Are You Disengaged At Work? 5 Reasons Why and How You Can Heal
The real reasons employees aren’t engaged and why it matters and needs to be taken seriously.
If you’ve ever been to an unfulfilling, out of touch team building seminar or “weekend getaway”where you wore matching t-shirts and built structures in the woods, you can attest to the fact that a lot of professional development has really gotten off track. And while development might be way off track, the reason for that is a much bigger, much deeper wound that we have to heal in order to clean up the current state of our internal business economy. I spoke with Zayd Abdul-Karim, otherwise known as Dr. Z, from Universal Self-Leadership Institute to have some real insights for you about engagement, life, business, and a lot of gray areas in between.
Maximum Dis-Engagement Engaged
The level of disengagement we see now, when put into numbers, tells us that seven of ten employees are disengaged at work. The reasons the majority of people disengage can be tied to a handful of reasons, and I want to address those because it’s up to you to take control of your own engagement. It’s also up to you to see where you have gaps, and where you may need healing yourself. So let’s check your energies, and engagement, and see if any of these disengaging factors apply to you:
1. Toxic Environments: Plenty of workplace cultures allow toxicity to overtake productivity and engagement. The cause of this toxicity is the people, and when the number of toxic plus disengaged people outnumbers their counterparts, the environment breeds even more toxicity, leaving little room for engagement, growth, or productivity.
2. Personal Stress or Trauma: When someone experiences stress or trauma, it leaves an impression on them. Most people never resolve those impressions, and by the time they join the workforce, are under the control of these impressions but generally unaware of this fact. These impressions cause us to act out of fear, concern, worry, and hurt, creating the toxicity mentioned above, and forces others to suffer the results of our original traumas and stresses.
3. Lack of Development: When we see someone suffering from stress, it is because their capacity is not expanded enough to handle what is in front of them. That’s all stress is really, too much to handle and not enough capacity. This lack of development, where an individual has not worked to expand their capacity, contributes to disengagement a lot, because once someone reaches this point, they are so overwhelmed, they don’t even have the energy to willfully and productively engage.
4. Ego Energies: One of the thing Dr. Z offers is practical techniques for you to move out of the diseased ego energies of fear, doubt, and worry, to live universal laws of faith and love, so you can fulfill individual happiness, peace of mind, and collective business progress. This all happens together, and your ego could be a huge contributing factor if things are off track.
5. Conditioning: As Dr. Z so wisely puts it, “Happiness is our natural state of being. Lifetimes of social, cultural and historical conditioning have corrupted our souls, hearts and minds causing misperceptions of reality and spiritual, moral, psychological and physical diseases.”
Self-Leadership Is The New Four Agreements
When I first read Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Four Agreements, I knew that what he wrote was a deep, profound, yet simple truth. The knowledge here is the same. Disengagement is a problem, not just professionally, and we have to address this. We have to be in charge of our:
● Capacity,
● Conditioning,
● Ego,
● And healing.
This take-charge approach is something Dr. Z has labeled Self-Leadership, a topic he speaks on often, and a topic he wants to share with as many people as possible. Why? Because he believes that the real key to personal transformation is a process that starts within the soul, heart, and mind. Your personal growth is the foundation of team and organizational effectiveness. When seven out of the ten people who create the foundation, are wobbly on their own, they don’t come together and create unity, they create toxic environments. Forget about the disengagement, let’s go a level deeper and start having a conversation about why. Why are so many people actively choosing to disengage from your life and your career? And even more importantly, how can we/they begin to heal from the root causes of disengagement?
Let’s Get Real
When we experience stress, that stress does not contain itself in the area we’ve experienced it. Work stress doesn’t stay and work, and home stress doesn’t stay at home. Engagement is the same way. If we routinely disengage at work, we will disengage in the other areas of our lives as well. So while employee engagement or leadership engagement is a topic that is important, what we are really saying is human engagement, and life engagement needs to be addressed, and we can start right here, right now.
