Your team is working hard. Putting the hours in, showing up, doing all the things. So why aren't you getting the results you should be?
Most organisations respond by reaching for more productivity training, better time management, or another round of process optimisation. In this episode, Lyndsey and Bryony are here to tell you that's not the answer — and it might actually be making things worse.
The real problem is invisible. It's the daily energy drains nobody's tracking or talking about. The information buried across five different systems. The meeting nobody knows why they're attending. The constant context switching because priorities were never made clear. Individually they feel too small to mention. Collectively they're exhausting your team and killing your results.
This week Lyndsey and Bryony introduce the energy audit — three practical habits to identify what's draining your team so you can strip it back and free up the focus they need to do their best work. Because most teams have around 30% of their time going into low or no value activity. And if you stopped it tomorrow? Nobody would even notice.
What You'll Learn In This Episode:
Habit 1 — The Energy Mapping Conversation
A simple 15-minute conversation with each member of your team — built into an existing one-to-one so you're not adding yet another meeting. You're asking two very specific questions, because energy is different from challenge. Something can be hard and energising. Something can be easy and completely soul-destroying.
The two questions to ask:
- What is giving you energy right now in your work?
- What is draining your energy?
Don't try to fix anything in the moment — just listen, take notes, and look for the patterns. When you do this across your whole team, you'll almost always find multiple people are being drained by exactly the same thing. That's your data. That's where you start.
Habit 2 — The Time vs Value Tracker
Get your team to track their time for one week — every meeting, email, and task. Then sort everything into four buckets.
The four categories:
- High value — directly contributes to your goals
- Medium value — necessary but not directly contributing
- Low value — questionable whether it needs to happen at all
- No value — if you stopped it tomorrow, what's the worst that would happen?
One team discovered they were collectively spending 15 hours a week on status reports nobody was reading — a process that had simply never been questioned. Once you see the data, you cannot unsee it. And you finally have the evidence to stop things, not just add more.
Habit 3 — The Energy Killers List
A living document you create and maintain together as a team. Every time something drains your team's energy — big or small — it goes on the list. But this isn't a complaint list. Every item gets an action attached to it, even if that action is simply deciding to accept it for now and manage around it.
How to use it:
- Add it as a standing item in your monthly retrospective or quarterly goal setting — no new meeting needed
- Encourage the whole team to contribute, not just the leader
- Celebrate when you've tackled one — that's a win worth acknowledging
- Review it regularly as energy drains change over time
This is one of the most effective burnout prevention tools a leader can build into their team culture. It makes the invisible visible, gives people a shared language for what's not working, and turns individual frustrations into something you tackle together.
Key Takeaway:
This isn't about working harder or smarter. It's about protecting your team's energy so they can do the work that actually matters. Strip away the noise, stop the low-value stuff, and lead a team that's energised — not just busy.
