You can probably recall the feeling of finding yourself immersed in a task at work. Whether your job is to solve problems, prepare budgets, make presentations or meet with people. That state of pleasant focus where ideas comes easily to your mind, words seems to write themselves, you feel highly productive, and you leave work a little more engaged and happy.

How to grow engagement within your organisation - start with workflow

When we help organisations grow engagement, we apply different well known theories one of them being workflow defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. Here we train participants in longterm focus and the use of workflow by entering a flow state experience.

Flow state also referred to as “being in the zone,” is according to Csikszentmihaly: “that mental state in which we perform an activity truly immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”

Based on thousands of interviews Csikszentmihaly found that flow state occurs in the intersection between the right amount of “high skills” and “high challenge”, we refer to this as challenge and mastery in the visualization below.

MABL Workflow Model

So, flow grows when the right mix of challenge and mastery grows - and high workflow is present when challenge and mastery is both high. On the contrary - people are out of flow/ not experinging a flow state, when they are either too challenged or when they find the job tasks too easy. You can probably imagine that both stress and frustration occurs, if people are working too much and too long above or below the green flow line finding tasks either too challenging or too easy.

This simple model is an easy tool for HR Experts and Leaders to work with, not only in terms of creating workflow but also in relation to talent- development and retention. If you haven’t already familiarized yourself with Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, we can recommend you to watch the short TED Talk from 2004 here.

How to Increase Workflow

For our MABL Workflow Company Session we started performing a simple breathing exercise to focus the mind. To get a demonstration of this breathing method download MABL - your online toolkit via App Store and go to video: “5 min. Office Breathing”.

This was followed by 20 minutes office exercises, to improve the participants ability to keep longterm focus and to enter a workflow state, involving the right challenge, mastery, and enjoyment. Further we asked the participants to work mentally with these three things:

Focus on the task at hand
Loose self-consciousness
Allow yourself to immerse in an *autotelic experience

Focusing on the task at hand and why mindfulness is so interesting. Besides practicing being in the present moment, you simply train your brain’s ability to keep longterm and deep focus, and stop the mind from thinking about the next tasks and to-dos.

Secondly, loose self-consciousness. In other words - pause the ego for a moment and allow yourself NOT to spend time on thoughts that will evoke either: fear, doubt or an urge to impress your leader. Just do it!

And thirdly, *autotelic (from Greek and translates to self-meaning) is something we do for the sake of the experience, and not for an outcome or end result. In the western world, we have a tendency to value efficiency as a positive thing, and the hedonic motivation for “pleasure only” as an act that has a laziness to it.