We Have Optimized Work. Have We Forgotten Recovery?

Why sustainable performance may require more than better tools, better processes and greater efficiency.

For more than a decade, global employee engagement was moving in the right direction. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, the proportion of engaged employees worldwide rose from 12% in 2009 to a peak of 23% in 2022 and 2023. The trend has since reversed, with engagement falling to 21% in 2024 and 20% in 2025. Most strikingly, this decline has been driven largely by managers, whose engagement has deteriorated particularly sharply over the past three years.

These figures raise an important question: After decades spent optimizing how people work, have we paid enough attention to what allows them to sustain that work?

Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026

We have become very good at optimizing effort

Modern organizations are built around performance. Companies continuously optimize processes, automate repetitive tasks, introduce new technologies, measure productivity and streamline workflows. The arrival of artificial intelligence has accelerated this logic even further, as organizations search for new ways to increase output, improve decision-making and achieve more with the resources available to them.

Yet better tools do not automatically create better organizations, and greater individual efficiency does not necessarily translate into sustainable collective performance. Technology can increase the speed at which people work, but it cannot indefinitely expand their capacity to concentrate, make decisions, absorb pressure and adapt to constant change.

This distinction matters because people are not machines. That observation does not mean that companies should expect less from them. It means that organizations need to understand more precisely what sustained human performance requires.

This is where the business world may have something to learn from elite sport.

Elite sport learned this lesson a long time ago

No serious coach would expect an athlete to improve through training alone. Training creates the stimulus, but the body needs recovery to adapt to it. Muscles must rebuild, energy reserves must be restored, the nervous system must regulate itself and mental intensity must subside before the next demanding effort begins.

For elite athletes, recovery is therefore not the opposite of performance. It is an integral part of the performance process.

The business world still tends to operate according to a different logic. Companies organize workloads, define objectives, schedule meetings, set deadlines and establish performance expectations. Recovery, however, remains largely a private responsibility. Employees are expected to manage it themselves after work, during weekends or on holiday, through sleep, exercise, meditation or whatever personal routines they can fit around the demands of their professional and private lives.

This creates a strange imbalance: the organization structures the effort, while the individual is largely left to structure the recovery.

The imbalance becomes increasingly relevant as the intensity of work rises. Faster processes, permanent connectivity and more efficient tools do not necessarily create calmer working days. In many cases, they simply create capacity for more activity, more decisions and more change.

Perhaps the problem is not work itself

The current conversation about employee wellbeing often becomes unnecessarily polarized.

On one side, companies face legitimate pressure to improve productivity and performance. On the other, employees and health experts call for fewer demands, better boundaries and greater protection from chronic stress.

This opposition may be misleading. High performance and wellbeing are not necessarily enemies, and the answer to excessive pressure cannot simply be the elimination of effort. Elite sport demonstrates that demanding performance can be sustainable when recovery is taken seriously enough to become part of the system that supports it.

The more useful question for companies may therefore be how they can help people sustain periods of high performance without simply accumulating their effects.

This question shifts the discussion away from reducing effort and towards improving the ability to recover from effort. The distinction is essential because recovery does not weaken a culture of performance. When it is properly understood, recovery can help make performance more sustainable.

Recovery is more than rest

When people hear the word recovery, they often imagine inactivity. They think of a holiday, a weekend or time spent doing nothing. However, recovery is better understood as a process that allows a person to move from one state to another.

Effective recovery can help someone move from tension back to calm, from mental overload back to clarity, from physical strain back to comfort and from depleted attention back to concentration. Its purpose is not simply to stop activity, but to restore the capacity to meet the next demand.

Recovery can therefore happen at different moments, in different ways and over different timescales. A person may need a few minutes of quiet after a period of intense concentration, movement after prolonged sitting or physical recovery after repetitive and demanding work. Other situations may require mental decompression between high-pressure tasks, better boundaries after work, adequate sleep or longer periods away from professional demands.

No single method can address every need, because the physical and mental demands of work vary widely. A production employee who spends hours standing and performing repetitive movements does not experience the same strain as a manager moving between difficult decisions, meetings and constant interruptions. Both may need recovery, but their needs will not necessarily be identical.

The important shift is therefore to recognize that recovery is not one activity. It is a capability. Like every capability, it can either be supported or obstructed by the environment in which people work.

Culture determines whether recovery is actually possible

A company can offer an excellent wellbeing programme and still fail to change anything. It can create quiet spaces, provide recovery tools, offer yoga or meditation and introduce flexible breaks. However, one question will often determine whether employees actually use what is available: what will other people think if I do?

If employees believe that taking time to recover will be interpreted as a lack of commitment, many of them will avoid it. If stepping away from a desk for twenty minutes creates guilt, people will remain at their desks. If managers never use the resources that the company provides, employees will quickly understand the unwritten rule.

A company may officially state that wellbeing matters, but its daily culture can communicate the opposite. When an organization offers recovery as a benefit while continuing to glorify permanent availability, the culture will usually win.

This is why the biggest barrier to recovery at work may not be access. It may be permission.

The permission that matters is not necessarily written in a policy or announced in an email from HR. It is cultural permission: the feeling that an employee does not need to justify recovering, that stepping away briefly does not mean falling behind and that restoring the capacity to perform is not a sign of weakness.

Without this cultural shift, even the best initiatives risk becoming underused symbols of good intentions.

Managers are central to this shift

The latest Gallup findings about managers deserve particular attention because managers are not simply another employee group. They translate organizational intentions into everyday experience, and they often determine, without explicitly saying so, which behaviours are genuinely acceptable.

A company may say that wellbeing matters, but a manager shows whether it really does. The same principle applies to recovery.

If leaders treat recovery as something that people earn only after all the work is finished, employees are likely to adopt the same belief. If managers themselves operate in a state of permanent urgency, their teams will absorb that rhythm. If a manager praises constant availability while ignoring the quality of sustained performance, employees will quickly learn what the organization truly values.

A different culture becomes possible when leaders understand recovery as part of maintaining human capacity. This does not require managers to become therapists, health experts or wellbeing coaches. It requires them to adopt a broader understanding of performance and to recognize that people cannot indefinitely absorb increasing demands without opportunities to restore their physical and mental resources.

The cultural shift therefore begins with a simple idea: recovery should not be treated as a reward for performance when it is one of the conditions that makes sustainable performance possible.

From wellbeing benefit to performance infrastructure

For years, recovery-related initiatives have largely been placed in the category of employee wellbeing. They have often been presented as benefits, perks or pleasant additions to the working environment, which has kept them separate from the supposedly more serious conversations about business performance.

This distinction deserves to be reconsidered.

If the ability to recover influences a person’s capacity to concentrate, regulate stress, maintain physical comfort and return to demanding tasks with renewed energy, then recovery belongs in a broader conversation. It should not be discussed only in relation to wellbeing, because it may also influence the conditions under which sustainable performance becomes possible.

This does not mean that every company needs the same approach. A factory, a consulting firm, a hospital and a technology company place very different demands on people. Recovery should not replace good leadership, sensible workloads, ergonomics, occupational health or effective work organization either.

The more useful starting point is a question that has been largely absent from business strategy:

What helps our people recover from the specific demands we place on them?

A company that asks this question seriously will begin to look differently at its working environment, its rhythms and its management culture. It may also discover that the needs of different employee groups vary significantly and that recovery cannot be reduced to one generic wellbeing programme.

The next productivity challenge may be human

Companies will continue to improve technology, automate tasks and make information more accessible. These developments will create enormous opportunities, but they will not automatically make working life less demanding.

Greater efficiency often creates capacity for more activity. Faster communication creates more communication. Better tools allow people to process more information, make more decisions and manage more change. The human system that carries this increasing intensity remains subject to physical, cognitive and emotional limits.

The next competitive advantage may therefore not come from asking people to push harder. It may come from understanding more precisely what allows them to perform repeatedly without treating recovery as something that begins only after the working day has ended.

Elite athletes learned this lesson long ago. Training creates the stimulus, recovery enables adaptation and performance is the result.

Perhaps it is time for business to reconsider the same equation.