They track who's doing what and redistribute tasks when imbalances become obvious. They reward quality work with career development opportunities, not just more work.
They invest in stress management training for everyone, not just people who are obviously struggling. Prevention beats crisis management every time.
They have clear policies about coverage during leave so people can actually disconnect without worrying about work piling up.
Most importantly, they address performance issues directly rather than expecting other team members to compensate for inadequate work.
If your best employees are working significantly more hours than everyone else on a regular basis, you have a management problem, not a staffing problem.
If the same people always volunteer for extra projects while others never do, you need to examine why and address the underlying dynamics.
If losing one person would create operational crisis, you've built an unsustainable system that's unfair to everyone involved.
Want to keep your best people? Here's what actually works:
Recognize excellence appropriately. Not just with praise, but with genuine career development opportunities, fair compensation, and reasonable workload management.
Address underperformance consistently. Stop expecting high performers to compensate for colleagues who aren't meeting basic job requirements.
Create coverage systems so people can take leave without feeling guilty or anxious about work consequences.
Set clear boundaries about after-hours availability and model healthy work habits yourself.
Monitor workload distribution actively rather than assuming people will speak up when they're overwhelmed.
Replacing a high performer typically costs 150-300% of their annual salary when you factor in recruitment, training, lost productivity, and knowledge transfer challenges.
Yet most organisations spend more money on team building events than they do on workload management systems that would prevent their best people from burning out.
A manufacturing company in Geelong calculated that losing their production supervisor cost them $180,000 in direct replacement costs plus another $250,000 in productivity losses during the six-month transition period.
They could have hired two additional team members for less than half that cost and created sustainable operations instead of relying on one person to hold everything together.
Managing high performers requires different skills than managing average employees. They need autonomy, challenge, and fair treatment more than they need supervision and motivation.
They also need protection from becoming the default solution for every workplace problem.
The best managers I know act as buffers between their high performers and excessive demands from other departments or senior leadership. They're strategic about assignments and ruthless about workload sustainability.
Your most reliable employees aren't machines that can absorb unlimited work without consequences. They're people who deserve sustainable careers and fair treatment.
Stop rewarding excellence with exploitation. Start creating systems where competence leads to appropriate opportunities rather than overwhelming responsibilities.
The teams that get this right keep their best people and develop their struggling ones. The teams that don't lose their institutional knowledge one resignation at a time while wondering why performance never improves.
Protect your high performers before they protect themselves by leaving.
Your business depends on it more than you probably realise.
This is what modern Australian workplaces have become: endless cycles of meetings about meetings, where actual work happens in the gaps between scheduled discussions that nobody really needs to have.
Yesterday I counted the meetings in a typical manager's calendar at a financial services company in Sydney. Seventeen meetings across five days. Total productive work time: roughly four hours, scattered between "catch-ups" and "alignment sessions."
Then management wondered why projects were running behind schedule.
Here's what drives me absolutely mental: We've convinced ourselves that more meetings equal better communication, when the opposite is actually true.
Look at your calendar right now. How much uninterrupted time do you have for actual work?
If you're like most Australian professionals, the answer is "not bloody much." We've allowed meetings to expand like bureaucratic cancer, consuming every available hour until real work gets pushed to evenings and weekends.
I worked with a mining equipment manufacturer in Perth where engineers were spending 32 hours per week in meetings and 8 hours doing actual engineering. Their innovation pipeline had completely stalled because nobody had time to think, design, or test anything.
The tragedy is that most of these meetings accomplished nothing that couldn't have been handled with a five-minute conversation or a well-written email.
We've created entire industries around meeting facilitation, collaborative software, and workshop design. Everyone's getting rich except the people actually trying to get work done.
Meeting room booking systems, video conferencing platforms, digital whiteboards, breakout session facilitators. It's a billion-dollar ecosystem built around the assumption that putting people in rooms together automatically creates value.
Spoiler alert: it doesn't.
The most productive teams I've worked with spend minimal time in formal meetings because they've developed systems for sharing information, making decisions, and solving problems without requiring everyone to stop working simultaneously.
For many managers, meetings have become a way to demonstrate importance and maintain visibility. If you're not scheduling regular team meetings, planning sessions, and strategic discussions, you're not really "leading."
This is complete garbage, but it explains why calendars keep getting more crowded despite overwhelming evidence that meeting overload destroys productivity.
I watched a facilities manager in Adelaide schedule weekly "operational alignment meetings" that served no purpose except proving to his boss that he was actively managing his team. The team already communicated effectively through daily handovers and had no operational alignment issues.