It’s noon at work, and your morning task list remains untouched. Perhaps you stared at emails, snacked three times and cyber loafed. You just want to sit there.
You’re having a disengaged day, according to three researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University who analyzed 11,245 workday surveys taken over two to nine months by 221 office workers. They found that employees cycle through ideal, typical, disengaged, crisis and toxic days, and that the same types of days tend to appear consecutively: Your one disengaged day turns into three.
Multiply that bad day across tens of millions of employees in millions of offices, and you’ve got big problems — low productivity, poor work quality, contagious low morale and trouble keeping good people.