For many people, 2012 represents a new beginning especially related to career development or job change. For others, change is a fantasy replaced instead with thoughts of complacency, redundancy, and general malaise over work environment, job duties, or career choice. Over the course of my career I have been witness to, and coached on, the effects of both career burnout and job loss. The emotions, thoughts, and decisions people make on these ends of the workplace depression spectrum are intense and require a great deal of sensitivity in the hopes of turning a negative perspective into a positive one.
Somewhere along the workplace depression spectrum, however, I have observed another condition. The state of mind I have observed is that of a productive employee. An individual that comes to work, shows no overt signs of depression, smiles, chats, and conducts business as usual but hides a level of dysfunction that impacts his or hers ability to be fully engaged.
I spent some time reading up on workplace depression to see if I could pinpoint another term for this condition and didn’t find anything to my satisfaction. So I decided to coin the term – Employee Adaptive Displacement – in order to focus on this piece of the depression continuum. The way I broke things down is as follows:
Employee
Adaptive (I’m not fully engaged in what I do; I think I should be doing something else but will “drift” or go along with the flow of things until somehow I “figure” things out or the decision is “made” for me)
Displacement (I am here but not “really” here; lights are on for the basic operational survival but not much else; I don’t fit – I’m displaced from the state I should ideally be in).
The challenge I have is finding an easy way to locate these people in a work setting. I wrote this paper as a means to starts a discussion on the topic and see what other experts have found. I think for most practitioners we are able see the signs of someone who is in a depressive state or at burnout. Often the behaviors are more obvious – performance suffers, absenteeism, etc. But when all of these “normal” giveaway factors are not present or at least not consistently apparent to draw a pattern, how do you tease EAD out in coaching conversations?
I plan to begin some research into how I can differentiate this condition given that so many pieces overlap with existing knowledge on workplace depression symptoms and remedies. Maybe it’s the same thing. I’m not sure beyond what I have experienced in the field.
In any case, I welcome comments and please download my free paper for more information and feel free to distribute as appropriate.
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