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I used to care about work— a lot. Not really now. Now, my time is spent caring about whether my peers and the juniors I am working with, are happy and having the right career development. I will confess, I don’t really care about what the top is doing or perceive about me. For me now, the fulfillment from work is watching my peers and juniors develop into the best versions of themselves. 

In a nutshell, I am disengaged from work or more precisely, what top management is doing and the corporate political games they are playing. I clock in, do my job, and leave by 5 pm, back to my family, without a care about what happens at work. 

You might be thinking I am not happy with my work or the company in general. To me, every place where I work has its own set of problems, and I understand that we all deal with these problems. But at the end of the day, I treat it like an indifferent person. Sometimes I am angry, sometimes I am not happy, sometimes I am ok, and sometimes I am happy. 

In my experience, there are about 3 things that ultimately decide whether I am engaged or disengaged with work. I hope that with me specifying these 3 things, you can decide how you want to approach work and life in general, and I will also talk about the impact of employee disengagement on companies, and how if you are an employer, you need to be aware of these things.

There’s Just No Learning from the Job or From Your Immediate Boss

Let’s face it, many of us want to progress in our careers and learn new things. Hopefully, in the future, we can use that knowledge and skillsets to do meaningful things or just earn more income. About 3 years ago, my wife and I did an MBTI test to determine what are each other’s strengths and weaknesses and also to better understand each other. Turns out I am an Advocate. What this means is that 

1. I am passionate and crave for purpose in life.
2. Seek deeper truths and knowledge
3. I am a perfectionist

When I go to work, I need a deep sense of purpose for what I am doing, and from there, I pursue boundless knowledge to try to be in line with that sense of purpose. I won’t stop till I get a near-perfect knowledge base and work. For that, I know I need to constantly learn from my immediate boss and be guided in the right direction.

When that doesn’t happen, my mind tends to clock out at work. I feel like I am wasting time, and so I constantly seek knowledge by my own means which sometimes have nothing to do with work. If the job is still challenging, that will still be ok, but once I get the hang of it, I will just be looking to clock out at 5 pm and leave. 

Not Having a Supportive Environment or Culture from the Higher-Ups

Let’s put it this way. Imagine you are in a discussion. You are trying to put forward your points and conclusion. Your boss and higher-ups are constantly correcting you to use “the right sentence structure”, and “right grammar” and saying that you should have used the word “resilient” instead of “steady” to sound more confident. They proceed to use that to belittle your analysis and straw-man your arguments. 

Back to that, they also criticise that your table font type and size are not pretty and you should use the ones they always use … for a 1-minute briefing. Why is there a slight little space between each row and tables of the table? Basically, this is micro-managing to an extreme. The culture is for everyone to criticise these elements and forgo the bigger picture, and use these criticisms to invalidate their work. 

If you are in such an environment and culture, how would you be engaged with your work? It’s hard. You spend more time thinking about these things rather than doing important work. Not long, you will just think that none of your work matters. You are wrong either way.

You Spend the Majority of Your Time Doing Useless Work From Your Bosses

If you have noticed, all the points I am putting forward are all about top management and your boss. From my context, I love working with my colleagues and have some amazing bosses but most of the time, my disengagement is related to bosses and higher management. 

Imagine this. You spent days working on a hard project. You give it to your boss, and your boss’s feedback is “I don’t like the picture, change it”. You proceeded to say you will change it but are there any other comments on the work? Your boss just tells you to change the picture first. You changed it and he said he doesn’t like it still and to change it again. You repeat this countless more times for 2 to 3 days, until he or she is happy and they give another comment “Find a better font type for the work”, and you repeat the process again.

While I think the definition of useless work will differ, we all know deep inside what kind of work is important and not. Yes, you need to understand bosses and higher management but make that decision in your mind whether you want to keep doing useless work for others. 

Disengaged Employees Don’t Pursue Improvement for the Company, and Tend to Make More Errors. 

For the employers outside, I hope you are privy to the impact of a disengaged employee. 

1. Employees do their job and don’t improve on company processes and performances. Why should they?
2. More errors crop up. Checking once is enough because they will get criticised anyway for every small little thing.
3. Reputational damage of the company in the job market. Disengaged employees who leave, tend to have negative opinions of the company. 

The Gallup Survey estimates that unhappy and disengaged staff costs the world economy an estimated US$7.8 trillion.