In mid December the New York Times had a short article entitled: You Won’t Find Me In My Office, I’m Working. It discussed where work gets done and it is often not the office, it is the “white space.”

The white space is where we do our best thinking or strongest connecting with others. For some people it is a coffee shop while for others it is a library or even a church.

Answer the following 5 questions to determine what engages you most in work and how you use space and place to engage employees:

1. Do you have freedom in your work to move from place to space?
2. What work do you do best in a place?
3. What work do you do best in a space?
4. Where is your personal best white space?
5. Do you create the space for full employee engagement or are employees enslaved to a specific place that becomes confining?

Photo Credit: An empty space by http://flickr.com/photos/riggott/8108443/

I hope you had a wonderful year and I wish you a great 2008.

Here is a 54 second  greeting from David – standing ankle deep in snow on a 20 below day in Winnipeg. Ho Ho Ho!

Click here to see the video if it does not load on this page.

David Zinger is a leading expert on employee engagement.

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle begins with a key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• Even Einstein said, “make things as simple as possible but no simpler.” Does this apply to engagement?
• I can see clearly now…clarity as a key in employee engagement.
• Training in emotional connection facilitates talent retention and employee engagement.
• Be strategic in your employee engagement efforts.

Is the corporate world cutting its own throat? It can be helpful to make things simple but when it comes to work, flexibility, social interaction and performance feedback wins out over job simplification. Carmine Coyote summarizes some research from the University of Florida: The results of this research clearly show that organizations which focus on providing job flexibility, opportunities for social interaction and performance feedback can produce highly performing, highly satisfied workers who have low levels of stress, anxiety and burnout, and who are uninterested in searching for greener pastures. However, organizations that move toward the simplification and independent completion of work will find that workers will be dissatisfied with their work and will perform at a lower level over time, with higher levels of stress.

Clarity – A Key to Employee Engagement. Be Excellent is a blog devoted to helping the best small businesses get even better. Summarizing Watson Wyatt’s research we are reminded: Managers who can clearly communicate where their company is going and why everyone is doing what they are doing are generally much more successful when it comes to engaging their staff.

Managers to be trained on the art of talent retention. This article outlines a program to help in talent retention. Of course, employee engagement is key and here is a snippet from one of the learning modules: Emotional connect between the manager and the employee is critical for employee engagement. iCare focuses on helping the participants explore and enhance their emotional competence and leverage the same at the workplace, effectively. This module will provide opportunity to the participants to be better equipped to relate with their team members at a personal level leading to the employees feeling cared for.

Succesful Employee Engagement Strategies. I highly recommend reading this post if you are in search of some varied and powerful strategies to empower employees. Here is the conclusion after the strategies are outlined in the post: High engagement really means helping your managers engage their staff. The HR department can’t engage every single worker but they have the greatest influence over facilitating processes and systems which will. 

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

Employee Engagement – Monday Morning Percolator – MMP #38

I received John Miller’s newsletter on Selection: Hiring Character. John is well know for his work on the book, The Question Behind the Question (QBQ).  I believe when we have people who act with full accountability we have fully engaged people working with us.

The aggregate of traits that form the individual nature of a person including moral or ethical qualities such as honesty, courage, integrity.

Here are the 4 qualities or characters to seek out:

1. Coach-ability
2. Work Ethic
3. A Heart of Service
4. Accountability

I believe these 4 characters will contribute to a very high level of employee engagement. Accountability leads to an enriched level of employee engagement.

Click here to visit the QBQ website.

Photo Credit: Pick a Color, Any Colour by http://flickr.com/photos/stephenliveshere/488233599/

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

Do you take time to pause, reflect, and see what you are doing and how that influences employee engagment for you and the people you interact with?

Without reflection,we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Photo Credit: Mirror Mirror by http://flickr.com/photos/22385015@N00/350494975/

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David Zinger is commited to helping employees, leaders, and organizations ensure that employee engagement is for the benefit of all. For more information contact David dzinger@shaw.ca or (204) 254-2130.

Do you stand with strengths or fall with weaknesses?

Our strengths are shown in the things we stand for,

Our weakness is shown in the things we fall for.

~ Source Unknown

Photo Credit: tumbled out by http://flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/308312828/

David Zinger is commited to helping employees, leaders, and organizations ensure that employee engagement is for the benefit of all. For more information contact David: dzinger@shaw.ca or (204) 254-2130.

David Zinger offers a one minute and 12 second video on employee engagement.

Click here if the video does not load on the page you are viewing. 

The Engaging Points of the video are:

• Loving the term employee engagement
• Employee engagement is not just a new word for motivation.
• When we engage fully at work we may also fully engage at home.
• Employee engagement is not sucking more discretionary effort out of people.
• Employee engagement must be for the benefit of all.
• To be successful employee engagement will need to transform into workplace engagement.

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David Zinger is commited to helping employees, leaders, and organizations ensure that employee engagement is for the benefit of all. For more information contact David dzinger@shaw.ca or (204) 254-2130.

David Zinger is a leading expert on employee engagement.

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle beings with a key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• What is the bonus to having employee engagement part of management’s bonus factors?
• Recognize and leverage the power of story to achieve higher levels of engagement.
• Employee engagement is not a management fad, it is worth the time and effort.
• Let employees know how they are doing and how they fit in.

Non-financial measures have growing influence on executive pay was a recent article at Management Issues. Tom Gosling offers some encouragement and warning in the article. This will put employee engagement into focus yet, incorporating non-financial targets into bonus plans isn’t necessarily guaranteed to deliver the type of benefits that might be imagined. If a target is set, managers will often find a way of meeting it in a way that was not envisaged and with unintended – and often negative – consequences.. Once these measures start being linked to pay, there is always the risk that they are met in ways that are detrimental to the business as a whole.

Work-Life Balance and Full Engagementoutline a free profile on energy and engagement. Jim Loehr has done fantastic work on sports psychology then moving to full engagement. He has now fully developed the power of story on engagement: We get energy for sustained performance when we manage our energy resources effectively,” says Dr. Jim Loehr, CEO of the Human Performance Institute and coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement. “It’s a process that’s not always intuitive, but it can be done when we take control of the stories we tell ourselves through our private, inner voices.” Dr. Loehr’s new book, The Power of Story, shows the essential relationship between full engagement and the stories we tell ourselves. “Put simply, energy follows our stories,” says Loehr. “We give life to something with every story we tell.” He adds, “The first step for many individuals is to face the truth about their current stories and how those stories affect their energy management habits.”

Mike Hager in Green Bay wrote that engaging employees proves beneficial.  A lot has been written about creating an “employee engagement” culture in the workplace. Is this just another management fad or is there something here of real value to an organization? The answer is yes. It’s worth the time and effort to create a fully engaged organization! The results of at least two recent studies are absolutely dramatic; companies with a highly engaged work force have a significantly stronger bottom-line than those who don’t engage workers.

Ken Cook wrote that effective leaders engage employees in Hartford Business.com. Summarizing some of the work of Dick Adams Ken provided these type of suggestions: Share operational and performance data with employees. If they do not know how they are doing in meeting goals or how the company compares to the competition, how can they help — and improve their own view of themselves as contributing parts of company success? In working towards whatever goals you are trying to accomplish, tell the employees how they fit in. This is critical. The employees are the ones who have to implement any solution, and they will know what works or doesn’t work. Effective leaders encourage and spur commitment on the part of employees.

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

Employee Engagement: Monday Morning Percolator #37

Don’t gamble on employee engagement? When work becomes a mindless addiction, employee engagement loses the power to enrich the person working.

I was at the casino in Halifax Nova Scotia this past weekend. It was amazing to walk around the casino and see people so engaged in gambling. They can sit at tables or in front of slot machines for endless hours. And we all know this is going on in thousands of casinos around the world.

You don’t have to be a keen observer to notice that so few of the gamblers are happy or enjoying themselves, unless they win big. Some of this demonstrates the addicting power of random intermittent reinforcement.

I know some workplaces would love to have people show up and sit at a machine for hours at a time pushing buttons and monitoring the screen. The employer wouldn’t even have to pay the person, the person would pay them!

Don’t gamble with your work. What I mean is, enjoy work and don’t let it become a mindless addiction. You might be working all the time but if work is not a source of pleasure or satisfaction I don’t believe you are truly engaged in what you are doing.

I say, to heck with letting the chips fall where they may – make a conscious deliberate craft of staying engaged with your work. When we are fully engaged at work we gladly chip in and that “chipping in” is a source of contribution to others, our organization, and a source of satisfaction for us. JACKPOT!

Photo Credit: Slot Machine by http://flickr.com/photos/kubina/347687569/