For a long time, it was accepted that the question of personal energy was external to work. But over the last decade, organizations have made a major sh

ift: 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 well-being, resilience capabilities, and team productivity is clear. Modern organizations therefore integrate this criterion into their management. In a book published in 2011 and titled Fully Charged, Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel propose an energy matrix (see below) to measure the energy that drives a team or an organization. Four «energy states» are possible:

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

• Create a team culture where energy management is not reduced to a personal matter. Discuss it to manage it collectively as well. Your team must be aware of the state of each of its members. This way everyone can pull together.
• Take into consideration all facets of personal energy: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Propose a range of activities to support individuals in each of these dimensions, in a holistic approach. Nutrition and hydration, sleep, physical activity, meditation and relaxation: all of these play a role!
• Make work and contacts within the team pleasant. Create favorable circumstances for the emergence of a «highly positive» energy state. Show optimism, and even humor: an authentic smile is contagious. Expressing your passion, your fervor can work wonders. Imagine original, attractive ways to connect with your team (e.g., a one-off event).
• Offer spaces of tranquility where one can concentrate, relax, and recover during the day. Make them havens of serenity. People should have a peaceful place to recharge their batteries. A «lowly positive» energy state greatly contributes to preventing stress, exhaustion, and burnout.
• Propose flexible work plans, with varied options to compensate for paid and unpaid leave. Consider part-time employment contracts, parental leave, sabbatical leave.

• Promote a culture that overvalues «highly positive» energies, i.e., states of internal agitation, with stress reactions (aggressiveness, flight). The cause: an activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
• Give at least as much importance to «weakly positive» energies», associated with physiological recovery, rest, and the stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Like an athlete who must avoid exhausting themselves during training, at the risk of injury, your team needs recovery time. This is precisely what enables performance.
• Devaluing relaxation spaces. Some organizations set up superb offices with relaxation areas, but no one goes there. People should be able to use them without feeling observed, monitored, or judged. Check that this is indeed the case in your organization. Present passive recovery as an activity that fully and sustainably contributes to performance. It is a key to people's engagement in their work.
• Launching internal energy management initiatives, without leading by example. Managers who allow themselves to send emails at inappropriate hours, schedule business trips during weekends, and skip their vacations are at the origin of internal tensions such as conflicts of loyalty. People risk feeling less and less comfortable with the displayed well-being rules, and some will tend to imitate the behavior of their hierarchy.
• Letting «strongly negative» energies exhaust a team. Resentment, anger, anxiety, even stress and chronic fatigue would result. This would obviously impact collective efficiency very negatively. External support is sometimes necessary to help people evacuate their emotions, overcome frustrations, and, ultimately, find ways to recycle negative energies into something constructive.
• Institutional taboos on exhaustion and burnout. This doesn't just happen to others. In any organization, a person can collapse, overwhelmed by fatigue. Ignoring this reality fosters an illusion of invulnerability and a culture of denial. Organizations should instead recognize their own share of responsibility and seek to provide attention and support to the individuals concerned. This is essential for their recovery.