Guess what!? If someone is texting while you're taliking to him/her, that person is really not listening to you.   That person is busy but definitely just going through the motions in your conversation and if you're over 30, I'm sure you get that. What we have is an epidemic of distraction.

The consequence of massive distraction is lack of engagement,a new buzz word, but for a good reason. Lack of engagement, or "here but not really" is a state of existence damaging companies, families and all sorts of relationships. Lack of engagement comes from F A T I G U E, lack of attention, or too many distractions and the false belief that multitasking is actually productive. Add to mix employees who are doing too many tasks and experiencing too much anxiety as they hear from their unemployeed former colleagues. Poor health may be another factor. And no one really has time to do anything about it.

There's one foundational piece to having engaged employees in your department, and research indicates that an engaged employee is worth 1.5 employees. Interesting!

Here's what Gallup researcher Jim Gallup has to say in his book The Coming Jobs War:

When you have workforces that aren't highly engaged, they don't create more customers. In companies customers come from workgroups that are highly spirited. Where you have high spirit, you have more customers. You never have jobs appear outside the presence of new customers. So you need highly engaged workplaces because they create more customers

(If you get to talk to Prez Obama, you might want to remind him of how real jobs get created!)

In other words, no engagement, no new customers, no growth.

Yesterday at work an this humongous project a young physician complained of having a migraine. She was having to run to the bathroom every so often.to vomit  Highly inconvenient. She was asking around for medicine to ease the pain but it never ocurred to her to ask to go home.

Mixonian firmly believes that stress is a product of your thinking and can be reduced and is not advocating migraines....but the example holds....That is one engaged employee.

Now, are you thinking, "welll if I made what doctors made of course I'd be engaged at work!"

Not true. Engagement comes first.

And here's the deal: to have engaged employees, you must be engaged yourself.

If your main theme is, well at least I have a job then you are not engaged, or fully present with what you're doing. If you're not, then probably no one who works for you is engaged in what they're doing either. 

If you're waiting for that better job, that fantastic project or the raise before you get engaged at work, you're deceiving yourself. Engagement comes first.

Engagement does not mean working 60 hours a week every week, only on special occasions. Boundaries are essential. 

Engagement means you do your best....even when nobody is looking. It means realizing that everything counts, everything matters, each transaction is an opportunity for connection and life without engagement is a rip-off!