Pause. Stop. Recover. Case Closed.
Burnout can result from never-ending work. According to Derks & Bakker people can become trapped in a continuous cycle attempting to address the inherent lack of closure in contemporary work.
This reminds me of the old statement that work expands to fill the time available for it’s completion.
How do you put closure on your work and extinguish the flames of potential burnout?
I believe one of the biggest barriers to full engagement in work is fear. Fear arrives in many forms. One form I am familiar with is procrastination. We put off. We delay. We think we lack good time management or tenacious willpower.
What we lack is a way to tackle the fear that surrounds being engaged and the answer resides in moments. The fear can range from the idea that even if we do our best it won’t be good enough to not even knowing how to do a task and afraid to ask for help.
We can often do in moments what we can’t do in grand plans, big strategies, and “smart” goals because moments shrink fear to something so small that we are no longer afraid.
Here is a simple equation to explain this:
Engagement = Moments > Fear
The next time you encounter personal disengagement and you believe fear is lurking behind the scenes I encourage you to remember this statement:
Moments shatter fear into tiny fragments that can easily be managed and overcome.
Take your next moment, separate it from the herd of endless time, and focus your work in that moment. When you start to string or stack together many moments you may even surprise yourself about what you can accomplish. The poet, William Blake, encourages us to see the world in a grain on sand…
Engage along with me, our best is yet to be.
I was listening to an interview of Jack Docherty with Stuart Goldsmith on The Comedian’s Comedian podcast. Near the end of the podcast Stuart asked Jack what his career plans were for the next 5 to 10 years. Jack responded, “I have no plan.” He said he operates more on a whim and was somewhat apologetic for this and openly wondered if this was the right way to go.
Whim can be defined as a sudden wish or idea, often one that cannot be easily explained. This seems to go against the grain of life and career planning — knowing your short and long term goals.
There are many paths to career development. I am not opposed to meticulous career planning with long term goals but I am opposed to people who tell you that there is the only one true path.
Jack, myself, and countless others navigate our careers on whims. We may improvise a life and possibly take the proverbial road less travelled but as Robert Frost so eloquently stated at the end of his poem The Road not Taken, “that has made all the difference.”
Reflections on Employee Engagement in Singapore
I am returning to Asia next week to conduct an employee engagement session in Bangkok. Last year I was fortunate to conduct sessions in Singapore, Istanbul, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur to very small groups and I was able to learn so much from the participants.
I believe around the globe we are more similar in what we are doing with work, management, leadership and engagement than different. We are joined in making work better for our organizations, others, and ourselves.
Yes, we do need to produce results but what is most memorable for me is the short engaging relationships we have with one another.
Below is a wonderful picture of people from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia during a recent course.
To everyone I have taught from Istanbul to Doha and Egypt, and Dubai to Singapore and Sri Lanka, please know that I have been enriched and inspired by your interest and focus on engagement.
Let’s keep our focus on the definition of employee engagement: good work done well with others every day.
Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.
David Zinger is a global employee engagement educator, consultant, and coach.
Whoever said “it’s nothing personal” was not talking about work.
This post is personal. I apologize in advance for not offering you levers, drivers, or 11 action items to boost engagement. I took the pictures in the post, I am not inserting stock photography of people jumping with joy at work – perhaps stock photography should be only used for livestock not to represent real people at work.
I hope sharing a personal experience encourages you to reflect upon your own personal experiences with work.
At the end of this post, I will outline new directions and implications of what I learned for my future contributions to work, management, leadership, and employee engagement .
I experienced an employee engagement watershed day on November 3, 2016. A watershed is an event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or state of affairs.
On November 3rd, I was conducting a 2-day workshop on Employee Engagement in Troubling Times in Dubai with 3 people from Egypt. On the second day their phones starting vibrating and ringing around morning coffee break bringing them distressing economic news. During our second day together, the Egyptian currency was devalued 40%. Interest rates were raised 3% and subsidies were removed from basic goods. They were still doing the same work but within the course of just a few hours it was worth less, by about 50%.
Later that day, after I had returned to my hotel room in Dubai , my wife called me from Winnipeg, Canada, half way around the world from Dubai. Susan told me that she had been walked out of her leadership position without cause at a health care facility. I am not saying this because Susan is my wife, I am saying this because it is true: Susan is one of the most engaged people I know. She has extremely high levels of work engagement yet her years of work and contribution, irrespective of her engagement, was taken from her in a few minutes in a vacuous meeting room.
That day felt devastating and demoralizing. External events can literally make work worth less or make you feel worthless in relationship to your work. I felt a sense of violation against the hard work people were doing. Perhaps because I was in Dubai it triggered the belief that my work in employee engagement was equivalent to putting lipstick on camels.
Regardless of how much lipstick you apply, it is still a camel!
It was over 5 months ago that I felt washed away and carried downstream away from my work on employee engagement over the past 10 years.
During this interval, I had the good fortune in February to visit the powerful and mighty Iguazu Falls in Argentina. Iguazu Falls personifies a real watershed. I saw and felt the power of rushing water. My wife, son, and I took a boat that went through some of the falls. We were drenched and the pressure of the water left us feeling that we had experience a liquid sandblast. Yet, the next day we walked to an isolated falls where you could relax under the water and be rejuvenated and refreshed through the power of falling water.
I intend to transform the November 3rd watershed day away from being sandblasted by organizations and towards being refreshed by the stream of possibilities that lie, often dormant, in our work and engagement.
Not only do I feel differently, I want it to change how I work, and what I work on.
It is time for me to put the lipstick tube down and face up to all that is involved in engagement at work. I intend to be stronger and more personal in my writing, expressions, and work on engagement. You can see some of the early developments of this in my recent posts on LinkedIn and my regular contributions on the Halogen TalentSpace blog:
Watch for a stronger more personal focus on my keynotes, coaching, consulting, workshops, and online courses during the next eight months in 2017.
In addition, a major project during 2017 is researching and interviewing people for my fifth book on engagement and work. The working title is Wisdom at Work. I am interviewing 100 people who have retired to draw out their stories, perspectives, and wisdom on how to work. I chose retired people as they offer a full perspective on work and career and they are removed from day-to-day work and organizational politics. I believe they will feel freer to open up about work and engagement. I have only interviewed 12 of my 100 people but I have learned so much already, including:
David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert and educator who won’t be buying any lipstick for camels in the near future.