Charlie Beestone
Specialism: Coaching
We help HR and People leaders in tech and AI organisations cut burnout, presenteeism and 3pm productivity crashes by running sessions that empower employees to use nutrition to optimise their performance.
We’re desperate for high-performing team members, yet we’re never taught two key elements that unlock productivity and cognitive performance:
- How should I work?
- What should I eat?
At Koru Performance, we help HR and People leaders in fast-moving tech and AI organisations protect productivity from burnout, presenteeism and stress-related absence by tackling something most corporate wellbeing nutrition content misses entirely – the bi-directional interaction between how people work and how they eat.
Standard corporate nutrition talks (and we should know, we’ve had to endure plenty!) cover some of the basics of nutrition, like why we need to eat the rainbow, or the importance of gut health – and that’s fine! But it’s not the lever that people actually need to pull to feel in charge of their work and their wellbeing. THAT lever is understanding the way that high-pressure work changes how we eat, as well as knowing how what we eat then changes what we can give back to work.
Underneath all this is overwhelm. People context-switch across digital tools all day, then plug back in at home through phones, social media, laptops and TV. We’re running huge amounts of information into a brain that was designed to cope with the Stone Ages, and it’s struggling! Given that overwhelm is the most common problem we hear, it’s baffling when wellbeing provision just serves to throw more information at people – more rules about what to eat, more ‘do this not that’. It adds confusion to an overwhelmed brain, and leaves them in no position to actually make changes. We believe that we’re the only provider having this conversation with people.
The misunderstanding most companies make about burnout is that it happens to people who work too much, and hate their job. In high-growth tech and AI organisations, it more often happens to the opposite – people who love what they do, but who have lost the capacity to do it. They want purpose, they want to ship, they want to perform, and the energy to do that has gone. When that breaks down, presenteeism and afternoon energy drops show up first – and then feed a cycle, because less energy drives more of the behaviours that drained it in the first place (skipped meals, more caffeine, context switching, checking social media, lunch at the desk etc), which drops energy further again. Left long enough, that cycle runs into stress-related absence and eventually burnout. The point of intervention is upstream – before the cycle has cost you the people you can least afford to lose.
If you are responsible for people in a fast-moving tech or AI organisation, this pattern is familiar. Work-related stress, depression and anxiety drive a large share of long-term sickness in the UK, and presenteeism costs around three times more than absence.
Our background is in elite sport – world champions, Olympians and professional sports teams alongside high-growth tech and AI companies across the UK, Europe and the Middle East. We bring the same principles into the room with your team. Our keynotes treat wellbeing and performance as bidirectional – they feed each other. That’s the element that most corporate wellbeing talks miss. Instead of a wellbeing awareness talk on ‘managing stress’, our sessions act as a diagnostic for your people to realise where their relationship with food and work are, how they interact – and how working on both of them together is the key to wellbeing and productivity.
“I no longer get afternoon slumps and can maintain concentration through endless remote working days – I’d recommend Charlie to any business looking to support the performance of their people.”
- Becca Jones, Director, Home Office
Common bookings include:
- Lunch-and-learns on energy, focus and the 3pm slump
- Keynotes on the work-eating loop and burnout prevention
- Conference and panel speaking at tech, AI and start-up events
- Timed talks for Mental Health Awareness Week and Stress Awareness Month
- Workplace nutrition keynotes for HR, People and L&D conferences to reduce stress-related absence and presenteeism costs in tech and AI organisations.
- Lunch-and-learns on energy, focus and the 3pm productivity slump for hybrid engineering and product teams to protect afternoon output and reduce burnout risk.
- Burnout prevention keynotes for tech leadership and senior managers to retain high performers and reduce attrition driven by stress and overload.
- Stress-eating and emotional-eating talks for HR and People teams, timed to Mental Health Awareness Week and Stress Awareness Month, to support employees through high-pressure periods.
- Conference and panel speaking on the work-eating loop for tech, AI and start-up events to position your organisation as a leader in modern workplace wellbeing.
- Manager-facing talks on spotting early burnout signals in hybrid teams so leaders can intervene before sickness absence and attrition climb.
- Bespoke keynotes tailored to your organisation’s absence, retention and engagement data to address the specific pressure points inside your workforce.
If you are an HR, People or L&D leader in a tech or AI organisation, and presenteeism, burnout or stress-related absence are showing up in your absence numbers, engagement scores or attrition data, please book a conversation about speaking with your team.
