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Help Yourself to The 10 Best Free and Fantastic Employee Engagement Resources

September 24, 2015 by David Zinger 3 Comments

Fantastic Free Employee Engagement Resources (plus a bonus resource).

I am celebrating my 61st birthday today. At my age, I don’t need any presents but I’d like to give some, so here are 11 employee engagement presents for you.

  1. The Power of Employee Engagement: Booklet on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement.
  2. Engage for Success: Enhancing Performance Through Employee Engagement.
  3. The Top Tens of Employee Engagement.
  4. Zengage: How to Get More Into Your Work to Get More Out of Your Work.
  5. Waggle: 39 Ways to Improve Human Organizations, Work and Engagement
  6. Employee Engagement: 72 Small Actions for Big Results
  7. Assorted Zingers: Poems and Cartoon to Take a Bite Out of Work.
  8. Engaging Questions: The Question is the Answer
  9. Primers for Engaging Conversations
  10. 22 Tools to Overcome Grumpiness: How Not to be Grumpy at Work (or in the rest of your life)
  11. Bonus: 15 Cartoons for 2015

Here is a bonus bonus resource for anyone interested in using gamification for managers: Game On

David Zinger Deed Image

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: #employeeengagement, 10 best employee engagement resources, David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker, Employee Engagement, employee engagement pdf, free employee engagement e-books, free resources, Pyramid of Employee Engagement, Waggle

Employee Engagement: 10 Ways You Can Flourish with Nourishing Work

May 11, 2015 by David Zinger 1 Comment

Work can make you well – Really!

10 Ways to Flourish with Nourishing Work

(The reading time for this post is 5 minutes and 30 seconds)

Here are 3 reasons why you should read this post :

  1. You will build your wellbeing toolkit by developing familiarity with 10 ways to flourish at work.
  2. You will be given helpful links and resources to go further into learning about wellbeing.
  3. You are one of the first people to gain access to the free illustrated e-book on 22 Tools to Overcome Grumpiness.

Introduction. Here are 10 ways you can flourish by creating nourishing work. Embrace these ways as invitations to flourish. They are not rules or tips you must follow. You are the expert on your own wellbeing. I trust these ways will give you a nudge in the right direction. The 10 ways offer a pathway to wellbeing through well-doing because specific actions are strong triggers to install and sustain wellbeing at work. This post was created in conjunction with a one hour session I facilitated for Nurses Week at Winnipeg’s Heath Sciences Centre on May 11th.

Start your day off right. Establish a solid morning routine that gets you out of bed on the right foot. Perhaps you go for a jog first thing in the morning. Or you sit by the fireplace and hug a cup of coffee. Maybe you write for 20 minutes. Or you help your children pack their lunches for school. The specifics of your routine matter less than having a routine that effectively and efficiently triggers engaged wellbeing for you. I encourage you to read a post on my morning routine and follow this up by reading a new morning routine from someone each week at My Morning Routine.  Other people’s routines give clues and cues on how to construct a morning routine that works for us.

Begin each day at work with the double endings in mind. Stephen Covey said, “begin with the end in mind” while William Bridges said that all transitions begin with an end. Know the results you want from your work and also determine what must end for those results to be achieved. Take one or two minutes every day to determine the results you are working towards that week while also attending to what must end for wellbeing at work to begin. Perhaps you want to finish a project this week and you must stop focusing on a nonproductive task. Perhaps you want to improve patient safety and what must end is a strained relationship with your manager. Know your end (result) and your endings (what must stop).

Install PERMAnent wellbeing. I don’t care for the term positive psychology, it sounds too much like saccharine and pop psychology. I know that is not the case but I know many people are dismissive of positive psychology because of this. I appreciate the research behind this discipline, especially the work of Martin Seligman. Work offers opportunities for both happiness and wellbeing right inside the very work itself. Focus your work on building and sustaining PERMAnent flourishng with:  Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment.

Create meaning and purpose for your work. Know why you work. Perhaps you work because you love your hospital. Perhaps you work because you care about patients. Perhaps you work to give your family the best life possible. Perhaps you work because work enriches you with relationships and achievement. We do not necessarily share the same why of working. I encourage you to determine your meaning. Here is my response to the meaning of life and here is the response of so many others. Use these sources to create a strong scaffold of meaning to support you and your work. As the Dalai Lama declared, “The question is not to know what is the meaning of life, but what meaning I can give to my life.”

Don’t forget to wear your SCARF at work. David Rock knows about your brain at work. When we align our work with SCARF (Status, Consistency, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness) our work – works better. Here is a brief article outlining the SCARF model at work. Rock’s book on Your Brain at Work is an insightful book on how to improve your day with your brain in mind by following one couple as they proceed through their day and how they could improve their day if they made better use of their brains.

Pair Mindfulness-East with Mindfulness-West. Mindfulness has been sweeping through workplaces around the globe. Did you know there are two types of mindfulness? Mindfulness-East is the perspective of being aware in each moment of what you are doing without judgement. Mindfulness-West, developed by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer teaches how to engage by actively noticing novelty and distinctions. Noticing novelty and distinction engages you and brings new life to your day.

Eliminate the negative. Baumeister and others have shown that bad is stronger than good. Before you get busy trying to add additional things in your day as the pathway to wellbeing ensure you address your challenges and bad events. Some researchers suggest that bad is 2 or 3 times stronger than good. When something bad happens do not be surprised at how it can knock you off kilter and how it begins to feel so permanent, pervasive, and personal. Remember to eliminate the negative before accentuating the positive.

Take the 90 second pause. Jill Bolte Taylor a neuroscience researcher, who also suffered a stroke, suggested that the shelf life of an emotion is 90-seconds. This would mean that upset or negative emotions last only about 90 seconds, yet for many of us they seem to last a lifetime. Give yourself 90 seconds from the moment you feel a negative emotion before you act on that emotion. Also know that you must feed negative emotions every 90 seconds to keep them alive. We feed it with fragments of tragic stories, feelings of being wronged, and a multitude of tiny, almost unconscious mechanisms, to keep being upset. If you remain upset ninety seconds after the initial emotion it is essential to ask yourself: “How am I feeding my upset to keep it alive?”

Sharpen progress while making setbacks dull. Most of us fail to maximize the benefits of progress and minimize the impact of setbacks. Progress and setbacks are so pervasive at work and daily life that we often fail to fully notice their impact. End each day by taking a minute to notice what stood out for you that day. When progress stands out ensure you let it soak in, celebrate it, and determine ways to extend it. When setbacks stand out ensure you determine what you can do next, how you might learn from it, or what you can do to let it go. Know that work and life often resemble a real-life game of snakes and ladders and our job is to climb ladders and squish snakes.

Use 22 tools to exit from grumpiness. Does work make you grumpy or do you find yourself surrounded by grumpy people?. I just completed an e-book, illustrated by John Junson, on 22 Tools to Overcome Grumpiness. Click on the cover below to enjoy this short, yet engaging, book.

22 Tools to Overcome Grumpiness Cover

A Short Reading List. Here are 9 books that can improve your motivation and skills to flourish with nourishing work:

  • Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle.
  • Ellen Langer, Mindfulness.
  • David Rock, Your Brain at Work.
  • Steven Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
  • Tom Rath, Are You Fully Charged?
  • William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes.
  • Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
  • Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation is Everyday Life.

—

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who works around the globe helping organizations and individuals improve work engagement and engaged wellbeing.

Employee Engagement Speaker - David Zinger

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: #employeeengagement, Canada, David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker, Flourish, health care, Manitoba, nourish, nurse's week, nursing, ways to wellness, well-being, wellbeing, Winnipeg, work

Burnout: 1000 Paper Cuts

December 23, 2020 by David Zinger

For many, 2020 has been a year of 1000 paper cuts. Rather than one big event resulting in a dramatic case of spontaneous combustion it has been the one thousand paper cuts shredding our optimism, cutting away at our self-efficacy, and dicing our energy into exhaustion.

Rather than wallpapering our mind with premature resilience, I believe it is time to take stock. I believe the way out of something is through it — so if you feel burnt out I encourage you to stop, or at least pause, notice your wounds, and declare: “owie, owie, owie.”

I believe our wounds transformed can become our gifts to our community but let’s not rush it with images or being resilient rubber balls that just keep bouncing or Energizer bunnies mindlessly marching forward while pounding our drums to drown out pain.

It is okay to not be okay, Just because you start there doesn’t mean you stay there. You can move forward but sometimes we need to sway backwards a little bit to generate authentic movement and momentum.

Remember Scott Peck’s opening 3 words in The Road Less Traveled: “Life is difficult.”

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: burnout, Employee Engagement, employee experience, resilience, stress

Mindful Noticing: A Pathway to both Liking and Engagement

December 21, 2020 by David Zinger

A simple, yet very powerful, employee noticing practice.

Your mindfulness is expanded when you take time to notice new things or see old things in new ways. Ellen J. Langer’s research on mindfulness demonstrated that when we notice more about others and things we like them more and are more engaged with them.

So you don’t have to pay attention, it cost nothing. Give your attention freely to whoever or whatever is right in front of you. You can start small by even noticing 2 new things.

When you give others your attention, your mindfulness expands, and you create stronger more engaged relationships with others. You will also find yourself more engaged in your work.

Make everyday noticing your true gift for the New Year.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: Ellen J Langer, Employee Engagement, employee experience, mindfulness, noticing

Personal Engagement Launched: 30 Years Ago This Month

December 18, 2020 by David Zinger

“I’d like you to think about a time when you’ve been attentive and interested in what you’re doing, felt absorbed and involved. A time when you didn’t think about how you’d rather be doing something else, and you didn’t feel bored. Can you describe a particular time when you’ve felt like that here at work?”

This was a key interview question Bill Kahn asked 30 years ago for his article in the Academy of Management Journal on: Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work. It was the seminal article launching 30 years of work in engagement. At the time, William Kahn was a tennis camp counsellor.

Are you asking rich descriptive questions about engagement for other and yourself? Don’t merely reduce engagement to a number because behind every engaging statistic there is an engaging story.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: employee engageement, employee experience, engagement, personal engagement, work

Engagement and Burnout: “You’ve got to give a little…”

December 14, 2020 by David Zinger

To me, engaging means giving of myself to my work. I mindfully give but do not mindlessly lose myself in my work.

I work with conscious intention and know as Christina Maslach stated: “giving of yourself must be balanced with giving to yourself.”

There may be times of full engagement when you need to give’er but you also need times to throttle back and recharge, refresh, and rejuvenate or what may give way — is yourself.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: burnout, Employee Engagement, give'er, stress management

Stopping Burnout

December 10, 2020 by David Zinger

Pause. Stop. Recover. Case Closed.

Burnout can result from never-ending work. According to Derks & Bakker people can become trapped in a continuous cycle attempting to address the inherent lack of closure in contemporary work.

This reminds me of the old statement that work expands to fill the time available for it’s completion.

How do you put closure on your work and extinguish the flames of potential burnout?

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: burnout, Employee Engagement, engagement, stress, work engagement

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David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

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