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Have you been hijacked from your work? Are you sitting in your chair right now looking like you are working, and really you have just disengaged? We all get hijacked from our work. We start to daydream, our thoughts shift to our responsibilities at home, we feel stressed and check out, or maybe we even go into a meeting with a plan to not participate so we can relax a bit.

As a leader, you get to be the model of engagement for your employees, and that means knowing how to pull yourself back to the present moment and get back in the game. Luckily there are a number of ways you can reconnect and get back to kicking you-know-what.

Top Ways to Re-Engage at Work

1. Be aware. Check in occasionally to discover if you have checked out. Building an awareness creates the necessary mindset for engagement.
2. Change your state. If you are sitting, stand up. Take a walk, get a breath of fresh air. The movement will bring you back to the now moment.
3. If outside stressors are taking up too much of your attention keep a pen and paper notebook handy to physically write down anything that is taking your attention away. Once it has been recorded your mind can relax and you can get back to work.
4. Use your senses. Look around you and see what is in your present moment. Name everything out loud. Have something handy to smell – fresh lemons are amazing for this, yet anything that can immediately connect you to this moment works. Go get a piece of ice and put it in your hand. Have a stress ball handy that has lots of nodules and bumps. The key is to get your brain to the same place as your body. Gathering sensory input is a shortcut to the system.
5. Know if you have a pattern. If you are disengaging frequently as a leader of your company then you are not getting your basic needs met. It’s time to discover what need isn’t being fulfilled and find a way to meet it. If you are an employee or you see that employees are not engaged there is a 50% chance it is a problem with a manager. If this is the case, take action. Help your employee out or seek out a way to work better. If it isn’t the manager then senior leadership probably isn’t offering a steady path and employees simply don’t trust the team to lead.

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Did you know that a huge Gallup study covering 30 years and 17 million workers found that there are three key types of employees? Yep, that’s it. Three.

1. Engaged: This type of employee works with passion and feels a profound connection to the company.
2. Not Engaged: Checked out, sleepwalking through the day, putting in hours instead of energy. In other words, zombies that are eating your profitability instead of brains.
3. Actively Disengaged: Simply put. People who are miserable at their jobs. They actively undermine coworkers and sabotage projects.

How would you characterize your workforce?

Most businesses right now have teams full of zombie employees. In addition to not understanding how to drive employee engagement, workplaces happen to be full of people just waiting until the economy picks up steam before they jump ship. Instead of deeply involving themselves in their work, these disengaged employees show up, put in their hours, do the minimum amount required to not get fired, and go home feeling unsatisfied and frustrated. Business leaders know it too. They feel exhausted by the thought of “herding cats” or treading water just to stay afloat.

Every business leader wants a team of engaged employees. And guess what? Every employee desperately wants to be engaged and connected to their work. So why aren’t more companies staffed with enthusiastically engaged team members?

1. Employee engagement has to start at the top. If the leadership team isn’t engaged nobody else will buy it either.
2. Mission and vision statements mean nothing. They are something written for a website, slapped up on the wall, and quickly forgotten. The effort that went into creating that means nothing unless the mission and vision are lived authentically by leadership.
3. HR focuses on the bottom line instead of employees. Our world is changing. If you want employees that behave like they would rather be anyplace else, strict working hours and punishment for having a life outside the office are the fastest way to get you there. Engaged employees don’t feel like they have to choose work or life. The company supports the whole person knowing that the effort put in at the office will increase if employees aren’t beating themselves up over missing another dinner with the family.
4. Poor communication. If your employees aren’t hearing from you regularly they assume you have forgotten about them.
5. Lack of feedback. Nothing turns a company around faster than a great feedback program. Employees want to perform well – everyone does when they think about it. Yet all too often we hold employees back by not providing critical information to let them know how to improve and remind them that we know they exist.
6. Little or no planning. An employee knows when the ship is drifting along. Initiative fades quickly when management isn’t sure if an idea fits into the plan, or if the course of the company changes so frequently that previous work proves to be a waste of time and energy. Leadership needs a thoughtful, committed strategic plan designed to guide the company and the employees toward the larger vision.

Obtaining high levels of employee engagement starts simply by making employee engagement a goal and focus of your business and trusting your engaged employees to make your company (their company) amazing.

The post The Three Types of Employees – Engaged, Not Engaged & Actively Disengaged appeared first on Driven for Life.

Here at Driven for Life you will hear us talk a lot about employee engagement. And most business owners and employees have an idea of what it is. Unfortunately, most of us have never had the opportunity to run or work in a highly engaged business, and often, an unclear understanding of employee engagement causes businesses to not achieve high engagement.

Employee engagement is a relatively new term and in a way serves as a modernized version of job satisfaction. Researchers looking into job satisfaction and overall business performance realized that the term “satisfaction” didn’t really describe what they were observing in the real world. Satisfaction can be likened to that feeling after a big Thanksgiving meal – you know, where all you want to do is rest and enjoy your family. That type of employee didn’t really exist. No one was happy and satisfied, unless they were tuned in and connected to their job and their company. The unsatisfied workers didn’t connect to the company, they didn’t participate in the business, and they did the minimal amount of work possible to skate by.

Engaged employees love what they do and it shows. They beam with pride when asked about their work and enjoy talking about the company they work for. In fact, they are just as invested in the overall vision and direction of the company as the leadership team – making them amazing brand ambassadors. In a building full of engaged employees, the energy creates a buzz in the air. The employees look forward to coming to work, staying and growing with the company, and contributing to the company’s success.

Focus on employee engagement instead of simply thinking about the bottom line, and you will reap the rewards of an engaged workforce including, higher profits, low turnover, greater efficiency, and enhanced creative problem solving abilities at all levels within the organization.

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