To Engage Employees - Focus on Helping them Manage Their Minds!
Nearly every organization is focused on trying to engage employees. Many are focused on the traditional levers of engagement, but how many are focused on helping employees create positive and meaningful lives?
What am I talking about? Did you know that in an average day the average person runs about sixty thousand thoughts through his or her mind! What is really amazing about this statistic is that nearly 95 percent of those thoughts are the same as the ones that the individual thought of the day before. And what is more interesting about this statistic is that a majority of these thoughts are negative.
Some of these thoughts include fretting over their families or childhood slights. Others are work related with the individual replaying interactions with co-workers or managers over and over in their heads. The individual constantly runs over negative scenarios in their head and replays them over and over. For example, they ask themselves: what did my Manager mean by that? Why did I get passed over for a promotion? What if I had done this? Why did my co-worker ignore me? Why didn’t that Leader say hello this morning.
What is interesting about these negative thoughts is that they actually prevent the individual from focusing on what is truly important – achieving their goals, objectives.In our opinion, too many of us don’t have control over our thoughts. We let negative scenarios inhibit us from achieving more meaningful and fulfilling work and personal lives. In fact, the key to success is to be able to cut out the negative thoughts that consume so many of us.
We would argue then that in order for employees to become engaged in their work – in other words to be emotionally and psychologically engaged – they must be able to manage their minds to achieve their live long goals and aspirations. If an organization really wants engaged employees they must help their employees find meaning and fulfillment. They can do this by finding ways to help their employees:
What do you think?