How to turn employee engagement and productivity expectations real?

Excellent intrapersonal skills and focus on keeping good mind health are a must, at least if you would love to see expectations about good employee engagement and productivity become real.

Only people who can focus and deal with pressures successfully can solve difficult challenges.

We can all perform well when we know what we do and there is no external pressure and demands. However, performing greatly while new challenges and stressors keep appearing isn't easy for the untrained mind.

Turning any new idea into reality demands clear goals and engaged people who can sustain their focus and access creativity with ease.

Productivity is the outcome when a team of fit minds takes a sustained effort. Let's observe how you can achieve that for your team!

All intrapersonal skills are learned

No one is born to take more action or handle stress and challenges better than others. Goal-focused sustained action is needed to solve any challenge that you face.

Taking systematic action is the single defining quality that will enable you to make a difference in your field. What prevents us from taking action are our doubts, worries and stress levels.

When people experience stress or near burnout their engagement level and work quality becomes low.

Employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, according to Gallup's 2022 data.

For example, the U.S. saw a decline as its employee engagement dropped from 36% engaged employees in 2020 to 32% in early 2022 (see the graph below).
 

In the rest of the world, the employee engagement number was in 2021 on average 20% and is now slightly up 21%.

Have you tried to focus on something when you are actively worried? Try to solve a problem next time when you feel unwell and mentally depleted.

It becomes a struggle. When you look back on your career, you know it is true. Even if your career is short, you can see a similar pattern from the years spent in the education system.
 

Unwell minds wander and procrastinate

No matter who you are or what you've done in life so far, you can learn interpersonal skills in order to enhance your success.

People who take initiative and personal responsibility work better. According to recent Gallup data, employees who worked exclusively remote or hybrid had 37% engagement. Clearly, when you work alone you need to take more personal responsibility and be able to focus on your own.

Excellent self-leadership doesn't happen, you learn it. Yes, learning is also an effort, but it is a small effort compared to struggling with your work on a daily basis or being ill.

A healthy mind gets things done

Grant Cardone has stated it well: “You will be amazed how much you can get done when you quit thinking, calculating, and procrastinating and just get on with it and make a habit of acting now.”

His book 'The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure' is well worth reading.

Taking massive action becomes a lot easier when your mind is fit and well.

When your mind isn't trained and fit, you probably end up riding the waves of positive stress. It can have a short-lived good spot, but only until you burn out and deplete yourself.

Burnout is dangerous for your mental health, it has an 86-92% overlap with depression. As the graph based on Willis Tower Watson's studies demonstrates below, the situation is far from satisfactory as every third person now struggles with mental health.
 

Prepare your mind to last longer sustained efforts while you are well

Entrepreneurship isn't a sprint. It is a marathon and for a marathon good health matters. Innovation is also a marathon.

Anyone who has developed a challenging idea into a meaningful solution can say "I had known the difficulties, I don't know if I have dared to start this in the first place." It is so common statement that it is impossible to know who said it first.

In the 10X book, Cardone also states, “The ability to remain focused on the goal and keep your orientation on that goal's achievement is vital to success.” As he explains we should set goals for a new year, but we should set goals every day. We should set our goals high.

He says well, the struggles are always 10 times bigger, so set your goals 10 times higher. You can do this in practice when your mind is well. Not just well, but trained to be well when it takes time and effort.

There are no shortcuts, you need intrapersonal skills and discipline

Cardone also states, “There are no shortcuts. The more action you take, the better your chances are of getting a break. Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success than any other combination of things.”

How disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions do you and your team take? How big are your goals? Even though we work on one blog and one training improvement at a time our goal is a global mental wellness revolution. It is ambitions. It is big, it keeps us going.

Until you consider taking action to train your mind as something normal, and actually take such action, you haven't arrived at excellent engagement and productivity levels!
 

Check out the online mind trainings to empower your team

How to train your mind to work smarter?

Getting something big done becomes easier when you know how to stay focused, access creativity and have trained your mind to take action.

Working smarter is working with a correct and supportive mindset and with the end goal in mind. This boosts engagement and productivity.

While taking action matters, taking the right action moves you closer to your goals faster.

When you leave out action that gets you tired, like a constant inner train of thought and your own emotional turmoil, your mind becomes calm. A calm mind works well. A peaceful mind doesn't seek excuses and idle chats.

A calm and fit mind works way better than a worried and stressed mind.

Let's quote Grant Cardone's 10X book once more: “Success comes about as a result of mental and spiritual claims to own it, followed by taking necessary actions over time until it is acquired. If you approach it with any less gusto than your ethical and moral duty, obligation, and responsibility to your family, your company, and your future, you will most likely not create it—and have even more difficulty keeping it.”
 

Every business and person aims to be successful

Initially, we all aim to be successful. Then life hits us, and we meet the wall of challenges. We often feel like in battle while working for our goal. When, besides our battles, markets tumble and inflation soars, our motivation easily becomes thin. No outer motivation lasts.

The only lasting motivation is the goal and aware action itself. When we know that we do meaningful things and do them well, we can keep moving on.

Our problem is that often our goals are vague and our mental wellness is missing.

When we have poor intrapersonal skills, our focus is constantly directed to outside events.

Our mind keeps running on a 'monkey mind regime'. What it means is that the newest and strongest event around us highjacks our attention/awareness. Even if we keep acting on a physical level when our mind wanders, we become open to mistakes and fail more often than is needed. When our mind is a mess, our productivity drops.
 

Failure isn't the problem when we aim for success

Failure is a learning process. However, there is a huge difference if we try and err and then learn, correct and move on, or we just stumble and fall without learning from our mistakes.

Failure only becomes a permanent mistake the day we fail to try again to correct it. No great goals or ideas are made real without effort and learning.

An idea without execution isn't worth much. Ideas are free and cost nothing and have no real value. Making something real is what matters.

Steve Jobs once talked about the idea of having a computer with a screen you can write on and the size of a wallet. At times we had old-school TV-s with a tube and no touch screens available. Without Apple's action on the idea, there would be no iPhones or iPads.

When we have an original and creative idea, usually, technology and easy paths to making it real still need to be discovered. It is the path for the brave.

We see it from our own experience. A systematic proactive mental wellness approach was unheard of ten years ago when we started to play with the idea. Later, about 7 years ago, our initial discussions and goals got into a format of real business. 5 years ago we finally had the first online training about stress reduction and burnout prevention ready.

You are most welcome to try our training and take a free stress test.
 

Having an idea is easy but turning it into action is a sustained effort. It took time to design the client journey, prepare the online training content and bring those to your screen anywhere in the world. It still takes a lot of effort to make the solution we have for you heard by a wider public.

It has not been an easy path. We have been bootstrapping Wellness Orbit (you can discover our story in this article). It has meant there we have often lacked financial assets. When you lack one asset, you compensate for it with other assets like your time, focus and dedication.

The impossible becomes possible by taking action with what you have

Some say the word impossible states "I am possible". Yes, you can read it this way. What matters here is keeping with the possible regardless of the odds and recourses you have. It is you who make it possible!

For us inventing a new proactive mental wellness approach for securing excellent mind health was as possible as for Steve Jobs to show a wallet and say back in the 1980s that this can be the size of tomorrow's computer. We remind you, that lightweight affordable laptops were unreal back then. The lack of technology to make it small and easy to carry didn't stop Jobs and Apple.

Apple searched for solutions and developed the technology. It took years, but here we are, smartphone-dependent.

We also did a lot of research and developed trainings that actually supports your (team's) success.

It has been a lot of work in both cases so that the end-user experience could be intuitive and relaxed.

The point here is that innovation and challenges become easier when your mind is prepared, fit and well.
 

Start creating your success

Let us quote Cardone one last time, “success is something people make. Great ideas, new technologies, innovative products, and fresh solutions to old problems are all things that will never exist in shortage. The creation of success can take place all over the world—either at the same time or at different times and at different levels—by millions of people who have no limits. Success doesn't depend on resources or supplies or space.”

Our own story is proof of that. Your iPhone, iPad or any other smartphone or tablet that followed the initial iPhone is living proof of that.

When Apple set out to do the impossible, the dominating market leader at the time, Nokia, considered touchscreens so impossible that they didn't worry as they were sure people preferred keys on their phones. Some years later they ended up selling their phone business as the old mobile phone with keys turned into a secondary segment.

However, after the identity crisis, Nokia reinvented itself and is now doing great again, even if it isn't selling mobile phones anymore. Today people say that Finland's next Nokia is Nokia itself. What mattered, they set a new goal and took massive action again. The rest was inevitable.

People who are well and innovate can turn things around! As a leader or HR, you need to support your people. People with fit minds are your greatest asset.

The good news is that investing in mental wellness can bring tenfold ROI and support innovation.

Conclusion

What makes any idea valuable is turning it into a realistic service or product.

Turning ideas into a success story demands engaged and productive people who can sustain their focus and access creativity with ease.

While workplaces focus on professional skills, access to intrapersonal skills is still mostly neglected. The outcome is the Great Resignation, low employee engagement and mental health issues. 

It is time to turn things around and train your brightest minds to work well without stressing out and burning out. 

It takes longer to train a new employee than it takes to train your mind.

We have made training your mind(s) easy, accessible and affordable. The provided practical intrapersonal education will allow your people to take massive action and shine for you without suffering from stress and burnout.
 

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This blog post is by Kaur Lass