrating this criterion into their management processes. In a book published in 2011 entitled Fully Charged, Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel propose an energy matrix (see below) to measure the energy driving a team or organization. Four "energy states" are possible:

If you achieve and maintain a state of productive energy, you boost individual and/or collective well-being and performance tenfold.

• Create a team culture where energy management is not just a personal matter. Discuss it and manage it collectively. Your team needs to be aware of the state of each of its members. That way, everyone can pull together.
• Take into account all facets of personal energy: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Offer a range of activities to support people in each of these dimensions, in a holistic approach. Nutrition and hydration, sleep, physical activity, meditation and relaxation: they all play a part!
• Make work and contacts within the team pleasant. Create circumstances conducive to the emergence of a "highly positive" state of energy. Show optimism, even humor: a genuine smile is contagious. Expressing your passion and enthusiasm can work wonders. Come up with original, attractive ways to connect with your team (e.g. one-off events).
• Offer quiet spaces where people can concentrate, relax and recuperate during the day. Make them havens of serenity. People need a peaceful place to recharge their batteries. A state of "low positive energy" goes a long way towards preventing stress, exhaustion and burnout.
• Offer flexible work plans, with various options to compensate for paid and unpaid leave. Consider part-time work contracts, parental leave and sabbaticals.

• Promoting a culture that overvalues "highly positive" energies, i.e. states of internal agitation, with stress reactions (aggression, flight). The cause: activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
• Give at least as much importance to "low-positive" energies, associated with physiological recovery, rest and stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Like an athlete who needs to avoid training to the point of exhaustion, your team needs recovery time. This is precisely what enables performance.
• Devaluing relaxation areas. Some organizations build superb offices with relaxation areas, but nobody goes there. People should be able to use them without feeling observed, watched or judged. Make sure this is the case at home. Present passive recovery as an activity that contributes fully and sustainably to performance. It's a key to people's commitment to their work.
• Launching internal energy management initiatives, without setting an example. Executives who allow themselves to send e-mails at odd hours, take business trips over the weekend and skip their vacations are the source of internal tensions such as loyalty conflicts. People are likely to feel less and less at ease with the posted rules of well-being, and some will tend to imitate the behavior of their hierarchy.
• Letting "highly negative" energies drain a team. Resentment, anger, anxiety, even stress and chronic fatigue are the result. This would obviously have a very negative impact on collective effectiveness. External support is sometimes needed to help people vent their emotions, overcome frustrations and, ultimately, find ways to recycle negative energies into something constructive.
• Institutional taboos on exhaustion and burnout. It doesn't just happen to other people. In any organization, a person can collapse from exhaustion. Ignoring this reality feeds an illusion of invulnerability and a culture of denial. Instead, organizations should recognize their own share of responsibility and seek to provide care and support to the people concerned. This is essential for their recovery.