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?
Dr Adam's Blog
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Why should I be engaged at work? Give me one good reason!
Adam Fraser - Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Sleep Deep
Adam Fraser - Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Sweet Dreams, Sleep Tight, Succeed!
Many hard-charging managers pride themselves on their ability to work long hours and get by on five or six hours of sleep. But the truth is that they’re shortchanging themselves—and their companies.
“Sleep is not a luxury,” says Dr. James O’Brien, medical director of the Boston SleepCare Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. “It’s a necessity for optimal functioning.”
When you sleep, your brain catalogues the previous day’s experiences, primes your memory and triggers the release of hormones regulating energy, mood and mental acuity. To complete its work, the brain needs seven to eight hours of sleep. When it gets less, your concentration, creativity, mood regulation and productivity all take a hit.
HOW SLEEP WORKS
To understand why the right amount of shut-eye is so important to performance, it helps to know how sleep works.
Healthy sleep is divided into four-stage cycles. As we progress through stages 1 and 2, we become increasingly unplugged from the world until we reach the deep sleep that happens in stage 3. In deep sleep, both brain and body activity drop to their lowest point during the cycle, and blood is redirected from the brain to muscles.
The fourth and final stage is named for the rapid eye movement—REM—that is its defining characteristic. Our brains become busily active in REM sleep, too, even more so than when we are awake. Dreaming happens at this stage.
In a full night’s sleep, we experience three or four such cycles, each lasting 60 minutes to 90 minutes.
THE WORK SLEEP DOES
Different yet equally important restorative work happens during deep sleep (stage 3) and REM sleep (stage 4).
Deep sleep is crucial for physical renewal, hormonal regulation and growth. Without deep sleep, you’re more likely to get sick, feel depressed and gain an unhealthy amount of weight.
In REM sleep the brain processes and synthesizes memories and emotions, activity that is crucial for learning and higher-level thought. A lack of REM sleep results in slower cognitive and social processing, problems with memory and difficulty concentrating.
A DEFICIT IN SLEEP LEADS TO DEFICITS IN WORK PERFORMANCE
Performing complex tasks and navigating complicated relationships—the heart and soul of a manager’s work—both become much harder to do when REM sleep suffers. And when you cut back on sleep, your REM sleep suffers the most. There are two reasons for this:
1. Your brain, when confronted with sleep deprivation, opts for lighter sleep and hence less REM sleep.
2. Later sleep cycles tend to have longer REM periods than cycles earlier in the night. When you sleep through only one or two cycles instead of three or four, your REM sleep is disproportionately affected.
When your brain is starved of REM sleep, concentrating on a single activity is challenging. Multitasking—an inescapable bane of managerial work—becomes exponentially more so.
A deficit of REM sleep also makes it tougher to pick up on nuances in discussions or negotiations.
“When you’re listening intently to someone, trying to understand the main meaning as well as the subtext of what’s being said, your brain is multitasking on several levels—an activity that requires lots of mental horsepower,” says Dr. Gandis Mazeika, head of Sound Sleep Health in Seattle. “If you’re sleep deprived, that’s hard to do.”
In addition, recent research shows that sleep deprivation takes a toll on decision-making ability.
GETTING MORE FROM THE SLEEP YOU GET
Given the demands facing managers today—working in a 24/7, always-on environment is a big one—a full night’s sleep is sometimes an impossible dream. Fortunately, there are ways to get more out of the time you do manage to spend in sleep:
Avoid caffeine. Cut out caffeinated coffee, tea and soda ideally 10 hours before bedtime—and chocolate, too.
Although some antidepressants can help you feel drowsy enough to fall asleep, they also tend to compromise REM, says O’Brien. A more healthful approach for some is to meditate a half-hour before hitting the sheets.
Darken the room completely. Your brain creates a hormone called melatonin that senses when it’s dark out and primes you for sleep. If you try to sleep amid too much light, your brain may decide you’re not ready for bedtime after all.
Sleep in a restful environment. Make sure the room is quiet and your BlackBerry is out of hearing range. Sleep on a comfortable mattress; Mazeika advises not to skimp on quality and plan on getting a new one every eight to 10 years.
Article written by Ms. Anne Field and was published at the Perspective Section of the Business Mirror, January 10, 2009.
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