David Zinger - Employee Engagement Speaker

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Employee Engagement: Work Should Be a Force For Good

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In April 2014, I personally defined employee engagement as: good work done well with others every day.

I wanted to make engagement both simple and good. I am delighted to see CIPD, the leading work organization in the UK spearhead a strong focus on good work. Here is a wonderful short video by Chief Executive Peter Cheese launching CIPD’s Manifesto for Work 2017, underlining the fundamental importance of good work:

Here is a snippet from this short video:

Work can and should be a force for good. It should be good for individuals, good for organizations, and therefore also good for economies and wider societies. Good work should be purposeful and meaningful. It should be inclusive and it should be fair.

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement speaker, educator, and consultant who works on engagement around the world.

 

Employee Engagement: A Dynamic Advance in Good Work

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Are you ready for the good stuff?

I have been defining employee engagement for a number of years as: good work done well with others every day.

I was thrilled to read the UK’s CIPD Manifesto for Work 2017. Here are the first few lines from the executive summary:

The UK faces a time of huge transition and transformation. We believe we must work towards putting people much more at the heart of business thinking and practice. It is people who drive creativity and innovation, productivity, customer service and all the elements of successful and sustainable enterprise of any kind. We need to invest in them, engage them, and lead from the principles that good work is purposeful, good work is safe, inclusive and good for our well-being, and that good work exists for the long-term benefit of individuals, organisations and society. That work can, and should, be a force for good, for all.

I put the “good stuff” in bold. Now that’s what I call good stuff!

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and educator. Picture by Peter W. Hart, my People Artists co-author.

Personal Tracking and Employee Engagement

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The next step in employee engagement for individuals and organizations is to fully engage the quantified self.

I define employee engagement as: good work done well with others every day. I believe employees are personally responsible for their own engagement while each of us is accountable for the influence we have on the engagement levels of other employees.

Our antiquated methods of survey data and analytics in employee engagement do little to help us measure and master engagement. The bi-annual or annual survey of engagement is a data anachronism resembling a flip phone in the age of smart phones and pulse surveys are at best bandages losing their stickiness to halt the haemorrhaging of useful data.

What if we offered employees a device to help them with their daily engagement, a device that acts like their own engagement version of Jiminy Cricket, which measures what matters?

Let’s imagine a day in the life of an employee connected to a personal engagement device

Prabir wakes up and checks his E-Zone (Engagement Zone) watch to determine his rest and recovery overnight because he wants to know his physical readiness for the day ahead.

His device takes his heart rate and other biomeasures to give him a baseline of physical energy for the day as he arrives at work. Based on the measures, it offers Prabir two suggestions to sustain his energy and engagement for the day.

His engagement monitoring device helps him determine his engagement zone, the period of work between 5 and 90 minutes that is ideal for him to stay fully engaged with a task. It tracks his level of vigor, absorption, and dedication for each task based on the work of Arnold Bakker on work engagement and suggests the length of time Prabir should stay on task before switching to something else. Prabir does this because it helps him stay in the flow and assists him in doing more vital ‘deep work’ as outlined by Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and author of Deep Work.

When Prabir is working with a team, he gets measures of honest signals based on the work of Sandy Pentland, to determine how effectively his team is working. His device monitors overall psychological safety at work and notifies him when safety may be at risk for himself or others. The devise both triggers and keeps a measure of Prabir’s high-quality interactions based on the work of Jane Dutton and the contributions of these interactions to his energy and the energy of the overall workplace.

Throughout the day the device takes measure of his engagement. Prabir has his own engagement dashboard, including a personal profile of his engagement strengths and challenges. The device can be configured by Prabir to give him engagement nudges at appropriate times.

Prabir owns his own data but he has the option to aggregate his engagement data with the teams he works with, his department, and the larger organization.

There are additional social and gamification options that he can choose to activate if they help him to be more engaged. Prabir’s engagement device is loaded with notifications and recommendations to enhance and enliven engagement. Over time, Prabir’s interaction with his engagement device has created customized and personalized analytic recommendations that guide him in being more effective, efficient, and engaged.

We do not have to imagine most of what was offered in Prabir’s day as the technology and research behind it is already available or will be through rapid development and refinement. The current use of health tracking and smart phones demonstrates how engaged people are with mobile technology and tracking devices. According to a research by Deloitte, on an average, people look at their phones over 40 times a day while those in the age group 18-24 years, look at their phones over 80 times a day. And the number of “looks” has been steadily increasing. Moreover, a GfK survey that studied 20,000 people in 16 countries reveals that 1 in 3 people track their health and fitness already with an app or device.

Data is part of the essential lifeblood of an individual, and it should be owned by the individual with an option to share with the organization. It should not be a resource we pay survey consultancies with large fees, only to be returned as slick PowerPoint slides and a generic list of drivers and levers. We need to create and sustain real-time and relevant engagement benchmarks laced with immediate measurement and feedback.

When we make data more personal and owned first by the very person creating it, we need to step up fully and address issues of honesty, trust, and psychological safety in organizations where we no longer hide behind anonymous data gathering approaches. New engagement technologies will function as a trigger to focus on building bonds of trust between individuals and organizations because the organization will not have access to the data without trust. The new currency for data collection for employee engagement will be human trust not large survey consulting fees.

In 2009, roughly when the first Fitbit appeared, I wrote about Sandy Pentland’s work on “honest signals” and the application of social measures to determine real-time social and team engagement. His group measured elements like synchrony and mimicry to measure unconscious channels of communication between people.

New engagement technologies will function as a trigger to focus on building bonds of trust between individuals and organizations In the near future, we envision a new generation of management tools that are enabled by the sociometer’s capability to produce real-time maps of an organization’s information flow and function. These sensible organizations will use these new sensing capabilities to make sure that the sales department really is talking to the marketing department, and that employees aren’t overloaded and miserable.

The next step in employee engagement for individuals and organizations is to fully engage the quantified self. Technology challenges in doing this may be less than the ethical and psychological safety challenges that will be required for this to work. This technological opportunity might not only transform metrics and analytics, it may contribute to increased levels of trust and safety for individuals and organizations. Sandy Pentland alluded to this in 2009,

To achieve this, it will take special care to strike a balance between the “big brother” nature of such information and the benefits that can be reaped. We believe that this balance can be achieved by giving employees control of their own information, creating a transparent system with immediate benefits to everyone.

So, how are you preparing for the next big thing in employee engagement?

References

1 http://www.davidzinger.com/honest-signals-andemployee- engagement-part-1-2138/

This article originally appeared in People Matters: Click here to open the PDF of this article from People Matters.

David Zinger is a workplace engagement educator focused on personal engagement, work engagement, and employee engagement

My Employee Engagement Course in Bangkok, Thailand

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Instil and install employee engagement with small and significant actions.

It was an honour to teach my 2-day employee engagement course in Bangkok last week. The participants were from Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. We were a small group and it gave us lots of opportunity to work together and to understand employee engagement better together.

The MahaNakon  was the inspirational backdrop to our course and very visible from the roof of our hotel. This building inspires a different way of looking at the world.

The MahaNakhon from the Furama Rooftop pool. By David Zinger

Engagement often left us scratching our heads and with many question about how to fully engage others and ourselves. We need to think carefully about what we really want from engagement and we need to keep a very mindful focus on how engagement changes and alters within moments.

Bangkok is exactly 12 hours difference than my home in Winnipeg, Canada and this journey half way around the world enriched and enlivened my learning, views, and teaching for employee engagement.

What most stood out for me about engagement is how we can both instil and install employee engagement with small and significant actions.

David Zinger is an employee engagement educator and speaker.

 

Building Employee Engagement in Bangkok: Pixels and Playfulness

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The MahaNakhon and 7 lessons for Employee Engagement – An  Open Architectural Metaphor

The MahaNakhon from the Furama Rooftop pool. By David Zinger

Ole Scheeren is the architect behind the MahaNakhon, the 77 story tallest skyscraper in Bangkok. The name of the building means “great metropolis.” The building’s shape creates the image of being unfinished, something like a Jenga game. It feels like a pixel building that is either being constructed or destructed. I keep thinking of the word fragmented as I view the building from many perspectives around Bangkok. I believe Scheeren is preparing us and giving us the space to dwell more comfortably in an increasingly fragmented and pixelated world, and this resonates with the world of work and engagement.

Here is a comment from a CNN interview with the architect:

“MahaNakhon is a vision of a tower that is very much about process, about becoming, about developing,” Scheeren says of the building. Scheeren says the design’s distinct façade and use of space is intended to strike an ongoing dialogue with the city and capture its intensity. “I believe in the interest of space and also the power of space to do something to the people that inhabit it,” Scheeren says.

The building captures your eye and often creates a strong emotion when seeing it. About half of the people I talked with love the building and the other half don’t like the building. In some ways people living and working within the building will become more transparent to the city of Bangkok. Scheeren added, “If you look at my buildings, they are not all the same. They are different because different situations inspire and require very different answers.”

Here are 7 mini lessons for engagement I derived from this new structure in Bangkok:

  1. Make engagement different where you work. Create ongoing dialogue with the full environment of engagement within your organization.
  2. Make what is going on more transparent as you move up the building or organization (leaders can learn a lot from this).
  3. Strive for engagement to be different through simplicity not specialness. (keep engagement simple in form while open to interpretation).
  4. Imagine things that are not there and consider what is there already (know where we are and how what we are building in engagement, changes things).
  5. The building exemplifies process, becoming, unfinished, incomplete, and developing (as we build engagement let’s not lose sight of these elements in our architecture of engagement).
  6. Ensure that what you are building with engagement is intriguing, visual, and engaging. If your approach to engagement is strong don’t expect everyone to like it.
  7. Ensure you create open space in your building or engagement for people to “move around.”

What stands our for you as lessons for engagement when you view the MahaNakhon?

For more on the building:

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David Zinger is a global employee engagement speaker and expert. To read a similar type of post from Doha, Qatar see Employee Engagement in Doha: Geometry and Sun Light.