Dr Adam's Blog

Recent research out of the US has shown that workers are becoming more disengaged during the economic challenges we are experiencing. One of the reasons for this disengagement is that many are feeling angry with their company for firing their friends or cutting benefits. Their reaction is to take power into their own hands and say I will get back at them by not working as hard and being disengaged at work.

Sounds logical, but are they hurting themselves more than the company?

There are 3 types of workers:

Engaged worker – has a strong connection to their job and the company. Constantly looking to improve their performance and move the organization forward. Are enthusiastic at work and boost the culture.

Not Engaged Employee - have “checked out”, do the job but don’t have any enthusiasm, energy or passion into their work. You could say they have quit but haven’t had the decency to resign.

Actively Disengaged – not just unhappy at work but they are “busy” sharing that unhappiness with other people in the work place. They undermine the company and engaged workers.

Currently in Australia only 18% of workers are engaged, a whopping 62% of workers are not engaged and 20% are actively disengaged (Gallup). This costs our economy 32 billion dollars in lost productivity alone.

Focusing on the wrong thing!

If you look at all the literature around engagement it always talks about how the company suffers if employees are disengaged.

A company that has 4 engaged employees to each actively disengaged employee, grows 2.6 times faster than an organisation with 1 engaged to one actively disengaged employee. In addition, companies in the top quarter of engagement out earn companies in the bottom quarter by 18%.

You can’t argue with those numbers, it is obvious that a company needs to have engaged workers.
What about the individual?
Rather than only focus on the company lets look at the impact of disengagement on the individual.

Among actively disengaged employees, 54% of them said that work stress caused them to behave poorly with family or friends (aggression, verbal abuse), while only 17% of engaged employees reported that work stress had caused them to behave poorly.

An English study followed a group of healthy men over 10 years. What they found is men who were engaged at work were 30% less likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than employees who were disengaged at work. The findings remained consistent even when the researchers controlled for age, ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, socio-economic position, cholesterol level, obesity, hypertension, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity. What this means is that work attitude was the defining variable.

Engagement is also beneficial for your mental health. When you are engaged all you are thinking about is the present moment, you are paying attention to each detail and thinking “Can I do this better, faster more efficiently?” Research by prominent psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that people with chronic depression and eating disorders feel a predominance of negative emotions and negative self-talk. However when given a task to do that they are engaged in, their emotions and thoughts are indistinguishable from those of people free of these conditions.

In addition they found that the worst thing for people with depression and eating disorders is for them not to be engaged as their mind becomes occupied by depressing thoughts and their consciousness becomes scattered.

This is true for all of us, disengaged people in the work place often say that they are bored and disinterested. Pause for a moment to think what happens when you put two children in the back of a car and go for a long drives. After 15 minutes, what do you hear? “She hit me!” “He’s on my side of the car!” “He teased me!” A disengaged worker is similar to these children in the back of the car because when not engaged their thoughts drift and they start looking for trouble. Office gossip, turf battles and in fighting is a fall out from a lack of engagement.

Can we start to choose to be more engaged in the work place?

For most people engagement is conditional, if my team are in a good mood I will be engaged, my boss didn’t thank me for doing a good job so I wont be engaged. Obviously having a supportive and fun work environment makes it easier to be engaged. However research shows us that highly engaged people don’t necessarily work in the best work places.

Start to think: what is your lack of engagement costing you?

The following was taken from a Harvard Business Review article!

Do you have trouble concentrating? Find yourself easily distracted? Before getting in a tizzy that you have attention deficit disorder or something worse, check your stress level. New research shows that stress interferes with attention. The good news is that easing stress reverses these changes.

In a report in the January 20, 2009 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Conor Liston and his colleagues at Cornell's Weill Medical College and The Rockefeller University show that stress blunts the growth and connections of nerve cells in part of the brain that helps keep you focused. The researchers recruited 20 medical students. Each had his or her brain scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while taking a test that gauges the ability to shift attention from one task to another. Think of it as a multitasking test. The students underwent the scan just before taking their licensing exams--a stressful event--and a month later, after a vacation.

Those who were most stressed out by the prospect of taking the licensing exam were the least efficient at shifting their attention back and forth between tasks, the researchers reported. The greater the perception of stress, the poorer the attention to the task. On the fMRI scans, the attention-shifting task lit up several brain regions involved in attention and focus, including the prefrontal cortex. Stress dimmed the connections between these regions. Interestingly, a month of post-exam vacation reversed the disconnects.

Attention is like a Ming vase--highly prized, yet fragile and easily broken.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, columnist David Brooks wrote this gem about attention:

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

Some people are born with this power. Some learn to cultivate it. Others struggle constantly to focus. For many of us, attention is continually shattered by the small hammers of email, IM, a BlackBerry, blogs, YouTube, the Drudge Report, and countless others. Chronic stress helps them knock harder.

Although reducing stress seems to be an obvious solution to improving attention, there's no evidence that popular techniques like meditation, the relaxation response, and others will help you concentrate better. They may, but few studies have tackled this connection.

A proactive approach is unplugging yourself from distractions. A study by Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Shamsi T. Iqbal of the University of Illinois showed that it took office workers 10-15 minutes to return to an interrupted task after responding to a distraction like an instant message. Their attention wandered to previous unreturned emails, IMs, blog browsing, Web site surfing, checking RSS feeds, and social networking before returning to the task at hand.

After having spent one too many long days at work with little to show for it, I started my own small distraction-reduction plan. Instead of keeping Outlook and my RSS feeds open all day, I now fire them up every couple hours, do what needs to be done, and close them again. It feels like it's working, and I feel a bit less stressed. If Dr. Liston and his gang are right, it could be the start of a feedback loop that will help me harness "the ultimate individual power."

What are you doing to keep office distractions to a minimum?