Surveys show that lack of engagement is a significant problem in Western workplaces. Laura Stack* has ideas individuals could try to become more focused.
Most of us are well aware of the statistics for workplace engagement.
For at least a decade, most surveyed workers have reported they’re just moderately engaged or completely disengaged rather than fully engaged with their work, at a rate of about 3:1.
It’s changed very little from year to year.
Either upper management doesn’t care, or the things they’ve tried so far haven’t worked.
I suspect it’s the latter more than the former.
Despite the rhetoric of productivity, and our focus on boosting performance, most of us care more about paying for the mortgage and childcare than we do about maximising our organisation’s potential.
We don’t live to work, but vice versa.
This is perfectly normal, even when you like your job; it’s about survival first.
In the West at least, it’s only in the last century or so that collective benefit has been emphasised in corporate structures — and not everyone buys into the idea anyway.
It’s not cynicism that’s the problem; it’s reality.
Bills and workplace politics trump the wellbeing of the organisation… until a lack of wellbeing threatens our jobs.
If you find yourself in such a position, it may be understandable.
However, you still owe it to yourself to at least try to reignite your motivation and boost your productivity, ideally in a way that reengages you with your work.
Wondering how to do so? Try these four methods.
Create a mini-crisis for yourself.
Crises demand quick, solid action to successfully push through, often requiring your best work.
Now, you can’t depend on a crisis occurring naturally to trigger your motivation, but you can simulate one.
Admittedly, your reaction may be muted somewhat by knowing that the crisis isn’t genuine, but you can work around that.
For example, even if you know you have five days to complete a task, set yourself a deadline of three days and let your teammates know you’ll be done then, so they’ll hold you accountable.
Or think about the horrible repercussions if you don’t finish by the deadline, up to and including getting fired, losing your home, and living in the street.
Focus as much as possible on your goal, and if needed, set a timer and then working diligently on the task for 10, 15, or 30 minutes to get your engines engaged.
Take advantage of your energy peaks.
Don’t try conquering the world first thing in the morning if you’re a night owl; you may be best able to maximise motivation at 2pm.
So save your big projects or must-do work for then. In the meantime, take care of other projects, or do minor work on a big project.
Set a new benchmark to strive for.
If you’re feeling ho-hum about work, it may have become too easy for you.
As a result you may lack the necessary challenges to excel.
Examine your goals, both short-term and long-term. Are they too easy to achieve?
Ideally, you should have to stretch a little to get them done.
If you always hit at or above your mark, raise the mark and then see what happens when you try to reach it.
Set aside time for a passion project.
Gmail, Google’s supremely popular email service, began as a Google employee side project — a passion project someone got management to sign off on for a short time each week.
So did a number of other Google initiatives.
If you come up with a great idea you think could benefit your organisation, pitch it to your superiors.
They may let you go with it.
Even if they don’t, that doesn’t mean you can’t design a passion project for your own time to help keep you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
An example: Once, there was a journalist named Frank who kept turning down his co-workers’ offers to go out for a drink in the evening.
Each night he went home immediately after work, to his co-workers’ derision.
They found out why when Frank Herbert published his runaway bestseller science fiction novel Dune, a passion project that remains one of the genre’s classics.
Car racers sometimes use nitrous oxide to power up their engines. Occasionally, human motivation needs the same thing.
So next time you’re lagging behind your hopes and expectations, use one of the above methods or something similar to inject some nitro into your workplace engine.
Sometimes all you need is a running start to get back on track and ahead of the pack.
*Laura Stack is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and authority on productivity and performance. She can be contacted at theproductivitypro.com/blog.
This article first appeared on Laura’s blogsite.
