13 Top Highlights from Alive at Work

Nearly 85% of the global workforce is disengaged at work. So why is this happening, and how can we fix it?

The answers to these questions can be found in the enlightening book Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Daniel M. Cable. 

As the Founder and CEO of a startup, I’m constantly thinking about how to get the most out of my people and make sure they’re engaged and excited about coming to work every day. So I was immediately drawn to this expertly-researched book on the science behind employee engagement. 

Most managers and CEOs think engagement is a matter of motivation. But the research outlined in Alive at Work found that disengagement isn’t a motivational problem—it’s a biological one. 

That means the majority of companies and managers are going about the problem of disengagement in the wrong way. They’re hosting pointless Zoom happy hours and team retreats to try to increase employee motivation, but the real issue is that humans aren’t designed for repetition and routine. 

We’re designed to seek exploration, learning, and experimentation. The human brain even contains something called the “seeking system,” which rewards us when we take part in these activities. So if companies want engaged workers, they need to tap into our brain’s seeking system. 

But right now, most organizations are run in a way that’s working against our innate biological impulses, which causes workers to shut down. So if you want to know how to encourage your people to bring their best selves to work and help your organization flourish, and how to build creative, motivating, and collaborative environments that embrace change and strengthen people’s connection to their work and to your customers, then check out my top 13 highlights from Alive at Work:

My top three highlights: 

1. The basic urge to play exists among almost all mammals. Play is how we learn what we’re capable of.
2. Things are different now. Organizations are facing higher levels of change and competition than ever, and the pace of change is increasing each year. Now more than ever, organizations need employees to innovate. They need employees’ insights about what customers want. They need new ways of working based on technology that employees understand better than leaders. They need employees’ creativity and enthusiasm in order to survive, adapt, and grow. The organizations that thrive in the future of work will be the ones that successfully activate their employees’ seeking systems.
3. The most important takeaway is understanding the biological seeking system that all employees possess and then investing in a structure to activate it. This happens when we create work environments where employees feel encouraged to play around with their intrinsic interests and personal strengths within the frame of the organizational demands.

All of my highlights:

• About 80% of workers don’t feel that they can be their best at work.
• 70% of workers are not engaged at work.
• Many organizations are deactivating the part of employees’ brains called the seeking system. Our seeking system creates the natural impulse to explore our world, learn about our environments, and extract meaning from our circumstances.
• The seeking system is the part of our brain that encouraged our ancestors to explore beyond Africa, and it pushes us to pursue hobbies until the crack of dawn and seek out new skills and ideas just because they interest us.
• The problem is that our organizations weren’t designed to take advantage of people’s seeking systems.
• Our evolutionary tendency to disengage from tedious activities is not a bug in our mental makeup, it’s a feature.
• We need to remember that big organizations are relatively new things. We invented them about 150 years ago as a new means of producing stuff and increasing the scale of sales and distribution. The method worked well in some ways, but has not improved and adapted to fit people’s needs over time.
• In the 1800s you could buy shoes from someone who performed multiple tasks using multiple skills. Most workers don’t have that opportunity anymore.
• This is the new war for talent: not ruling employees away from competitors but unleashing the enthusiasm that is already within your employees.
• Dopamine opens up your mind to learn.

Games are proven to be one of the best ways to activate the seeking system and encourage play, which leads to long-lasting learning and increased engagement. And dare we say, fun…

That’s why transforming traditional ways of learning and training into a game increases employee innovation, productivity, and creativity. So if you’re ready to get the most out of your people by tapping into your employees’ seeking systems and making work fun and engaging, then try requesting a demo today.