A poetic nudge on your career development from John O’Donohue’s, A Morning Offering:

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more.

Today at Work in Winnipeg, it is -50 celsius with windchill. 

Now that’s cold. To keep warm I have collected the best cartoons by John Junson from his Today at Work collection from 2018.

When we laugh, we indulge in a short humor break and boost to rejuvenate ourselves and maybe even keep us warm!

John has created over 600 cartoons on work for the Employee Experience and Engagement network. I encourage you to use his cartoons today in your work.

To view the collection visit: http://www.davidzinger.com/wp-content/uploads/Today-at-Work-2018.pdf

Think “conflate” for employee engagement in 2019. To conflate is to mix together. We must strive to ensure our behaviors for engagement conflate results, relationships, wellbeing, and career.

As you offer performance feedback connect that to achieving results, building a relationship, to developing the other person’s career, and to increasing the wellbeing of both of you.

One input – many outputs.

Do you know how to fully engage with your work so that both you and others fully experience all the benefits of your labor?

In 2019, I am devoted to helping educate others to get more into their work to get more out of their work. If you or your organization would like to learn more to fully engage please take the next moment to contact me: david@davidzinger.com. We can discuss possibilities around coaching, keynotes, workshops, or internal consulting.

Engage along with me, our best is yet to be.

Good work requires more than sheer effort, it requires knowledge and skills. It require an acuity to the moment and recognizing each moment invites us to engage with the work in front of us. It means embedding our moments within a bigger story as we string or stack moments for a momentous career.

I decided to make a video to sum up my 25,000 hours devoted to work engagement, personal engagement, leadership engagement, and employee engagement.

Below is my 23 minute 56 second video that was done in just one-take to share with you the future of engagement in 2019 and what I believe about the power of moments in igniting, enhancing, and build work engagement.

Below you will find the key points from the video.

If you prefer a wonderful and colorful PDF document containing these key points, click here.

Here are the key points from Engage the Moment:

• The secret: We are looking in the wrong place to improve employee engagement.
• Engagement is to be found in the moment and moments are the fundamental building blocks of engagement.
• There is no stress in the present moment.
• When we fully engage, we are also enhancing our wellbeing and lowering our stress.
• Ask yourself this great time management question: What is the best use of my time right now?
• Drivers and levers are poor fit concepts to explain a personal responsibility for engagement approach.
• Engagement is an invitation.
• Engagement can be defined in 8 simple words: good work done well with others every day.
• Trying to achieve and proclaim Great Work often isn’t so great.
• The way to achieve great work is to do good work every day.
• Good work can literally make us well.
• We are responsible for engagement while we influence others’ engagement.
• Some of us are more engaged with our smart phones than the tasks and relationships right in front of us.
• Can you treat engagement as well as you treat your smart phone?
• Do you charge both your smart phone and yourself up every night?
• An excellent engagement trigger is after you use your phone to ask yourself: What can I do right now to improve engagement for myself of someone else in the organization?
• Engagement is not about PowerPoints and survey results it is about actions and interactions. There is no way to engagement, to engage is the way.

• Four focuses for engagement are ABCD: Achieve results | Build relationships | Cultivate wellbeing | Develop career
• Attach your moments and small actions to the bigger story or strategy of your organization.
• Add spice to moments so that you focus on results: keep asking yourself and others “what you want, what you really, really want.”
• Engagement is not an extra it is the core of work.
• Prevent iatrogenic disengagement – our attempts to engage employees that instead end up disengaging employees.
• Anonymity can be a killer of engagement yet we rely on anonymous surveys.
• Disengagement should not be a punishable offence it should trigger dialogue, conversation, and connection or re-connection.

• Engagement is the diamond in the heart of work and wellbeing
• Engagement is not something we do to people or for people it is something we do with people.
• To get everyone on the same page, follow the Positive Deviancy dictum: never do anything about me without me.
• Determine your Engagement Zone or E-zone: How long can you stay engaged.
• David’s fine-tuned E-zone if eleven minutes and eleven seconds.
• David offers 3 suggestions on how to determine the length and efficacy of your personal E-zone.
• We have 20,000 possible moments every day.

• When will you turn engagement around? How about the next moment?
• Recognize or support someone else at work right now.
• Study the academic focus on work engagement by Arnold Bakker and others to infuse work with vigor, absorption, and dedication.
• Learn why snakes and ladders is such a vital metaphor for engagement at work.

• A powerful leadership question to ask in many situations: What stood out for you?
• Prevent and manage setbacks — can you make a ladder out of snakes?
• Study John Gottman’s relationship moments composed of bids and turns.
• Bids and turns are very predictive of engagement and relationships.
• Make lots of bids and keep turning towards others.
• Engagement thrives on strong relationships, good friends, and effective connections.
• High quality connections occurring in the moments of time between people is a huge source of personal and organizational energy.
• There is no secret in engagement. The real requirement is to step up to, and into, the moment of engagement.
• Mindfulness is related to personal engagement.
• Authentic, powerful, personal engagement is only a moment away.
• What are you going to do in the next moment?
• Keep on asking: what can I do right now to improve engagement for myself or someone else in our organization? Turn your answer into an action or interaction that contributes to achieving results, building relationships, cultivating career, and developing career.