THE STILL PROGRAMME — BURNOUT PREVENTION FOR TOP PERFORMING ORGANISATIONS
The Still Programme — burnout prevention for high-performing teams. Doing nothing
is not a strategy.
Through The Still Programme, I work with leaders and the teams they run to build a shared language for balancing pressure and sustained performance. Burnout isn't a wellness issue. It's retention, performance, and revenue — and the evidence is no longer ambiguous.
The cost of inaction
Your best people
don't announce it.
The people you can least afford to lose are the hardest to spot. They don't speak up in the team meeting. They quietly disengage — and one day they resign, or worse, they stay and stop caring.
$10T
lost last year to low engagement — around 9% of global GDP, with engagement at its lowest since 2020
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026
22%
manager engagement declines 5% in a single year — down 9% since 2022. Managers used to have an engagement premium over the people they lead. They don't any more.*
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026
*In Europe, engagement sits at just 12% — the lowest of any region globally.
50%
of Gen Z and over 40% of Millennials feel burnt out at work right now
Deloitte 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey
What burnout isn't
It doesn't look
the way you'd expect.
01
It isn't a junior problem.
The instincts that build a consistent high-achieving career — the drive, the passion, treating exhaustion as noise to override rather than a signal to obey — are the same instincts that puts your top performers at risk, and they are the least likely to ask for help. Sabine Sonnentag calls it the recovery paradox. The blind spot scales with the role.
02
It isn't a bad quarter.
It builds over extended periods, not moments. By the time it's visible in performance, it has usually been building quietly for two or three quarters already.
03
It isn't weakness, and it isn't personality.
It's a nervous system response to sustained load without recovery. The same physiology fires whether the threat is physical or a Slack at 11pm.
04
Resilience training alone doesn't hold.
Individual coping tools produce short-term results. The effects that last twelve months and beyond come from pairing individual practice with how work is structured and how leaders lead. The intervention has to match the cause, and the cause is rarely just the individual.
05
It isn't a wellness problem.
It's a business performance, retention, and culture problem.
THE LANGUAGE
No one talks about burnout.
Not properly.
Not because it isn't real. Because there's no shared language for preventing it, and most people are afraid to even start the conversation. Four words give you somewhere to start.
01
Load
What's actually being asked. Is it sustainable, or already past it. This is the main variable for most and it can fluctuate.
02
Recovery
Load without recovery is where it breaks. Is the system actually resetting — or just pausing before the next push?
03
Boundaries
Protecting the time that lets recovery happen. And being able to flag when load has tipped too far, before it costs something bigger.
04
Meaning
Does the work still land the way it used to. Are people still motivated, still connected, still bought in.
When a business needs to push harder — a heavy quarter, a hard deadline — this is the language for explaining what's coming, and for a team to know what to put in place before it lands.
THE PROGRAMME
Three ways
to work with Still.
Every engagement starts with a conversation about where it is showing up for you: sick days, survey data, a leader who has gone quiet. The answer decides the format, never the other way round.
01
Keynote
A single session that names what is happening, and gives a room the shared language to talk about it honestly. Built for all-hands, offsites, or as a summit opener.
- Format
- In person
- Duration
- 60 to 90 minutes, plus Q&A
- Audience
- Any size, one room
02
Team session
We start with a conversation about what is showing up in your business: attrition, employer brand reviews, what your people say in employee surveys. The session is built around what you need, including a working session on Load, Recovery, Boundaries or Meaning, and ends with a shared way forward. The Full Day adds extended practice and space for individual reflection, so it is practised before people leave the room.
- Format
- In person
- Duration
- Half Day or Full Day
- Audience
- One team at a time
03
Planning Phase
Find out where burnout is showing up in your business, what it costs, and what doing nothing risks, before you commit to a programme. In four weeks you get a costed picture, a clear recommendation and a plan your leadership team has agreed. If the evidence does not support acting, we will say so.
- Format
- Working sessions and a review of your figures
- Duration
- Four weeks, fixed fee
- Audience
- Leadership team and HR
Then, if the evidence supports it
Implementation. Scoped from the Planning Phase findings. Leader education, the Still. framework workshops, rollout by team or across the organisation, and monthly and quarterly check-ins that review the measures agreed in the Planning Phase.
Not ready to talk? Start with the free resources.
ATTENDEE FEEDBACK
What attendees say
in their own words.
“A great way to help you identify stress and burnout and how to avoid it and manage it moving forward!”
“It has never been more important to talk about the stress of work ... in an era when we are expected to do more. This conversation is critical to have now.”
“It's great to learn more about ourselves and having time to reflect on how others display stress.”
“Make it longer!”
Feedback from attendees of Still. sessions in 2026.
Enquire
Let's talk about
what this looks like.
Tell me a little about what brought you here and we can build a plan together that is aligned with the business issues you are trying to solve and has a clear way of measuring impact.
Not ready to talk yet? Free tools for managers and People teams.
About
Anthony Maher.
I spent over two decades in tech sales as a high performer, fifteen of those years leading EMEA sales organisations. I know the version of performance that costs people their health, because I lived it, and I know what it looks like on the other side of that.
On the teams I led, attrition stayed low and engagement stayed high. I didn't call it prevention. I called it looking after my people. What I didn't do was look after myself.
I wrote it down in The Journey to Acquiesce, now a #1 bestseller on Amazon Ireland.
The Still Programme is what I do now: burnout prevention for high-performing teams. The work is calm, direct and evidence-led. The aim is a healthy relationship with sustainable high achievement, for the people doing the work and the organisations that depend on their performance.