Are You Stuck In a Rut At Work? 5 Tips To Re-Energize Your Work Life

Have you experienced these feelings – Monday morning blues, dreadfulness about going to work, lack of feeling towards your job, boredom, dissatisfaction, feeling stuck, feeling resigned to the same old grind, feigning deafness when someone asks about your job. All these are indicators of being stuck in a rut at work. Stuck in a rut is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a sign for you to make changes and get out of a rut before it becomes total disillusionment leading to disengagement and eventual downfall at your workplace. The latest gallup survey reveals that a shocking 51% of employees are not engaged at work and a further 17.5% are actively disengaged. Imagine the effects of these high numbers on productivity at the workplace. While there are other factors that play a part in disengagement, a good percentage of it is attributed to employees feeling stuck in a rut. The onus does not fall on the employer at all times to banish disengagement. Some of the onus does fall on the employees too, especially when they recognize the symptoms of feeling stuck.

Here are 5 tips to re-engerize and reinvigorate your work life without having to find a new job necessarily.

1. New experience – Sometimes we are so comfortably settled in a routine with our day to day work activities that it is almost on auto pilot mode. There is no sense of feeling challenged or no mental stimulation on a daily basis. Staying put in your comfort zone may be a personal choice, but as humans we thrive on mental stimulation. So it may be time to step out of that comfort zone at work and seek a new challenge. It may be a simple task like improving the process(or the way things are done) in your own area of responsibility or a big change like moving to a different role or a different department. While these may not be changes that can happen overnight, the simple act of initiating this change itself will trigger that spark of excitement and help in re-energizing your attitude towards work. The idea is to seek new experiences at work to stimulate you.
2. Help a co-worker – In cases where you are not totally ready to step out of your comfort zone and make a huge change by taking on a new role etc, a simple solution may be to engage and help someone at work. There are many folks at work who could always use an extra hand to do their day-to-day tasks. Reach out to different folks to see if if you can help them in any small way. It may be a win-win situation for both as it may give you something new to do and also help the person with their tasks. Again, this does involve stepping up and above your own responsibilities.
3. Initiate a give back program – Another great way is to introduce opportunities in the workplace to give back to the community . There are tons of organizations that need our help as responsible citizens and what better way to give back to the community and reinvigorate your work life than to introduce a new program at work.Some examples are:- introducing a recycling program at work,
   – driving the toys for tots collection at work,
   – engaging with habitat for humanity,
   – organizing a volunteer event for a group of colleagues to a non-profit,
   – group activity of planting trees
   – organizing a clothing drive and the list goes on
4. Community – Surprisingly, another common factor that contributes to feeling stuck in a rut is a lack of social connections in the workplace. Feeling stuck in your own island and doing your own thing is the contributing factor. And it is very easy to be in this spot. Make an effort to reach out to coworkers and get to know people better. Open up about yourself and truly and genuinely see your co-workers as other humans going through the same set of motions and emotions as you. Go out of lunches, indulge in networking and look forward to happy hours. All this involve action on your part and does involve stepping up. It is so easy to stay put in your cubicle and feel dreadful and resigned to this rut feeling, but challenge yourself to take small steps towards fostering those workplace connections.
5. Break – Depending on where you stand on the rut spectrum, a week’s vacation may be a perfect reset and re-energize you. If you are on the almost disillusioned end of the spectrum, you may consider a month off or even a couple months sabbatical to re-evaluate where you stand in your career. This is generally most helpful for people who feel a desperate need to re-invent their careers and they do not see how their current work contributes to their big picture vision of their career. (More about this in another post.)

This Forbes article offers tips that are mainly changes to our environment such as standing and working, changing your shoes, reading on a different device etc. While i do believe these may offer some relief, I question the duration of feeling unstuck as a result of this. I believe the feeling of being stuck is a mental state and hence the tips I offer are all directed towards challenging and changing the mental state.

Have you ever been stuck in a rut in the workplace? What helped you move out of the rut?