Energy. The raw material of engagement is energy. It takes energy to engage and authentic engagement contributes to our energy. Energy comes in a variety of forms: mental, emotional, physical, organizational, and spiritual. We must strive towards mastery of physical, mental, and emotional energy.

Here are five ways to be instill energy for employee engagement

1. Power up your engagement through energy
2. Energize through high-quality connections
3. Mobilize energy and avoid traps
4. Walk ten
5. Ask the number one energy question of yourself and others

Power up your engagement through energy. In the past 10 years business and the workplace has had a strong focus on mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual energy. Although this is a relatively new focus for the workplace these 4 energies have been a strong part of the traditional medicine wheel used by First Nations People for hundreds of years.  Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote about the 4 energies in The Power of Full Engagement in 2003.  This was one of my favorite earlier books on the topic of engagement. I appreciated their declarative statements ranging from energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance to performance health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy. They argued that to be fully engaged we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.  They stated that physical capacity is the quantity of energy, emotional capacity is the quality of energy, mental capacity is the focus of energy, and spiritual capacity is the force of energy.  We need lots of high quality energy to provide us with focus and force to achieve results. Loaded with suggestions, research and practical practices this book can help you transform and leverage your energy for full engagement.

Energize through high-quality connections. Jane Dutton from the Ross School of Business and a leader in positive organizational scholarship has done a lot of research and writing on energy in organizations.  Energy is the sense of “being eager to act and cpable of action.” Dutton offers an evidenced based pathway to foster and enhance organizational energy through the strength of high-quality connections at work. Energy is a limited but renewable resource and managers can contribute immensely to energy creation. High-quality connections not only energize others and ourselves, they have a significant impact on well-being and lessen or eliminate corrosive connections. Everyday interactions build upon respectful engagement, task enabling, and trusting can bring dynamic vitality to engagement and organizational results.

Mobilize energy and avoid traps. Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel outlined how leaders can boost their organization’s energy and ignite strong performance. Organizational energy is the force behind an organization  or team works. The organizations must mobilize its emotional, cognitive, and behavioral potential. There are four states of energy based on intensity and quality: corrosive energy, resigned energy, comfortable energy, and productive energy. In productive energy, we see high levels of passion, mental agility, and effort aligned with organizational goals. Energy states are predictive of numerous gains in performance, productivity, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. To maximize organizational energy, organizations must guard against three energy draining traps: over complacency, eroding corrosion, and never ending acceleration.

A charged conversation. Here is a recording of a conversation with the two authors on how to enhance organizational energy:

If the video does not load in this window, click here.

Walk ten. Robert E. Thayer wrote an insightful and well-researched book on energy and mood: Calm Energy: How People Regulate Mood with Food and Exercise. He conducted in-depth research on how we control mood and how often we control mood through food. Thayer demonstrated in a number of studies that a more powerful way to control mood and energy was by short periods of brisk walking — after just 10 minutes of brisk walking energy was significant increased for one hour. We much replenish our energy during the day and short periods of brisk walking or short periods of napping offer quick pathways to rejuvenating work.

Ask the number one energy question of yourself and others. Ask the primary energy question. Donald H. Graves spent a year studying the relationship between energy and teaching. He worte a great book on the energy to teach. In essence, he travelled around America asking teachers one basic question. I think this is the best question you can ask yourself and others to provide an open ended pathway to an energizing conversation. What gives you energy, what takes it away, and what for you is a waste of time? Of course, we must bring our responses to life by making changes and taking action.

Read these 5 sources to instill and create energy:

1. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement
2. Jane Dutton, Energize Your Workplace: How to Create and Sustain High-Quality Connections at Work
3. Robert Thayer, Calm Energy
4. Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel, Fully Charged
5. Donald H. Graves, The Energy to Teach

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

(Part 10 of an 11 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Enhance Well-being. We need to create wellbeing inside of work. There are things we can do outside of work but how we promote and enhance well-being within work is becoming increasingly important as mobile devices makes work portable and 24/7. We must eliminate toxic workplaces poisoned with a lack of respect or mutuality. We must create a profound wellbeing where people leave work enlivened and enriched rather than depleted and deadened.

Here are 5  prescriptions for well being at work

1. Enliven the five elements of well being.
2. Establish PERMAnent well being.
3. Mind your work
4. Establish and maintain psychological and social safety
5. Be a well being heretic

Enliven the five elements of well being. Rath and Harder in Well Being state that well being is a combination of  ”our love for what we do each day, the quality of our relationships, the security of our finances, the vibrancy of our physical health, and the pride we take in what we have contributed to our communities. Most importanty, it’s about how these five elements interact” (p. 4).  About 66% of us are doing well with at least one of these elements but only 7% of us are thriving in all five areas. This leaves much room to improve well being at work by working on our career  well being, social well being, financial well being, physical well being, and community well being. By the way, I don’t think we try for the infamous work/life balance with these elements, rather we try and have healthy flow that benefits us and others.

Establish PERMAnent Well Being. Martin Seligman approaches well-being with the caution of a scientist and the optimism of someone who developed the approach of learned optimism. In Flourish, Seligman went beyond happiness work to examine flourishing and offering practical suggestions on instilling well being. His perspective of well being also has a foundation of 5 elements, different than Gallup, and structured around the mnemonic PERMA. PERMA stands for: positive emotions, engagement, relationship, meaning, and achievement. Positive emotions and the pleasant life contribute to our well being and happiness. Engagement creates well being with powerful connections to work, belonging and serving.  Relationships, one of the 10 blocks of the pyramid of engagement, in study after study is found to be one of the most salient contributors to well being.  Meaning, the most recent block we examined in this series on the pyramid of engagement is vital for health.  Achievement has been a more recent insertion in Seligman’s approach to authentic happiness and well being. Seligman examined his own love of playing bridge and realized how much achievement plays a role in well being. Achievement fits well with the top three blocks of the employee engagement pyramid: results, performance, and progress.

Mind your work. Mindfulness can be a powerful yet subtle pathway to well being. Jon Kabat-Zinn defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentaly.” How well do you show up to the moment? We may reduce high levels of stress attached to the past and the future by being where we are. As Stephan Rechtschaffen declared in Time Shifting, “there is no stress in the present moment.”

Mindful leadership.  A recent Harvard Business review blog post by Holly Labarre quoted Pamela Weiss: ”If you want to transform an organization it’s not about changing systems and processes so much as it’s about changing the hearts and minds of people. Mindfulness is one of the all-time most brilliant approaches for helping to alleviate human suffering and for bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings.” Mindfulness seems so subtle, almost anemic for well being, but for a world that has gone crazy busy it can keep us well, centered, aware, connected, and present. We often seem to be searching for dramatic data-driven tools when this subtle and powerful tool is always available to us, embedded in us, and always only a moment away.

Watch the talk. I encourage you to mindfully watch this Google talk by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

If the video does not open in this window, click here.

Establish and maintain psychological and social safety. We have focused and improved our work on physical safety at work. We need to keep all employees safe. In addition we need to ensure that our work and workplaces are infused with psychological and social safety. Safety is created through mutual purpose and mutual respect. It means we care about each other and we care about what each other is interested in. This must be genuine and is more than a fuzzy warm feeling. People read a lack of safety in seconds and this thwarts are ability to achieve results, build relationships and be well at work. A lack of safety saps away well being at work and creates ineffective conflicts and confrontations. We seem to have a bigger safety issue than engagement issue at work. It feels unsafe for most workers to be honest, direct, and respectful about engagement. An unintended consequence of the infamous anonymous survey in engagement is that we are telling employees we don’t want to know who they are, thereby making employees invisible. Robust engagement needs a name and a face. Management also justifies anonymous surveys because they don’t believe workers will be honest unless they are anonymous. We need to stop thinking of disengagement as a punishable offence and instead use it as a trigger for meaningful listening and talking about work.

Be a well being heretic.  I believe we have too much fluff and far too many mistaken notions about specific wellness approaches at work. I have believed this for 30 years but just recently has it coalesced together into the  Heretic’s Manifesto of Well Being. I do not write about this frivolously having been an employee assistance counselor for almost 20  years and a university educator in educational and counseling psychology for 25 years.

A wellbeing epiphany and dodging a bullet. Late last year, I was teaching a short course for blue collar workers on overcoming stress and engaged well being. They were a skeptical group who did not want to be there and approached the topic with a high degree of defensiveness and disdain. This was no time for fluffy soft skills yet I wanted to fully contribute to their well being and knew they could benefit from a focus on well being that was real, robust and respectful. I deviated from my plan, connected with the group and realized their rapt attention and interest was bringing out my personal weave of wellness in a way that even I had never fully heard before. When the session was over one of the guys came up at the end. He told me he hated motivational speakers and that he got nothing from them. Before the workshop he borrowed some change from a friend for Tim Horton’s coffee and his friend had a small caliber bullet in his pocket (gives you an idea of the audience).  He picked up the change from his friend plus the bullet saying he may need it as he had to listen to some speaker (me). After everyone else had left at the end of the session, he handed me the bullet, the most creative expression of gratitude I have every received as a speaker, voiced a big thank you, and really did make my day! And this was in…Beasejour, Manitoba! The impromptu and honest rant with the group during that session resulted in the articulation of the following 33 point well being manifesto:

A Heretic’s Manifesto and Guide to Better Well Being at Work:

1. We must find wellbeing inside of work and not wait until we are outside of work at the end of our day or in retirement.
2. Hope is a misguided future perspective taking us away from where we can really make a difference, right here – right now.
3. There is no stress in the present moment so strive to be where you are.
4. Self-esteem is an evaluative trap that snares you like cheese snares a mouse with the snap of the trap. Accept yourself don’t evaluate yourself.
5. Life comes before work and work/life balance and any balance is dynamic like a teeter totter.
6. Well being is only a concept until we engage in well doing.
7. Ignorance is more important than knowledge in fostering and enhancing well being. We being by not knowing.
8. People don’t actually hear most interpersonal feedback unless they feel safe and safety is the only way to overcome most of our problems.
9. Genuine caring trumps professional competence in almost every relationship.
10. Achieving  happiness is a shallow and insignificant approach to living.
11. Structure trumps willpower in promoting and fostering well being.
12. Powerful questions we ask ourself are the ideal WD40 for a brain clogged by an amygdala seizure.
13. Wellbeing is strong stuff. We must know, live and leverage our strengths in the service of others.
14. It take energy directed towards well being to get energy and when you are depleted this is a real hindrance to experiencing well being
15. Relaxation is the anemic aspirin of stress management and can actually cause stress.
16. What lessens your stress today could be a major contributor of stress tomorrow.
17. There are no algorithmic certainties of well being only heuristic probabilities of success.
18. In life and work you are going to fart, fumble, and fall. You are human. It is not about avoiding falling down it is about how you pick yourself back up again. Everyone is screwed up: I am not okay, you are not okay and that is okay.
19. Placebos are examples of caring made tangible.
20. Employee wellbeing is not a soft skill just as accounting is not a hard skill.  Wellbeing embraces fluid skills when the fixed parts of our life are in need of repair.
21. Reality is overrated, living through positive illusion, not delusion,  is powerful and practical.
22. Wellbeing is more than a personal endeavor it  is a social phenomenon.
23. Only you are responsible for your own well being but others are accountable for your well being just as you are accountable for their well being.
24. No one can upset you after 90 seconds.
25. Compliance is the anemic byproduct of power.
26. We do not resist change we resist coercion and the gravity of the familiar is what holds us in place.
27. If life throws you a lemon — duck, determine where it came from, think about what you can do about it and only then contemplate making lemonade.
28. Positive thinking must be changed into a more authentic constructive thinking. Lots of  bad things do happen and positive thinking may be a disrespectful glossing offer the richness, albeit ruggedness, of human experience.
29. Bad is at least twice as salient as good in most situations so we must tip the scales of good for good.
30. Most of what we know really isn’t so.
31. Wellness tips like this without personal evaluation and experimentation can create a  misguided tyranny of tips leading towards more stress. The Buddha said, “we must be a lamp unto ourselves.”
32. Contradiction is only troublesome if you are locked into rigid thinking and a fixed mindset.
33. Take a long shot, Charlie Chaplin once said, “life is a tragedy in close up and a comedy in long shot.” How long does it take you to get a long shot on things?

Read these 5 sources to be well on your way:

• Tom Rath and Jim Harter, Well Being: The Five Essential Elements.
• Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being.
• Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are
• Stephan Rechtschaffen,  Time Shifting: Creating More time to Enjoy Your Life
• Polly Labarre, Developing Mindful Leaders, Harvard Business Review Blog, December 2011.

Next post in this series: How to enliven energy for employee engagement.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

(Part 8 of an 11 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Finding direction through meaning

Meaning. For work to sustain and enrich people it must be meaningful. Those who have a why to work can bear almost any how and a sense of meaningful work instills a strong and rich intrinsic motivation. Progress, when it is meaningful, can be one of the best events of our day.

Finding and Defining Meaning. Paul Fairlie recently published an article on meaningful work and engagement in Advances in Developing Human Resources. He listed the common dimensions of meaning: having a purpose or goal, living according to one’s values and goals, autonomy, control, challenge, achievement, competence, mastery, commitment, engagement, generativity or service to others, self-realization, growth and fulfillment. Fairlie conducted research on meaningful work with 574 respondents.  He offered six implications for human resource development practice including deeper discussion and social connections, changing mindsets, and management education on models of human meaning. He concluded that meaninful work was a unique predictor of engagement, “meaningful work characteristics are an overlooked sources of employee motivation and engagement within organizations.”

Here are 8 ways to create meaningful work:

1. Trump how with why
2. Build abundant leadership whys
3. Stretch meaning, shrink money
4. Get Pink with autonomy, mastery, purpose
5. Master your Mojo
6. Reframe your values as promises
7. Lead on purpose
8. Double your WAMI at work

Trump how with why. Viktor Frankl concluded that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living and that life never ceases to have meaning. To move this to the workplace, if you have a why to work you can bear almost any how. Not everyone is engaged in meaningful work, but maybe everyone can be.  Part of making this happen is helping organizations, leaders, managers, and employees learn how to co-create meaningful workplaces. Part of making this happen is helping workers to perceive and experience the greater purpose in their work. In the workplace, meaning is co-created between the organization and individual. It is not something we give to another person — meaning must be built through authentic conversations about the why of work.

Build  abundant leadership whys. David and Wendy Ulrich wrote They Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations that Win. The authors frame the book around some down-to-earth and meaningful questions around identity, prupose, motivation, relationships, teams, work culture, contribution, growth, learning, resilience, civility and happiness. They encourage us to ask ourselves:

• What am I known for?
• Where am I going?
• Whom do I travel with?
• How do I build a positive work environment?
• What challenges and interest me?
• How do I respond to disposability and change?
• What delights me?

The Why of Work is a practical book for leaders who are looking to instill meaning. As the authors  state in their preface: “Leaders are meaning makers: they set direction that others aspire to; they help others participate in doing good work and good works; they communicate ideas and invest in practices that shape how people think, act, and feel. As organizations become an increasing part of the individual’s sense of identity and purpose, leaders play an increasing role in helping people shape the meaning of their lives.”

Stretch meaning, shrink money. Money matters but so does meaning, completion, competition and motivation to instill caring at work. Dan Ariely offered an insightful 4 minute video on work and meaning at Big Think. He outlines how motivation and engagement are created through meaning. I encourage you to watch this video. Here is a short snippet from the transcript:

Sure, we care about money and it’s nice to get paid, but there’s also a whole range of other things that we get–a need for achievement and completion, competition with other people, and a sense of progress and a sense of meaning.  And all of those things really, really matter.  But as we move to a knowledge economy that depends more on people’s good intention and willing, and as the nature of work becomes more amorphic and work kind of interweaves with life in all kinds of interesting ways, as we move more and more to that kind of workplace, I think the relative importance of money is getting smaller and the relative importance of those other things could get… could get much larger…The first lesson is that we need to recognize how important meaning, completion, competition, motivations are in getting people to care and to work hard, and we need to try to encourage those…we need to do things that don’t undercut those human motivations.

Get Pink with autonomy, mastery and purpose. Daniel Pink wrote the popular book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  Meaning and motivation according to the research Pink gathered is created through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Pink stated that purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle.  We need to use profit to reach purpose, lessen the emphasis on self-interest, and help people pursue purpose on their own terms. Pink believe this may not only rejuvenate our businesses and organizations but also remake our world.

Master your Mojo. Marshall Goldsmith offers MOJO to find meaning. Mojo means working with 3 elements:

1. Identity (Who do you think you are?)
2. Achievement (What have you done lately?)
3. Reputation (Who do other people think you are? What do other people think you’ve done lately?) .

Reframe your values as promises. I appreciated Mike Morrison’s slim book on The Other Side of the Card: Where Your Authentic Leadership Begins. Mike was the Dean of the University of Toyota. He stated that one side of our business card has writing and the other has meaning. The meaning is created on the blank side of the card. The book offers a number of short exercises to fill the white space of our work with meaning. One element of the book that really stood out for me was to reframe values as promises. Values are often nice sounding statements that frozen in a framed wall statement while promises are something we keep. Ensure that your values don’t stagnate on the wall, think of them as promises, and then do all you can to keep the promises you make.

Lead on purpose.  Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have done some great research and writing demonstrating how important minimizing setbacks and maximizing progress is for engaged work. In the January 2012 McKinsey Quarterly they outline how leaders kill meaning at work. This occurs by “dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off projects teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers. The article includes a plea for executives to instill meaning in other and find meaning for themselves at the same time:

 you are in a better position than anyone to identify and articulate the higher purpose of what people do within your organization. Make that purpose real, support its achievement through consistent everyday actions, and you will create the meaning that motivates people toward greatness. Along the way, you may find greater meaining your own work as a leader.

Double your WAMI at  work. Michael F. Stager encourage us to fine our WAMI through a work and meaning inventory. People work for many reasons – some are obvious (I am paid to work), some are not as obvious (work is where my friends are). Research evidence and case studies testify to the reality that understanding how people approach work and what they get from it is vital to learning how to achieve the best possible outcomes for individuals and organizations. Meaningful work is a good predictor of desirable work attitudes like job satisfaction. In addition, meaningful work is a better predictor of absenteeism from work than job satisfaction.  The Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI) assesses three core components of meaningful work: the degree to which people find their work to have significance and purpose, the contribution work makes to finding broader meaning in life, and the desire and means for one’s work to make a positive contribution to the greater good. To download the 10-item WAMI assessment and scoring key click here.

Five meaningful considerations.

1. Create meaning rather than searching for it. Making meaning is a creative and co-creative process.
2. Work with meaning while achieving meaningful results.
3. Actively engage with some of the sources listed here to enhance your own meaning and help others create their meaning.
4. Have wide eyes about your work so that you can see and experience the greater purpsse in what you do.
5. Remind yourself that meaning is a process not an event. You don’t simply find meaning one day, you engage in meaningful work every day.

Read these 7 meaningful sources:

• Paul Fairlie, Meaningful work, employee engagement, and other key employee outcomes: Implication for Human Resource Development. Advances in Developing Human Resouces. December 2011.
• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
• Dave Ullrich and Wendy Ulrich, The Why of Work: how Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win
• Dan Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Marshall Goldsmith, MOJO: How to get it, how to keep it, how to get it back if you lose it.
• Mike Morrison, The Other side of the Card: Where Your Authentic leadership Begins.
• Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, How leaders kill meaning at work. McKinsey Quarterly, January 2012.

Next post in this series: Experience Well Being.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Employee Disengagement: I have created a short slide presentation and story based on an employee who left before his actual leaving and was deceiving himself about the ability to engage in retirement when he had not engaged at work. This presentation will be broadcast during the Ken Blanchard Quite and Stayed Livecast this week.

Join 5000 attendees and over 40 speakers during a free Ken Blanchard Livecast. It takes place on January 25, 2012 at 8am PST. Register Now.  The presentation is designed for anyone interested in motivating themselves or others. It will be helpful to increase productivity, enhance motivation, encourage creativity, and build loyalty. Here are pictures, names, and titles for many of the Quit and Stayed Speakers:

Mike Alpert Certified Business Coach, FocalPoint Coaching	Karl Bimshas Founder, Karl Bimshas Consulting
Lee Cockerell Executive Vice President (Retired & Inspired) Walt Disney World Resort	David Facer Executive Coach, Activate Potential
Dr. Jackie Freiberg Author, Speaker, Executive Coach, Freibergs.com	Grace Gorrell Instructor, Community and Leadership Development, University of Kentucky
Pat Hyndman Chair, Vistage International	John Izzo Speaker and Author
Betsy Jordyn President, Accelera Consulting Group	Kathi Kroop MBA, SPHR, Trinity Focus Consulting
Charlene Li Founder, Altimeter Group, Author of Open Leadership	Jeff Lindeman SPHR, Senior Director, Organizational Performance & Development, San Diego County Regional Airport Authority
Kenneth Manesse Sr. Micro-Entrepreneur Specialist, Founder & Director, 3 Dimensional Life	Mark F. Matejik CEO, BOOST Strategic
Elliott Masie Chair – The Learning CONSORTIUM @ The MASIE Center	Eileen McDargh Founder and CEO, McDargh Communications
Mark Miller V.P. Training & Development for Chick-fil-A, Inc.	Harry Paul Speaker, Author
Garry Ridge President and CEO, WD-40 Company	John Stahl-Wert President and CEO, Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation and Serving Leaders
Jared Stauffer President and CEO, Brinkster	Dr. L. Todd Thomas Associate Professor, DeVos Graduate School of Management, Northwood University
Jim Vasconcellos CBT (Chief Boomerang Thrower), Boomerang Concepts	Richard Whiteley CEO, The Whiteley Group
David Zinger Founder, David Zinger Associates

David Zinger is an author, speaker, founder and host of the 4500 member Employee Engagement Network and one of the 40 presenters at this Ken Blanchard event.

(Part 6 of an 11 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Let’s get strong in 2012.

Engagement is strong stuff. When you know your strengths, live your strengths, and leverage your strengths in the service of others you will have increased engagement, happiness, and well being. To bring out the strengths of others we must be aware of our own strengths. Powerful managers “spot” employees’ strengths and make strength training and strengthening routines a daily endeavor.

Strength Based Leadership. I have been a student of strength based leadership for 7 years. If you go back and read blog posts on this site from 5 years ago you will see most of them had a strength based leadership focus. In fact, this specific blog was started November 11 2005, the day Peter Drucker died.  I dedicated the website to his legacy and encouragement of a strength based approach to work. I have taken inventories of my strengths, taught strength based approaches, encouraged thousands of employees to learn more about their strengths and believe that strengths are a foundation cornerstone in the pyramid of employee engagement. Overtime I realized that strength based approaches for work were best subsumed under the broader perspective of employee engagement.

5 pathways to strengthen your engagement and work:

1. Don’t be a sucker, heed the advice of Peter Drucker.
2. Follow Martin Seligman’s strong path towards happiness and well being.
3. Gallup along with your strengths, your winning combination is 40-22-1.
4. Set aside your trombone and find your strengths by looking at what engages you (Marcus Buckingham).
5. See your best reflections as others offer you your reflected best self.

Don’t be a sucker, heed the advice of Peter Drucker.  Peter Drucker was a prolific management writer who focused intently on strengths at work  in his final years. In 1999 in an article in managing our own career Drucker said we have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution to our organizations and communities. And we have to stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do. It may seem obvious that people achieve results by doing what they are good at and by working in ways that fit their abilities but Drucker believed very few people actually know–let alone take advantage of–their fundamental strengths. He challenged each of us to ask ourselves and hold conversations with  others at work about:

• What are my strengths?
• How do I perform?
• What are my values?
• Where do I belong?
• What should my contribution be?

Accept yourself. Don’t try to change yourself, Drucker cautions. Instead, concentrate on improving the skills you have and accepting assignments that are tailored to your individual way of working. If you do that, you can transform yourself from an ordinary worker into an outstanding performer. Today’s successful careers are not planned out in advance. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they have asked themselves the above questions and rigorously assessed their unique characteristics.

Follow Martin Seligman’s strong path towards happiness and well being.  If Drucker is the dean of management then Seligman is the dean of psychology and leader of positive psychology. Seligman is a cautious academic, former head of the American Psychological Association, and a true difference maker. He was instrumental in turning psychology toward a balance of the positive and the negative. Starting with Learned Optimism and then moving to Authentic Happiness Seligman created a constructive and positive foundation for psychology. In regards to strengths the single greatest resource Seligman was involved in creating was the is the VIA Strength Survey of Character Strengths – measuring 24 character strengths. Of all the strength assessment inventories available I recommend this one the most. It has a universal perspective, it can be applied both inside and outside of work, and best of all it is free. Research has gone on to demonstrate that is you know your top 5 strengths, use them on a daily basis, and leverage them in the service of others you will have a much higher level of happiness and well being.

My top 5 VIA strengths going back to November 2004 were: humor, creativity, curiosity, love of learning, and perspective.

Gallup along with your strengths, your winning combination is 40-22-1. As an organization Gallup has been at the forefront of helping individuals and organizations bring strengths to work. The third question in their famous Q12 survey of employee engagement is: At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Marcus Buckingham and now Tom Rath have created powerful and popular books and resources for strength based work. Their primary strength-based assessment is StrengthsFinder 2.0. You can take the online assessment after purchasing one of their books related to strengths at work and entering the code at the StrenghsFinder website. Gallup does an impressive job of creating helpful information and resources to learn more about your strength and how to put them to work. They offer a number or resources in addition to StrengthsFinder 2.0 to get the most from your strengths.

My top 5 StrengthsFinder 2.0 strengths are: maximizer, strategic, positivity, ideation, and empathy.

Set aside your trombone and find your strengths by looking at what engages (Marcus Buckingham). Marcus Buckingham worked with Gallup and is now a very popular independent strength based speaker, writer, and coach. He has just developed yet another strength assessment tool for work in StandOut - designed to help you find your edge and win at work. His assessment is okay but I believe his best contribution was in the book Go Put Your Strengths to Work and the video, Trombone Player Wanted. I especially appreciated how, at that time, Buckingham encouraged us to find out strengths not in an assessments or inventories but by paying very close attention to what we looked forward to doing each day at work, what fully engaged us at work while we were there, and what gave us our greatest sense of satisfaction.  In other words, we looked at what engaged us to determine our strengths and then we maximized these activities and roles to enhance our engagement. There was no need for an inventory or test. I think his delightful video series on Trombone Player Wanted was a great way to help a team build strengths by watching the videos together, having conversations about the applications and implications of what he said, and holding each other mutually accountable for bringing their best to work each day.

Here is a sample video  from that series:

If the video does not load in this window, click here.

See your best reflections as others offer your reflected best self.  The University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship developed the Reflected Best Self Exercise to use stories collected from people in all contexts of our  life to help us understand and articulate who we are and how we contribute when we are at our best. These stories collected from people who know us can strengthen and connect us to others, help us experience clarity about who we are at our best, and refine personal development goals so that we can be at our best more often. I think the strength of this approach is the social element and as opposed to the anonymous feedback of a 360 evaluation it offers triggers for further discussion and elaboration from the people who let us know what we were like when we were at our best.  Many of us have blind spots or lacunas about our strengths and the reflected best self exercise can fill in the holes.

Seven strong suggestions:

1. Ensure you go beyond taking a test and saying you’ve “done that strength thing.”
2. Don’t merely reduce strengths to a list of 5 attributes.
3. Be mindful of what truly engages you and work backwards from engagement to strengths.
4. Notice other people’s strengths and give them lots of strength based feedback.
5. Develop a daily structure or reminders so that you don’t lose your strengths in the flurry of demands and activities.
6. Be disciplined about your strengths and turn your strength based work into the foundation of your work.
7. Gain additional strength perspective and insight by taking another  popular assessment for strengths at work: Strengthscope.

Consult these  5 sources to enhance your engagement and put you in the moment:

• Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself.
• Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary new understanding of Happines and Well-being
• Tom Rath, StrenghtsFinder 2.0
• Marcus Buckingham, Go Put Your Strengths to Work 
• Marcus Buckingham, Trombone Player Wanted (Video)

Next post in this series: Make meaning.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Bonus Trombone Player Wanted Guide

Here is a free e-book I created for the Trombone player video series which includes a review of StrengthsFinder 2.0. Click here to read or download.

• Strive for everyday simple, small, and significant actions.
• Lighten up your perspective, workload, and intensity.
• Stop consuming information unless that information contributes to meaningful and important action.
• Transform the endless quest of more and more  into vital focused contribution.
• Ask yourself if you really need any more data before you engage.
• Only measure employee engagement elements that you are ready, willing, and able to change.
• Set 3 to 6 daily focused power periods from 10 to 30 minutes to fully engage in specific tasks.
• Be mindful and masterful in helping others engage more fully in their work.
• Target achieving results and building relationships as your twin goals for engagement.
• Make progress a daily work expectation, essential and experience.
• Don’t let the allure and  immediacy of social media fritter away time and energy for your important work.
• Engagement only comes alive as a verb so engage today!

Prescription: Repeat daily for the remainder of 2012.

David Zinger looks forward to an engaging and productive 2012 as he follows his own prescription and also focuses on his 2012 three-word work theme: Stop – Focus – Finish.

Extra Strength Prescription to help you lighten up:

1. The Employee Engagement Pyramid What are the 10 actions managers can take to turbo charge employee engagement?

Engagement is more than a feeling, survey number, or a YouTube happy dance. We engage in actions directed towards results. The first key to consider when acting to increase employee  engagement is what results are you working to achieve and how can you involve all employees in formulating those results or achieving those results? Powerful results matter to managers, organizations, employees, and customers.

2. Employee Engagement: 33 Keys for Engaged Wellbeing What do we see when we take a closer look at engaged well being in the workplace?

A wellbeing epiphany. A few weeks ago, I was teaching a short course for blue collar workers on overcoming stress and engaged wellbeing. They were a skeptical group who did not necessarily want to be there and approached the topic with a high degree of defensiveness. This was no time for fluffy soft skills yet I wanted to fully contribute to their wellbeing and knew they could benefit from a focus on wellbeing that was real, robust and respectful. I deviated from my plan and realized this group’s rapt attention and interest was bringing out my personal weave of wellness in a way that even I had never fully heard before.

3. Employee Engagement: A New Buzz on Engaged Branding Through Community Co-creation What brand new things will happen when we give honeybees an opportunity to play with a Starbucks mug in their hive?

 The buzz. I believe we need to offer more white space in our organizations with employees and customers to help us create both our organizations and our brands. Our customers and our employees may surprise us with their innovations, even more than a community of honeybees given one week to work with the new open logo of the Starbucks cup. We need to look carefully at the the physical and experiential invitational structures we create in organizations to foster collaboration, co-creation, and community with our employees and customers.

4. Employee Engagement and the 3 Word Theme: Stop, Focus, and Finish Do you have a 3 word theme to guide your work engagement for 2011?

Benefits of a 3 word theme. A three word theme is succinct and easy to remember and leverage as a tool for work. It offers a quick guide and evaluation for work completed. It is a nice reflection tool for work and progress. It is also a great planning tool to get a tighter focus on the year ahead while offering flexibility in how those 3 themes are actualized.

5. Employee Engagement: What’s Up with Gamification If 2011 was the year of gamification, what are you playing?

 I believe gamification is one of the key engagement approaches and tools for 2011 and beyond. I think the big challenge will be to ensure these approaches are meaningful, authentic and operate for conversion into work rather than a diversion from work. We must be on guard for the manipulative elements of gaming and the potential lack of spontaneous playfulness in work. We must be aware of the potential negative impact of gamification to foster engagement, achievement, and work. Having said that, I believe gamification can be a very valuable tool towards fuller engagement and corporate social responsibility.

6. Employee Engagement: 33 Ways to Engage Today How do you engage the day?

Focus on the work right in front of you. Savor your morning cup of coffee. Connect to your peers. Esteem your organization. Laugh to keep perspective.

7. 21 Ways Employee Disengagement Hurts How does employee disengagement hurt?

Lowers results - cuts profits - reddens finances - sickens well-being - frays relationships - crumbles organizations …

David Zinger is focusing 2012 on the 10 things managers must do to achieve full employee engagement. Based on the pyramid of engagement, this approach offers managers a powerful structure, process and tools to create and sustain engagement. This pathway to power engagement is offered to organizations and individuals as a two day course, a one day course, a half day course and shorter presentations. Contact David Zinger today at 204 254 2130 or dzinger@shaw.ca to create an engaging 2012 where you work.

(Part 6 of a 10 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Making moments.  Engagement resides in the moment. Learn to master moments from high quality connections to powerful touch points. When we balance challenge and skills we enter the flow zone as we dwell and work within the moment. In addition, focusing our work within the moment alleviates work stress.

6 ways to engage the moment:

1. Access even 1% of the 20,000 opportunities for engagement.
2. Be a micro-manager, really!
3. Reach out and TouchPoint somebody.
4. Transform IQ into HQI to power up the organization.
5. Dwell in the moment to banish stress.
6. Intersect challenge and skill to find flow.

Access even 1% of the 20,000 opportunities for engagement. According to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, we experience approximately 20,000 individual moments in a waking day. Each “moment” lasts a few seconds and each offers an opportunity to engage.  Within a moment we can fuse with our task at hand for full engagement or reach out beyond ourselves to appreciate and recognize others. Even at just 1%  fulfillment we would experience 200 powerful and engaged moments everyday.

Be a micro-manager, really! Generally, being a micromanager is not perceived to be an admirable quality in a manager or a helpful connection to the manager or work for the employee. But what if we manage our moments and focus on our moments of interaction. Small things make a big difference.  Engagement, to be effective, must be reduced to the verb of engage and when we fully engage the moment seemingly miraculous things begin to occur. Instead of the energy sapping interaction of micromanagement based on command and control of trivial details become a manager of the micro moments of work by enhancing connection, input,  interaction, authenticity, and co-creation.

Reach out and TouchPoint somebody. This approach to managing engagement is the Campbell Chicken Soup for the Organization as it originates from the former CEO of Campbell soup, Doug Conant. Doug used TouchPoints to transform Gallup’s dismal engagement scores at Campbell Soup  into some of the best scores Gallup has seen. Doug believes the moment of interruption is the real work of management. Each of the many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone’s day. The point of getting in touch is that each touch point has the opportunity to “establish high performance expectation, to infuse the agenda with great clarity and more energy, and to influence the course of events…TouchPoints take place any time two or more people get together to deal with an issue and get something done” (page 2).   Our interruption interactions are not distractions but rather the real work of management. In the moment of engagement action resides in the  interaction.

Transform IQ into HQI to power up the organization. Jane Dutton believes that there is tremendous power in our connections and interactions and we must guard against corrosive connections that  corrode motivation, loyalty, commitment and engagement. Rather, we must enhance high-quality connections or interactions marked by mutual positive regard, trust, and active engagement on both sides. A cornerstone of high quality connections is respectful engagement characterized by being present to others, affirming them, and communicating and listening in a way that manifests regard and an appreciation of the other person’s worth. Even small acts of respectful engagement infuse a relationship with greater energy. An ongoing stream of high quality interaction by people within an organization may be the single most powerful way to renew and contribute to an organization’s energy to achieve results through strong relationships. It takes some energy to initiate a high quality interaction but usually we find a return of energy through the interaction.

Dwell in the moment to banish stress. If you make where you are going more important than where you are there may be no point in going. Stephan Rechtschaffen stated in Time Shifting:  ”there is no stress in the present moment.” Rechtschaffen advocates time awareness — living fully in the moment.  The practice of timeshifting recognizes that every moment has a particular rhythm to it, and that we have the capacity to expand or contract an individual moment. One way to shift what’s going on in our world is not to try to rush to do more, but to allow ourselves to go deeper into that moment. Our ability to shift gears, to shift our rhythm to meet that moment and be present in it. We waste great chunks of time by thinking about what we’ve just done and what we’ve got to do next, instead of what we’re doing now. Much of our stress comes from regret and dread. Rechtschaffen offers a number of practical tips to improve our moments at work:

1. Get to meetings early so you can compose yourself before the others arrive.
2. When the phone rings, let it ring one extra time to “get centered.”
3. Practice “mindfulness” by doing just one thing at a time, giving it your full attention.
4. Pause after you finish one task before beginning another. If possible, make it last for several minutes.
5. While waiting for a fax or an elevator, think about the present instead of succumbing to the rush and anxiety of tasks still waiting.

Intersect challenge and skill to find flow. Work in the moment by working on tasks that balance challenge and skills level. Csíkszentmihályi’s book Flow is over 21 years old yet offers timeless perspective and advice on how we approach a state of great time shifting or  über engagement. He has found that we experience more flow in work than our leisure time and suggests we frequently overlook the richness of the experience engagement at work offers us. Many of the current game developers have studied flow very closely to ensure their games are designed to help players experience flow. We need to do the same in our workplaces. Some of the key characteristics that promote flow at work are:

1. Clear goals - expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities.
2. Concentration - a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
3. Lack of self-consciousness - the merging of action and awareness.
4. Timelessness - one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Powerful feedback  - successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed.
6. Balance of ability and challenge - the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult.
7. Sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. Intrinsic rewards, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. Full aborption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Read these  5 sources to enhance your engagement and put you in the moment:

• Douglas Conant and Mette Norgaard, TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
• Edward  Hallowell: Crazybusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD
• Tom Rath and Donald Clifton, How Full is Your Bucket?
• Stephan Rechtschaffen, Time Shifting: A Guide to Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life.

Next post in this series: Why employee engagement needs to be strong stuff.

View Moments. I strongly encourage you to watch the wonderful 4 minute brilliant video on moments at the end of this article.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Bonus Video: Moments

(Part 5 of a 10 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Expanding recognition. If we split the word recognition it can be viewed as to think again (re-cognition). We need to rethink what recognition means in workplaces beyond long service pins, toasters, donuts on Friday, and minimal encouragers such as, “good job.”

• Recognition can be strategic to assist in achieving results and advancing the enterprise.
• Recognition can be personal such as noticing when someone is struggling with a task yet reluctant to ask for help.
• Recognition can be social and make use of  internal or external social media tools similar to LinkedIN, FaceBook, and Twitter.

Everyday time. Brun and Cooper in Missing Pieces stated: “the leading challenge to modern organizations is to increase the time that managers spend with their employees.” they also go on to state, “people work each day. Therefore, you should as much as possible recognize their achievements on a daily basis.”

The business of recognition. Recent studies by Gallup, the Corporate Leadership Council, Towers Perrin and others illustrate that recognition is highly correlated with improved employee engagement. Recent AON Hewitt research on the status of employee engagement globally tells us: worldwide, employee engagement is at 56%, which indicates a workforce indifferent to organizational success or failure. The largest engagement drop is in how employees perceive performance management. Employee are asking for recognition for their efforts, better communication about company direction, and an improved link to how individual employees can contribute to the organization.

Intent and impact. We must look at both the intent and impact of  recognition. Toasters and gift cards can be okay when the intent is to express caring made tangible, not as an obligatory duty of a manager. We must also look at impact. Is recognition well-received, does it make a difference, or is it seen as some kind of managerial tokenism? Our recognition needs to be fair and it needs to be real. As my friend Roy Saunderson, from the Recognition Management Institute, declares, “we need REAL RECOGNITION.”

Recognize this.  Without recognition our workplaces are void of the human element. Are you fully letting  employees know that you see them, you are thinking about them and you both recognize and appreciate them? Authentic recognition is so much more than an annual gala or occasional gift card for good behavior. Recognition is social, strategic, and powerful. Recognition is the “re-thinking” of engagement in our everyday interactions and recognition for progress creates a strong multiplier for the  motivation and engagement of knowledge workers.  Gary Chapman and Paul White have written extensively about the 5 languages of appreciation at work: words of affirmation, acts of service, tangible gifts, physical touch and quality time.

The invisible employee. I believe employees are over-surveyed and under-engaged.  Added to this is the lack of recognition in surveys due to the extensive use of anonymous surveys. At one level, anonymous surveys are telling employees we don’t want to know who you are. If it is not okay to write your name on a survey given by the people who employ you I believe we have less of an engagement problem and more of a safety and genuine recognition problem.

Recognition makes good sense. The symbol used in the employee engagement pyramid for  recognition resembles the Eye of Horus an Egyptian symbol associated with power, good health, and action. We must engage with recognition while we fully recognize engagement. Recognition can power an organization and contribute to employee well-being. We must fully open our eyes and senses to both recognize and appreciate the people we work with.

Recognition in the core and at the heart of the pyramid of engagement. Recognition is the inside center of the Pyramid of Employee Engagement for Managers. It is central to engagement at work. We must help employees recognize

• what they need to engage with to achieve key results,
• their level of  performance from excellence and mastery to deficiency and gaps,
• the power of progress as a motivator and the importance of minimizing setbacks,
• that organizations are based on relationships and community,
• the power of moments at work and the ability to flow into the moment of work,
• personal and working strengths as elements of engagement and contributors to well being,
• authentic meaning at work giving  us greater purpose, connection, and engagement,
• the vital role engagement can play in enhancing well being and how key it is to engage purposefully in well being for ourselves and others,
• that work both consumes and contributes to mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and organizational energy.

Read these 3 sources to foster greater recogntion at work:

• Roy Saunderson, Giving the Real Recognition Way.
• Jean-Pierre Bran and Cary Cooper, Missing Pieces: 7 Ways to Improve Employee Well-Being and organizational Effectiveness.
• Gary Chapman and Paul White, The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace.
  

In a moment. The next post in the employee engagement pyramid series will be: Mastering Moments.

Pyramid Power. Contact David Zinger today to put the 10 building blocks of full engagement to work in your organization. Ensure your managers are living the 10 actions they must take to create powerful engagement within the organization. David Zinger at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

30 minutes on employee engagement. When is the last time you spent 30 minutes thinking about employee engagement? What myths surround employee engagement and how do they influence your outlook and actions? David Zinger’s research highlights a series of myths that are associated with employee engagement. These are myths we work by that may not be working for us.

Transforming our myths. Joseph Campbell believed that if myths are to continue to fulfill their vital functions in our modern world, they must continually transform and evolve as older mythologies, untransformed, simply do not address the realities of contemporary life, particularly with regard to the changing cosmological and sociological realities of each new era. The question therefore needs to be asked: Are we operating from an old employee engagement mythology?

21 myths we work with. The 21 myths range from Employee engagement is a noun not a verb to Executive, leaders, and managers are not seen as employees.

Free E-book. This short study guide was written by David Zinger  and produced by Berghind Joseph. It is a practical and cogent employee engagement  resource. To download the PDF E-Book click on the cover above or click on this link: Zinger and Berghind Joseph Myths of Employee Engagement

Contact David Zinger today. Don’t myth out on employee engagement, contact David Zinger to get assistance with your employee engagement endeavors (dzinger@shaw.ca or 204 254-2130).

December Assorted Zingers New E-book Special $3.99.

Click on the image below or click here to learn more and place an order:

(Part 4 of a 10 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Foundation of relationships. Obviously relationships and relationship building are a foundation of employee engagement. Linda Hill in a Harvard Business Review article on Building Effective One-on-One Relationships cited research by John Kotter that found “that one of the factors that distinguished  those general managers with consistently outstanding performance records from their counterparts was their ability to develop and maintin a strong network of relationships.” Work is a relationship and engagement experience. One third of Gallup’s quintessential Q12 survey asks directly about relationships to uncover engagement at work while most of the other items are also influenced indirectly by relationship. Four of the twelve statements employees are asked to respond to are:

1. I have a best friend at work.
2. In the last seven days I have received recognition.
3. My supervisor or some one at work cares about me as a person.
4. There is someone at work who encourages my development. In the last six months someone has talked to me about my progress.

Relationship defined. A relationship is s a connection between two individuals. Interpersonal relationships usually involve some level of interdependence. People in a relationship  influence each other. Because of this interdependence, most things that change or impact one member of the relationship will have some level of impact on the other member. Exercising a strong BACKbone as a manager will have an impact on other employees. This BACKbone is comprised of: bids, authenticity, caring, and knowledge.

People are people, don’t depersonalize with terms such as assets or human capital.  From a distance we can view employees as assets and human capital but engagement and relationship requires closeness. Employees are human and we inadvertently dehumanize employees when we refer to employees as assets or capital. Remember, as a manager you are an employee too. One classic definition of management is getting work done through people but in an engaged workplace work is done with people. We don’t have relationships with assets or capital we have relationships with other humans. An employees locus of engagement is frequently a task while a manager’s locus of engagement is the working relationship with the employee.

Don’t go soft. Too often the human element of engagement is dismissed as a fluffy soft skill afterthought.  Soft skills sound mushy and unimportant while hard skills sound like the foundation of management. I want to add some fortitiude, gumption, and moxie to relationship building in employee engagement by adding BACKbone to a manager’s work. The backbone is our central source of support and stability, it refers to fortitude and determination, and it is part of a network that connects the other networks together.

Dissecting the relationship BACKbone. BACKbone is an acronym for bids, authenticity, caring, and knowledge. John Gottman offered an excellent micro skills focus to building relationships by examining relationships through the lens of bids and the other person turning towards or turning away from that bid for connection. Authenticity is central to trust and true relationships as our brains are social and detect in-authenticity in fractions of seconds. Relationships are built on meaningful and personal connection not manipulation tactics. Caring is a fundamental engagement key and a core to both relationships and management. Knowledge creates our foundation for relationship as we learn more about each other and ensure we acknowledge the people we work with.

B is for Bids. John Gottman in The Relationship Cure outlined a very powerful practice to build better relationships in all elements of our life including work. He examined the smallest of exchanges between people that communicated a request for connection followed by one of three responses. A bid is the fundamental unit of emotional communication. It can be a question, a gesture, a look or any expression that says, “I want to be connected to you.” A bid is followed by a positive or negative response to the other person’s bid or request for emotional connection. The response can be turning towards (a positive response to a bid); turning against (a negative response); and turning away (ignoring another’s bid). In a future post we will examine how working with bids and responses can help us master moments and transform micromanagement from a creepy control mechanism to a fluid and authentic relationship builder that infuses and energizes our work and the work of the people we manage.

A is for Authenticity. Being authentic is key to trust, respect, and genuine relationships. Authentic managers demonstrate integrity, with a profound sense of purpose and willingness to live by their core values.  Bill George, author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership believes that authentic managers genuinely desire to serve others through their management.  They are interested in empowering the people they manage to make a difference; more than they are interested in power, money or prestige for themselves.  They are guided equally by the heart and the mind – practicing heart-based guidance grounded in passion and compassion,  as well as thoughtful management.  People follow authentic managers because they are consistent, reliable and strong.  When they are pushed to go beyond their beliefs and values, authentic managers will not compromise.  If we want to foster full engagement we must be real or “get real.”

C is for Caring. Without caring for others and what they are trying to achieve and experience our management and relationship building is shallow and insignificant. Caring is valuing the people who report to you and focusing more on their needs than your own. Caring is not a fluffy emotion but a number of powerful behaviors demonstrated by managers. Caring can include “care-frontation” where we hold others accountable for their performance and don’t shy away from having conversations about bad behavior or variances in performance expectations. An excellent source to read on  how caring is infused in conversation to create safety while building relationships and achieving results is Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.  Michael Kroth and Carolyn Keeler in a thoughtful article entitled, Caring as a Managerial Strategy in the Human Resource Development Review outlined a number of actions by managers that demonstrate caring:

• Invites employees
• Is receptive and fully available to the employee
• Is emotionally accessible
• Pays attention
• Shows interest in the employee
• Accepts the employee
• Remains open to ideas, possibilities (is open minded)
• Empathizes
• Advances employees
• Has a desire to help the employee succeed
• Puts employee plans and goals ahead of his or her own
• Advocates for the employee
• Commits to employee success
• Protects employees
• Seeks opportunities for advancing employees
• Builds employees capacities
• Sees individual potential and helps employees grow and learn
• Informs employees
• Facilitates problem solving
• Gives generative feedback
• Encourages employees
• Believes in employees
• Teaches and mentors employees
• Connects with employees
• Shares feelings
• Develops relationships of mutual trust and obligation

K is for Knowledge. Interpersonal knowledge is a key to relationships. We begin to learn more about other people and can respond in ways that create and invite more engagement based on the other person’s needs, values, beliefs, experiences, culture, personality, etc. It helps to have knowledge of how to build relationships but even more important is the knowledge we gather as we fully connect with each other. It can be very engaging to notice something is amiss for one of our employees without them saying a thing. Strong relationships are based on knowing the other person. Do we take time to “know” and do we retain that knowledge of employees’ interests, motivators, and uniqueness to further develop both the relationship and engagement at work? Interpersonal knowledge is greatly heightened by acknowledgement, as we show or express recognition or appreciation and gratitude. Notice the word now is contained in the larger work knowledge — gather and act on your knowledge now and in the moment of relationship.

Get BACK to work. When we tell people to get back to work we are usually suggesting that they get on task. We need to achieve results and we need to understand that work is also social. You can enhance engagement for your employees and yourself by putting your BACKbone into it. Make bids and respond positively to employees bids. Be fully who you are. Demonstrate the power of caring. Build your knowledge base of employees to acknowledge each employee as the unique person they already are.

Read these  5 sources to strengthen your employee engagement relationship BACKbone:

• Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter, 12: The Elements of Great Managing
• John M. Gottman, The Relationship Cure.
•  Michael Kroth and Carolyn Keeler Caring as a Managerial Strategy in Human Resource Development Review.
• Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, Crucial Conversations.
  
• Bill George and Peter Sims, True North.

Next post in this series: Recognition.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

December Assorted Zingers E-book Special $3.99.

Click on the image below or click here to learn more and place an order:

This post on employee engagement program guidelines was published exactly 2 years ago on December 1. It is one of my most popular posts and gets read about 5 to 10 times every day since it was published. One big change at the end is that the Employee Engagement Network has grown in 2 years from 1750 to 4415 members.

Get a good start

Ms Julie Carter, a student at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX, asked an excellent question:

One question I have is about how a company would go about implementing an employee engagement program.  Are there any specific guidelines or initiatives?

In a previous post, 11 Pathways to Disengagement, I offered a satirical answer and in this post I will offer a genuine and personal response.

Strong guidelines not rules. Here are some of the things I believe will contribute to a good start to implementing an employee engagement program. I want these to be strong statements that are not rules to be followed but guidelines voiced and offered that encourage you to consider them carefully and either adopt them, modify them, or reject them as you develop your own approach. There is no cookie cutter approach to employee engagement and we certainly can’t leave employee engagement in the hands of others.

13 key considerations in starting an employee engagement program:

Engage employees early and often. Ensure employees have a voice in the program. Ask employees what question could be asked for a survey, have them participate in looking at the results, and give them an opportunity to generate strategies and interventions. We won’t get everyone on the same page unless we give everyone a hand in authoring that page.

Read good research. Read the free and informative research on employee engagement. There is lots of good free material out there. One source I highly recommend everyone read is the MacLeod report from the UK.  Click here to read 21 highlights from this report and you will also find a  link at the end of the article to the full PDF report.

Under-measure and over-deliver. Data can be very helpful to determine success and get baseline engagement but keep it as simple as possible and strive for the fewest questions possible. I recommend more frequent surveys with less questions than lengthy surveys that can be disengaging because they are so long and it takes so long to get feedback to the employees.

Use this as your last question in any survey. Ensure you ask survey recipients what they can do right now to foster their own engagement and enhance the engagement of others. The survey you use should be engaging and ensure that engagement starts right after the survey is completed by asking: What can I do right now to improve engagement for myself or others?

Focus on employee engagement for all. We all must benefit. The employees should benefit from their engagement, the organization should see results, and customers should also experience the benefits of engaged employees. As you plan any program ensure you have declarative clarity on how everyone will benefit.

Say No to something else. Do not make employee engagement another item on an over bulging to do list. What can you say no to so that you ensure you can yes to employee engagement? Employee engagement is not about adding more on  – it is about being more connected to the work, others, and organization you are already a part of. These connections need to contribute to meaningful and significant results for both organizations and individuals.

Eliminate consultants, hire coaches. Don’t leave engagement in the hands of external consultants who will always know less about your organization than you do. We too readily put our important work in the hands of experts who may consume dollars that could be better spend on programs rather than advice. Use external sources as coaches to guide you not to take over what will be done and how it will be done.

Employee engagement is not a soft skill. I hate the term soft skills for people skills. It makes it seem mushy and fluffy rather than vital and pivotal. Soft also sounds easy while hard sounds solid and difficult. Rather than soft skills and hard skills I think we need to refer to these two types of skills as fluid skills and fixed skills. We need fixed skills and we need the fluid skills to ensure the fixed skills don’t seize up because people are not engaged.

Put a name and face to engagement. Minimize the amount of anonymous data you collect. How can we expect people to engage when they are anonymous. Put a face and name to engagement and make it safe to engage in authentic and real dialogue. If you think people won’t give you an honest answer about their level of engagement in your organization if they are identified than you have a much bigger problem than engagement. You have very troublesome trust, honesty, authenticity, and safety issues to address.

Spread engagement around. Make everyone responsible for their own engagement and accountable to everyone else in the organization. We don’t need people checking up on us, we need people checking in with us to talk about our fluctuating levels of engagement. Avoid putting engagement in the hands of just HR or Internal Communications. This is a line issue, this is everyone’s issue. Don’t forget, CEO’s and Presidents are employees too.

Community mobilization. Create a community rather than a simple organization. Community needs co-created conversations. I would like to see HR take on a bigger internal community mobilization role by fostering and convening conversations to create and mobilize the latent community potential embedded in every organization. Start by reading Peter Block’s, Community: The Structure of Belonging, and bring people into dialogue.

A pluralism of voices. Perhaps you have different keys or believe some of the keys were wrong or missed. I  encourage you to voice your perspective in the comments to the post. We need fewer answers and more dialogue.

Get connected. Join the Employee Engagement Network. We have over 1750 members interested in employee engagement. Join us to ask questions, find information, offer support, and stay current on the latest information in employee engagement. The glue of engagement is contribution and we welcome your contribution.

(Part 3 of a 10 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Fully engaged. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer published The Progress Principle this year demonstrating the primary role progress and avoidance of setbacks plays in motivation and engagement.  Their research was based on 12,000 daily diaries. Their conclusion:

of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work; of all the negative events, the single most powerful is the opposite of progress – setbacks in the work.  We consider this to be a fundamental management principle: facilitating progress is the most effective way for managers to influence inner work life. Even when progress happens in small steps, a person’s sense of steady forward movement toward an important goal can make all the difference betweeen a great day and a terrible one. (p.76&77)

Snakes and ladders. If progress is the ladder on the classic board game of snakes and ladders than setbacks are the snakes. It is very important to realize that the effect of setbaks on emotions is stronger than the effect of progress. Small loses can eliminate small wins and negative managerial behavior trumps positive management. As we climb up the pyramid of engagement we must guard against setbacks perhaps even more than working towards making progress.

The 3-block pyramid of engagement. In my pyramid of engagement Path Progress  is in the second row to indicate how important this building block is for managers to increase employee engagement. It is naturally paired with maximize performance as these concepts are paired together to achieve results.

7 Significant Steps on the Path of Progress. Here are 7 steps to help you fully path progress for robust employee engagement:

Accentuate the positive. Continually work towards small wins and breakthroughs. Ensure employees are working towards meaningful goals paired with sufficient autonomy to achieve success. Managers can ensure resources, time and help are available on the path of progress. Managers can catalyze progress by ensuring proper resources and tools as they also nourish progress by fostering strong interpersonal connections focused on progress.

Eliminate the negative. Negative events have a disproportionate impact on engagement. Because negative events have a stronger impact than positive events it is important to prevent setbacks before they occur or minimize the damage setbacks can cause. As a manager, ask yourself these two questions then construct solid responses to squash setbacks:

What can I do to prevent setbacks before they occur with my work group?

 What can I do to overcome setbacks once they have occurred?

Hack your work and work around. Hacking work and workarounds are two powerful twins to achieve progress and minimize nasty setbacks. Bill Jensen and Josh Klein wrote Hacking Work to outline how we can hack our work to achieve progress.  Hacking work is getting what you need to do your best job by exploiting loopholes and using workarounds to make it easier to do great work. I encourage you to read a previous post I wrote as a review on  hacking work.  Another book that just came out based on the same idea is Russell Bishop’s Workaround that Work. It is not always up to the manager to ensure progress, employees can seize control of how they do work and create powerful benevolent hacks or workarounds to get the job done and heighten their own engagement.

Ready, willing and able. We must ensure that not only are employees ready and willing to be engaged they must also be able. Engagement without enabling is a fast track to frustration. Up to 20% of your engaged workforce  may be frustrated because they are unable to fully act on their engagement. Mark Royal and Tom Agnew wrote The Enemy of Engagement offering a framework to end workplace frustration. They found that about 30% of employees don’t get clear goals and feel they lack authority to do their jobs. About half of all employees are concerned with adequate staffing, don’t feel they have time  for training, that other teams in the company do not offer high-quality support, and that their organization is not effectively structured. They offer numerous suggestion to lessen frustration by enabling employees with such methods as: making training a priority, share people as well as resources, and beware of the “trap” of routines.

Be game. Study the principles and practices of games to transfer gaming principles to work. One of the reasons games are so engaging is that they are often designed so that we both achieve and see our  progress.Virtual games are programmed to ensure new player begin to experience progress almost immediately. How long does it take to have your newly hired employees experience progress? Are employees getting lots of feedback on their progress? Are setbacks framed as challenges that compel your employee to try again? If you want to instill significant progress at work you must “get into the game.”

Little feats. Many of us are overwhelmed by the copious volume of work and shy away from new tasks because we have little or no capacity or we fear falling further behind on the tasks already on our plate. In today’s workplace, small is the new significant. As one manager said to me in Tucson last month, “we have gone from doing more with less to doing everything with nothing.”  Determine small and significant actions that move towards achieving results. Ensure those small actions are significant tasks…they should be important not just urgent. If you doubt the power of the small think about this statement from Betty Reese, an American pilot, “if you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”

Celebrate progress. Don’t forget to celebrate progress. You should have celebration markers along the way. The celebration can be a quiet yet mindful internal sense of satisfaction to a high five or more formal recognition. My model for this is Usain Bolt who slowed down in the last 20% of his 100 meter race at the Beijing Olymicps and still achieved an Olympic record time of 9.69. Physicists calculated that Bolt could have finished in 9.55±0.04 seconds had he not slowed to celebrate before crossing  the finishing line. Progress is not always about ultimate record breaking achievement — we have much to gain by celebrating achievement even if it costs us a tenth of a second!

Read these  5 books to build your awareness, knowledge, and skills on the path of  progress:

• Bill Jensen and Josh Klein, Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results
• Russell Bishop, Workarounds that Work: How to conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work
• Peter Sims, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries
• Mark Royal and Tom Agnew, The Enemy of Engagement: Put an End to Workplace Frustration and Get the Most from Your Employees.
• Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignie Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

Next post in this series: Build Relationships: We get our work done with others not through others.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Bonus: I encourage you to view the slides and listen to this informative 40 minute interview/webinar with Teresa Amabile on The Progress Principle.

The Progress Principle and Employee Engagement from David Zinger on Vimeo.

According to Aon Hewitt’s most recent report Trends in Global Employee Engagement, the largest drop in engagement this year is employees’ perception of how companies manage performance. Workers worldwide believe their employers have not provided the appropriate focus or level of management that would lead to increased productivity, nor have they connected individual performance to organizational goals.

Jamie Gruman and Alan Saks wrote an insightfull article on performance management and employee engagement in the Human Resource Management Review. They stated that less than a third of employees believe that their company’s performance management process assists them in improving performance.

Barbara Bowes, an excellent writer in Winnipeg on HR issues, stated in a Winnipeg Free Press column on Job performance appraisal system needs overhaul:

The result is that in many cases executives do not support performance appraisals and so the practice falls by the wayside. Human resource managers are dissatisfied because the performance systems are typically time consuming, bureaucratic, paper driven, top down and often have little reference to organizational goals. Not only that, operational managers are often chronically late in completing their appraisals. All in all, the performance management system is frequently the most poorly implemented of all human resource management systems.

What, then, should an effective performance management system look like? First of all, no matter the technical details of your performance system, the organizational philosophy must recognize that “on task behaviour” is not the only thing that should be counted. Organizations need to recognize that work has changed. It is more flexible, more dynamic, interchangeable, less precise, team oriented, more ambiguous, more complex and more stressful. These elements have been found to be just as important and need to be given consideration in a performance evaluation.

Changing landscape and mobility of work. Engaged performance management must recognize and respond to the flexible, dynamic, ambiguous, complex and stressful elements of performance. Add to the challenge is the increasing level of mobile workers, reaching over 1 billion this year. We want to maximize employees performance and not tick them off with the use of structured inauthentic performance appraisals that sucks the energy out of both employees and their managers.

Here are 6 practices to create engaged performance:

Make work worthy of attention. One sports psychologist defined performance as anything worthy of your attention. Hopefully all work is worthy of a worker’s attention. We need to step back from the jobs, roles, and tasks and ensure that work is worthy of the attention it deserves. Here are a few questions to consider:

• Have I done my best to make work worthy of every employee’s attention?
• Does each employee know the value and meaning of their work?
• Does the employee have some freedom in their attention and work that capitalizes on intrinsic interest and motivation?

Job craft with employees. Help employees job craft by fusing the needs of the organization with the strengths of the individual so that performance is beneficial to both. Knowledge workers need to have input into what their work is and how that work is achieved and job crafting can be an excellent step in that direction.  I encourage you to read a short review of job crafting by CV Harquail, How Job Crafting Can Get You Closer to Authentic Work. Here is a short section from her post:

Job crafting is the practice of (re-)shaping the job that you are expected to do so that you can enlarge the parts that are important to you.Through job crafting, an employee can take on new activities, new responsibilities, and new relationships, making the job so bigger (or smaller), more interesting, more useful, and overall more closely linked to their strengths and interests.

Fuse performance appraisal and engagement appraisal. Jamie Gruman and Alan Saks, in a rigorous academic piece on engagement and performance, advocate that we move from management of performance to facilitation of performance. They recommend that we fuse performance management and employee engagement into a new approach that weaves the two more closely together to respond to the way work is done in 2011.

Engage with mastery versus competency. It is astounding to see the lists of competencies required by many jobs and the lengthy guidebooks that outline those competencies. How can employees act on all those competencies or even remember the lists? We engage strongly with a sense of mastery versus competency and we need to parse long lists of competencies in favor of strong mastery on a  vital few performances that achieves results while fully engaging the employee.

Personal performance focus. Are you maximizing your own performance? Mike King on his Learn This website wrote an excellent blog post on 10 ways to be performance oriented. In the post he includes such ways as:

• study the results of everything you do
• reflect on your talents and how to use them
• kill distractions and find solitude
• change what doesn’t work quickly

Step up to variances with conversation. Step up to variance with safety and conversation. Learn to address variances in performance as soon as possible through conversations that demonstrate caring. I think both Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations offers a good foundation to build the conversation skills to achieve results, address gaps, and build realtionships.

Previous posts in the series:

• The Employee Engagement Pyramid
• 12 Keys to Achieve Results with Employee Engagement

Next post in this series: Navigate through setbacks, path progress, and enable work.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Fly into engagement. My last post was on  achieve results and the employee engagement pyramid. It is important for employees to fully understand and engage with results. It is also key for employees to see their results. I  just received and watched this short  video from Diana Dozier 15 minutes ago. It is a great demonstration of employees seeing results.

Are you showing your employees their results?

The video reminded me of the old slogan: GE brings good things to life.

Top of the pyramid. Based on extensive work in employee engagement, I constructed a pyramid of employee engagement actions for managers. There are 10 building blocks to full engagement and at the top of the pyramid on the 10 things managers must do to increase employee engagement is Achieve Results. The symbol used for achieving results is a target to ensure we know where we are aiming our engagement efforts.

Strategic engagement. Achieving results is important for the organization, team, manager, and employee. Engagement must be directed towards a specific end or it will lack focus and  sustainability. It will also quickly be perceived as a fluffy extra lacking in contribution to strategic objectives and wither because of a lack of impact or energy. Achieve Results is tightly aligned with the first principle in my 10 Principles of Engagement:

Employee engagement is specific. We cannot sustain engagement all the time and everywhere. When we talk about engagement we need to ask: Who is engaged, with what,  for how long, and for what purpose?

12 key concepts. The 10 block pyramid of engagement is the structure for a course for managers to improve and increase engagement. Here are 12 key points from the course that connect achieving results with employee engagement.

Results defined. The definition of a result is a  consequence, effect, or outcome of something. The something we are looking for here is engagement. In addition in this integrated view of engagement into work, employees will also contribute to the development of targets and results for the organization.

Expansive view.   Lisa Haneberg in writing about a results orientation at work stated,  “many organizations use “results orientation” as a core competency. Let’s start describing it fully – not just focusing on accountability and measurements, but also how culture, passion, and challenge impact results. If you use this competency to train and evaluate leaders, take another look at how you have described what results orientation looks like in action.”

Clearly stated and clearly communicated. Are your results clearly stated? To ensure the organizational results are clear to employees ask a number of employees on the spot to state the results the organization is working to achieve. Can they state them without hesitation or ignorance? If not, make sure what is clearly stated is also fully communicated.

Drucker’s drive for results. Peter Drucker focused extensively on results, including writing the book, Managing for Results. He stated that results come from leveraging opportunities rather than focusing on problems. Resources must go to opportunities and to achieve economic results we must concentrate. As a manager ensure the resource of engagement is directed towards results not aimless activities. If achieving results is a weak spot on your pyramid of engagement I encourage you to read Drucker’s classic book on managing for results.

Results in reverse. When we know specifically what we are working to achieve we can reverse engineer from the results to the specific actions we need to fully engage with to achieve those results.

Create white space so that employees can input into the crafting of results. Did employees have an opportunity to influence results. In full engagement, we have moved from results being given to employees to also being created by employees. Remember the following two keys lines as you develop the results that you are working to achieve. If you want everyone on the same page give them an opportunity to write on the page. Never do anything about employees without employees, including determining results.

What you really want. Ensure that the results you are focusing on are what you and your reports really want. I encourage you to contemplate the “spice girl question.” This is part of the lyrics from one of their ear-worm like classics: I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want, So tell me what you want, what you really really want, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want, So tell me what you want, what you really really want.

Pull results rather than push results.  Do you and other employees feel excitement and interest in the results the organization is trying to achieve. Do the results have meaning? When we find results engaging we are powerfully pulled into engagement rather than feeling pushed to engage.

TEAM up for engaging results. Apply the TEAM acronym as a quick guide to your results statement: Are your results:  Timed - Engaging –  Achievable - Meaningful? In regards to timed and specific, Don Berwick, the health care leader who was responsible for the 100,000 lives campaign was always reminding us:  Some is not a number and soon is not a time. Based on achieving high levels of engagement and successful results the campaign is now the Protecting 5 Million Lives From Harm campaign.

10 measures. Skip Reardon offered 10 insightful reasons to measure results ranging from clarifying expectations and directing behavior to promoting understanding and improving execution. I encourage you to read his post to learn more about the four mentioned here and the additional six outlined in his post, The Top 10 Reasons to Measure Results.

Locus of engagement. Employee engagement has shifted away from a general pervasive measure of connection to being localized to different areas or results. For example your report’s locus of engagement may be on a task while your locus of engagement is the people achieving those tasks. Our results could be financial, environmental, or wellbeing. A strong connection between engagement and specific results ensures that engagement is integrated into work and management rather than an additional demand and helps give a rifle-like powerful specificity to engagement rather than a shotgun feel good satisfaction about work.

Target-Engagement fusion. At the highest level of engagement, we engage so fully with the target, that the target and our engagement become one. This was eloquently described in Eugen Herrigel’s book  The Zen of the Art Archery. This would be the ideal state of engagement and demonstrates a model of what is possible when we engage fully with results that are meaningful, focused, and enriching.

Next up, maximize performance. In the Employee Engagement Pyramid, the 10 blocks are very connected. We cannot reach the heights of achieving elevated results without the other 9 blocks that support this. Check into this site next week for the second post on  Maximize Performance in this 10 part series building the Pyramid of Engagement for Managers.

David Zinger created The Pyramid of Employee Engagement as a powerful tool to help managers understand the 10 key actions they can take to build full employee engagement. Contact David Zinger at zingerdj@gmail.com or phone David Zinger at 204 254 2130 to learn more or request the course for your company, organization, or conference.

Bonus resource for results. JD Meier has written an excellent guide to agility and results. I encourage you to take a look at his extensive and helpful book: Getting Results the Agile Way. The link in the previous sentence to Meier’s book will take you to free online wiki version of the book full of excellent tools, checklists, and methods.

Workshop/Presentation/Course

If you would like to arrange for a keynote or a workshop for your company, conference or organization on The Employee Engagement Pyramid and The 10 Things Managers Must Do to Increase Employee Engagement contact David Zinger at zingerdj@gmail.com or phone 204 254 2130.

Here are the 10 things managers must do if they want to  increase employee engagement.

Achieve Results

Results. Engagement is more than a feeling, survey number, or a YouTube happy dance. We engage in actions directed towards results. The first key to consider when acting to increase employee  engagement is what results are you working to achieve and how can you involve all employees in formulating those results or achieving those results? Powerful results matter to managers, organizations, employees, and customers.

Path Progress

Progress.  The most overlooked source of engagement and motivation is to experience progress. Recent research by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer has demonstrated that progress is the single biggest key to motivation and engagement for knowledge workers.  Learn how to structure work for progress and especially to guard against the demoralizing and disengaging experience of setbacks.

Maximize Performance

Performance. Performance is anything worthy of your attention. How do you make key performances worthy of employee’s attention and how do you offer feedback that is actually heard and acted upon by employees? We are witnessing the early stages of a significant fusion of performance management and employee engagement that may address some of the gaps we have experienced in attempting to have performance management do a better job of improving performance.

Foster Recognition

Recognition. Without recognition our workplaces are void of the human element. Are you fully letting  employees know that you see them, you are thinking of them and you both recognize and appreciate them. Authentic recognition is so much more than an annual gala or occasional gift card for good behavior. Recognition is social, strategic, and powerful. Recognition is the “re-thinking” of engagement in our everyday interactions and recognition for progress creates a strong multiplier for motivation and engagement.

Build Relationships

Relationships. We need to focus on the two “R’s” of engagement, results and relationships. How do our efforts achieve results while also building relationships?. Our brains are wired for the social element of work and in some ways all managers are becoming new versions of “social workers.” While our staff may have a locus of engagement on tasks we need to ensure that we have a strong locus of engagement on people.

Enliven Energy

Energy. The raw material of engagement is energy. It takes energy to engage and authentic engagement contributes to our energy. Energy comes in a variety of forms: mental, emotional, physical, organizational, and spiritual. Spiritual energy is the energy invested in something greater than ourselves and when you look closely at work and managing people it is always something greater than ourself or there would be no need for managers. We must strive towards mastery of physical, mental, and emotional energy.

Leverage Strengths

Strengths. Engagement is strong stuff. When you know your strengths, live your strengths, and leverage your strengths in the service of others you will have an increase in  engagement. To bring out the strengths of others we must be aware of our own strengths. Powerful managers “spot” employees’ strengths and make strength training a daily endeavor.

Make Meaning

Meaning. For work to sustain and enrich people it must be meaningful. Those who have a why to work can bear almost any how and a sense of meaningful work instills a strong and rich intrinsic motivation. Progress, when it is meaningful, can be one of the best events of our day.

Master Moments

Moments. Engagement resides in the moment. Learn to master moments; from high quality interactions and 45-second engaging conversations to the power to transform interruptions into touch points. When we balance challenge and skills we enter the flow zone as we dwell and work within the moment. Working in the moment also reduces stress. As Stephen Rechtschaffen stated: “there is no stress in the present moment.”

Enhance Well-being

Well-being. We need to find wellbeing inside of work. There are things we can do outside of work but how we promote and enhance well-being within work is becoming increasingly important as mobile devices makes work portable and 24/7. We must eliminate toxic workplace poisoned with a lack of respect or mutuality. We must create a profound wellbeing where people leave work enlivened and enriched rather than depleted and deadened.

If you would like to arrange for a keynote or a workshop for your company, conference or organization contact David Zinger at zingerdj@gmail.com or phone 204 254 2130.

Informative Webinar with Yael Zofi Monday November 14

The managers guide. I completed reading Yael Zofi’s wonderful book, A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams. Yael has created a powerful and practical guide for managers of virtual teams.  You will learn how to create trust and accountability, navigate through communication challenges, resolve conflicts, and ensure deliverable get out the door.

A virtual team – whether across the street or across the world – is a team whose members simultaneously work together to a common purpose, while physically apart.

Virtual challenges. Engaging virtual teams is all about connection and finding powerful and connected approaches to handle some of the numerous challenges:

• Relationships
• Performance
• Communication
• Delegation
• Team Building
• E-Mail
• Conflict
• Promotion
• Teleconferencing
• Walking the Talk
• Travel
• Etc.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of trust and accountability in business (as with all human) relationships. Accountability and trust are spoken of in the same breath because they are interrelated. Accountability  provides  the energy for the virtual team’s day-to-day activities, but trust is the larger concept and at the very core of human interactions. And trust develops over time. (p. 98).  

Zofi goes on to map out and help us navigate the road to realizing and achieving accountability and trust with our virtual team.

Webinar.  Join Yael Zofi for a free webinar conversation on How to Manage and Engage Virtual Teams on Monday November 14 from 11:00 AM to 11:40 am EST. If you cannot attend the webinar will be recorded and put up in the video section of the Employee Engagement Network later that day.