The disengagement epidemic

Being disengaged at work can shave years off your life, lead to an early heart attack and cause you to fight with your family.

New research out of the US and Australia is showing us 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 employer 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 their company?

There are three types of workers:

• The engaged worker – has a strong connection to their job and the company. They are constantly looking to improve their performance and do their job better each day. In addition they are enthusiastic at work and boost the culture.
• The not-engaged worker – the “walking dead” of the typical office. They do their job but don’t have any enthusiasm, energy or passion for their work.
• The actively disengaged – are toxic to any organisation. These people undermine the company and its engaged workers. You could say they have quit but haven’t actually had the decency to resign.

According to a recent Australian survey, only 20% of workers there are engaged; a whopping 63% of workers are not engaged; and 17% are “actively disengaged”. Gallup, a polling and market research firm, says this costs the Australian economy between A$33.5 billion (US$30.1 billion) and A$42.1 billion 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 four engaged employees to every actively disengaged employee, grows 2.6 times faster than an organisation with just a one-to-one ratio. In addition, companies in the top quarter of engagement profiles outearn those in the bottom quarter by 18%.

You can’t argue with those numbers; it is obvious that a company needs to have engaged workers. However, I have been in many a team meeting where the manager says employees must be engaged at work so the company can perform better. This is usually met with glazed expressions or rolling eyes, Why? Because the average employee is far too self-centered and this does not appeal to their self interest.

What about the individual?

Rather than only focus on the company, why don’t we talk about the impact of disengagement on the individual?

Gallup’s survey of Australian workers showed that 43% of Actively Disengaged workers have also admitted to treating their family poorly for three or more consecutive days. But the fall out of disengagement does not end solely in the home.

An English study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, followed a group of healthy men over 10 years. It found that men who were engaged at work were 30% less likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than employees who were disengaged. 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 real defining variable.

One of the contributing factors to this relationship between disengagement and heart disease is the fact that people who are disengaged at work report higher levels of stress, compared to engaged employees. Moreover, a German study published in Psychosomatic Medicine shows that people who report high levels of stress at work have significantly higher levels of cortisol in their system. Cortisol is a hormone naturally secreted during times of stress. Prolonged high levels can lead to heart disease and other health problems.

Prominent psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has 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 engaged with, their emotions and thoughts are indistinguishable from those of people free of these conditions. In addition, he found that the worst thing for people with depression and eating disorders was 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 workplace often say that they are bored and disinterested. Think what happens when you put two children in the back of a car and go for a long drive. 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. When not engaged, their thoughts drift and they start looking for trouble. Office gossip, turf battles and in-fighting are all possible fallouts from a lack of engagement.

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

For most people, engagement is conditional: if my team is in a good mood I will be engaged; or: my boss didn’t thank me for doing a good job so I won’t 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.

Looking at all this evidence we can clearly see that being engaged in the work place is one of the most important elements in our search for greater wellbeing. Can we start to expand the engagement conversation to focus on the benefits to the individual? What if a company focused on helping their employees to be more engaged in the work place so they had greater wellbeing, better health, and richer relationships with their family?

Would you call them an employer of choice?