(Bloomberg) -- 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.

Disengaged employees also don’t innovate.

“There’s a pretty robust playbook on what it takes for a company to be innovative, but we don’t have a good handle on how to drive creativity amongst individuals from an organizational standpoint,” said Mayoor Mohan, an associate professor of marketing at VCU’s School of Business and one of three co-authors. “The people management aspect of it has been left untouched.” 

Co-author Christopher Reina, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship, was inspired to look into such issues by his own past corporate experiences when his days tended to go south when coworkers threw curveballs, creating unanticipated to-dos.

“It kind of throws you off your game, and it’s really demotivating,” he said. “Changing demands with time pressures can really reduce your ability to meet a task.” Reina began with a simple research question: What makes your work days go well or not well? After all, you were the same person yesterday, and perfectly productive.

The researchers used a long-trusted dataset that was harvested from 1996 to 1998 by a Harvard Business School professor. While the information may seem dated, it has been the cornerstone of a number of studies over the years. When trying to tease out a phenomenon, researchers use such datasets because they remove uncertainty about collection and complicating factors like, say, a pandemic.

“The tensions between freedom and responsibility in the workplace don’t really change over time,” said Markus Baer, professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The analytical techniques have changed over the last 25 years, and they applied new tools.”

The researchers found empirical evidence for five distinct daily workplace experiences. Most surprising was the extent to which the factors that determine good versus bad days were mostly beyond workers’ control. Meaning that disengaged day isn’t your fault.

“Leaders play a really important role in engineering the work environment and how people perceive it day to day,” said lead author Alexander McKay, an assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship.

Five Types of Days

Typical: 34% of days. Smooth sailing through tasks that don’t require much thought. You’re not fired up about work, but have just enough motivation to be mildly engaged. It could be a catch-up day. Creativity is neither high nor low. Overall, it’s forgettable.

“Many people let themselves fall into typical days, which can be a hindrance to both creativity and more ideal days,” McKay said.

Ideal: 29% of days. You’re productive, like a plane with a tailwind, fueled by a positive mix of autonomy, challenging work, resources and support from your manager and organization. Healthy pressures, such as deadlines, keep you hopping, and you aren’t slowed by clashes or red tape.

Crisis: 19% of days. Putting out fires. Good factors are present, such as engaging tasks, but there are problems galore: A project is imploding, a contentious meeting erupts or you lack a critical resource like time, staff or equipment. You perceive your work as creative, but in fact it’s not.

Disengaged: 10% of days. You’ve checked out because both the positive and negative aspects of the environment are missing, leaving you bereft of both pressures and motivators. Perhaps the tasks are a snooze and your deadline isn’t until December. “It translates into a lack of energy,” Reina said.

Toxic: 8% of days. Obstacles, challenges or conflict mix with a dearth of positive offsets like freedom, engaging work and encouragement. Perhaps ugly office politics flare up or your project is put on ice. Emotional conflict tends to really sink your ship (versus task conflicts, which are disagreements over work and less damaging).

The negative consequences of disengaged and toxic days are on display today, said Baer.

“People are willing to jump ship easily, which tells you that they’re not very engaged or perhaps that there’s too much toxicity at work,” he said. “That’s worrying.”

Baer credits the VCU researchers with looking at key factors affecting work holistically rather than individually. Unlike most studies, which focus on one or two aspects of the workplace, the researchers employed a rarely used methodology to study work environment factors like autonomy, supervisor encouragement and organizational impediments among others, in a nine-way interaction.

Better Days Ahead?The goal isn’t to have only good days—that’s not possible—and crisis days are important.

“You kind of need to debate and discuss and butt heads to move ideas forward,” McKay said. What matters is how you respond—do you crash and have a string of toxic days? Or are you motivated for the next project? Managers play a key role by providing  support, resources, encouragement and engaging work. Not too much though.

“You can’t just barge in and shake things up because you read a study about how more freedom and support leads to better days,” Mohan said. The goal is to adjust culture to boost positive experiences and alleviate negative ones in the hope of adding ideal days and reducing toxic ones, which requires keen awareness of employees’ day-to-day experiences.

For employees, awareness is half the game, because it allows them to see where their day is headed and lean toward the better situations. “People who are mindful don’t experience as much of a declining trajectory,”  Reina said, because they can step back and look at how the day unfolded without judgment or negative emotion.

And better days are probably ahead. 

“There’s nothing to suggest that you’re going to have week of toxic days—there’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Mohan said. “Or, if you’re riding a wave, at some point that wave is going to come crashing down.”

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