Page 25 - Make Work Great

It Starts with You

Depending on the economy and unemployment rates, it may be more
or less diffi cult to depart, but that doesn’t make it harder to disen-
gage. Studies have shown that only about 20 percent of employees
are “highly engaged” and that 16 percent are actively disengaged
and intentionally disruptive. The majority of the workforce sits idle
between the extremes, not intentionally disruptive but not terribly
engaged either. 4
What’s a manager to do? How is a leader supposed to lead? How can
even the most engaged individual contributor actually contribute?

A Changing World
To answer these questions, we fi rst must determine where these man-
agers, leaders, and contributors are. It’s no small consideration; the
workplace has changed more in the past 15 to 20 years than it did in
the entire century or two before that.
Workers are more connected, sending instant messages and text
messages to each other at all hours of the day and night via computers
and mobile devices. We are all linked.
Yet people are also more detached. A growing percentage of work-
ers are “remote,” working from home or a satellite location where
they have few colleagues. Even those with colleagues in adjacent
cubicles or offi ces communicate more frequently via e-mail than in
person—although their coworkers sit just a few feet away. We are all
alone.
Information fl ows more easily today. Internet technologies enable
everything from the transfer of movies, pictures, and voice commu-
nications to asset transfer and package delivery tracking. We have
everything we need at our fi ngertips.
Yet information is often buried and lost. Our senses are overbur-
dened with spam, news, media chatter, and irrelevant trivia. Informa-
tion overload exhausts us and disables our ability to process more.
The things we need are harder to fi nd than ever.
We control our destiny. The average person today may change
careers 7 to 10 times in his or her life—and change jobs more often

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