Are you disengaged at work?

If you work forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year (with two weeks of for your skimpy “American” vacation), for forty years-you will have worked 80,000 or more hours.

Many of you reading this will average more than fifty hours a week and work well beyond fifty years-which puts you over 125,000 hours. Almost nothing in your life takes more of your time and energy than work.

And yet, in poll after poll, Gallup indicated that approximately 69 per cent of American workers are disengaged from their work (a percentage that includes the plain “disengaged” and the angry and resentful “actively disengaged”).

Globally, the number of workers unhappy at the place where they spend most of their lives is an astonishing 85 per cent. These workers do not go to work with a smile on their faces. Instead, they often talk about their work as “dreary and boring.”

And we aren’t just talking about people with mundane office jobs or blue-collar workers doing repetitive manual labour or fast-food workers doing the same at your local burger chain.

In many of their studies, they found it came from all walks of life, teachers, CEOs, coaches, dentists, doctors, farmers, bankers, barbers, private equity gurus, Liberians, army helicopter pilots, physical therapists, truckers, government bureaucrats and lawyers (actually, from lots of lawyers), and from men, women, young, middle-aged, old, single, married, divorced-you name it – people, all saying the same thing.