Lets put measurement in the hands of the “carpenters” not the consultants!

by David Zinger

Abandon tired old surveys. Many employees are tired of employee engagement surveys. It feels like a workplace intrusion similar to the intrusion of the telephone survey requests you get just as you are sitting down to eat with your family. Employees have thoughts similar to the one expressed below:

Oh please, not another survey that is going to ask us a ton of questions, be shelved in some drawer or computer file for months, take forever for us to  find out the results, and then leave us wondering what action will be taken after an external consultant gives us a 30 minute slick slide show, showing what we already know.

Don’t waste money. The money that is spent having experts construct the survey and create fancy looking charts and presentations may be better invested on actual initiatives that engage employees.

Focus on one question. I am not against measuring engagement with the very very occasional longer survey but I advocate fast surveys, with just one question, where the question and results are given to the people who can make a difference with the data right away and leaders or managers are not left taxed with a whole bunch of more duties on a working plate that is already overflowing.

Usability trumps rigorous validity and reliability. I taught a graduate level course on testing and measurement. The 3 big concerns in surveys and measurement are: validity, reliability, and usability. I am not naive about issues around reliability, validity, and confidentiality but first and foremost I am a practitioner of engagement and I think we don’t attend enough to the third key criteria of measurement: usability. Let’s use surveys, polls, and measurement to assess engagement quickly and get on with the actual work of engagement.

From start to finish in under 24 hours. I have developed a simple and powerful method to create timely and helpful surveys. The survey can be constructed in a matter of minutes, the responses can be gathered within a few hours, and action can be launched before 24 hours have elapsed.

Check out this sample survey. For a quick sample of what I am talking about, see a quick emotional survey on work I constructed for my management blog:

1. Click here to see a survey created in under 5 minutes. The question took me 3 minutes to create, I had a click-able link in a minute, and the data automatically began populating a spreadsheet (all this in less than 5 minutes of work)! I had 188 responses in about 6 hours.
2. Click here to see the results from almost 500 readers with a sample of some of the comments a few days later. The statistics were interesting but I think the comments and the following conversation were most significant. I encourage you to read the dialogue in the 21 opinions after the blog post. 

Engage today. If I was a manager of the “slacker manager” group I surveyed above, I would have an instant pulse on the workplace, a lot of insightful comments, and the start of engaging conversations about disengagement and engagement and what we need to do.

Learn to employ social media tools for employee engagement. This is  an example of the application of powerful, pervasive and free social media tools (Google Shared Documents and a Blogging Platform) to enhance or improve engagement. No budget dollars were harmed or squandered in the production, assessment, and actions based on the one question survey!

For more information about the survey or using social media tools in employee engagement contact David Zinger at dzinger@shaw.ca or phone (204) 254-2130.

Here is a short snippet on friendship from a Gallup article on Are You Neglecting New Employees:

This is one of the most common ways a vital friendship is formed at work — discovering a coworker with common interests or beliefs. The best workgroups we have studied engage in passionate conversations and e-mail discussions about non-work topics. This helps the group bond and makes it stronger.

Photo Credit: Mr. Pumpkin and Mr. Apple by http://flickr.com/photos/orinrobertjohn/159744546/

Click here to listen a Blog Talk Radio interview I had with Zane Safrit on employee engagement:

David Zinger, founder of the Employee Engagement community on Ning (http://employeeengagement.ning.com) will talk with me today about employee engagement and its role in corporate success and its foundation for creating customer evangelists and their word-of-mouth advertising for your company.

Employees as hamsters. A recent large scale employee engagement survey categorized some workers as hamsters: “those working hard but at the wrong things.” Initially I thought it was a cute image to understand engagement. Later I began to wonder about the appropriateness of using the term hamster to refer to employees.

112 responses. 112 people responded to the following question:

Do you believe it is appropriate to refer to a category of employees

from an employee engagement survey as hamsters

(working hard but at the wrong things)?

54 participants said yes and 58 participants said no.

Here were some of the yes comments:

• If the story line helps to understand the behavior it probably is appropriately used notwithstanding that it does not make us warm and fuzzy inside.
• It’s all in how you say it. I think it’s pretty funny, and would disarm people a bit, and at the same time they’d get it.
• It’s an image that people can immediately grasp, and is therefore a powerful one.
• MOST SUITS ARE HAMSTERS
• I don’t have a problem with the reference (though I’m just not sure that a hamster is the right animal metaphor for this group)…but then it’s all in how it’s used as a way to help organizations and employees…if it’s used in a derogatory way then it’s inappropriate.

Here were some of the no comments:

• As I read leadership blogs, I see managers referring to front line staff as though they’re a different species. I hate to see anyone being *that* obvious about it, though.
• Engagement properly understood is not about the employee at all; it’s about the organization and how well the org is ENGAGING its… hamsters. 
• We should refer to the leader of that group as an Ostrich.
• Yeah…referring to people as rodents who poop in wood shavings is such a way to inspire them. Yeesh.
• Whereas the behavior may parallel that of hamsters, people are intelligent, sometimes misguided, confused, or mismanaged, people are not without willpower.
• Oh my gosh!  I can’t imagine how negative the reaction would be if any of those employees saw that category!

My thoughts. It seems like the overall response is quite divided. My own response has been influenced by this. If the term was seen negatively by even a small percentage of the sample then I will not use it. I believe it was an attempt at a playful and “sticky” categorization but it is viewed by many as disrespectful.

R- E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means. Without respect, conversational safety it at jeopardy in the workplace. I will avoid references to people as small furry animals as these are the people I want to work with to achieve full engagement. Of course I also don’t like people being referred to as resources or capital as in human resources or human capital.

Just human. Perhaps we can just leave humans as humans!

Photo Credit: I have to think the through now by http://flickr.com/photos/annia316/488876291/

Have a sweet break from work.

Drawing by Elizabeth Perry:

http://www.elizabethperry.com/woolgathering/2008/05/watermelon.html

Read 300 Free Eclectic Employee Engagement Keys. This book compiles employee engagement alphabets by 12 members of the Employee Engagement Network. This is a 39 page free E-book to enrich your employee engagement knowledge and efforts. Click here to download a free PDF copy of the 39 page E-book:           [Read more...]

The raw material of employee engagement is energy. Are you an energy gain or energy drain for your organization?

Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy – in companies, organizations and even in families. They inspire or demoralize others first by how effectively they manage their own energy and next by how well they mobilize, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead. The skillful management of energy, individually and organizationally, makes possible something that we call full engagement. ~ Loehr & Schwartz, The Power Of Full Engagement.

Photo Credit: light show 05 by http://flickr.com/photos/krassycandoit/2436740107/

Do you see the light? The Hawthorne effect is something most first-year university psychology and business students learn about.

The Hawthorne effect describes a temporary change to behavior or performance in response to a change in the environmental conditions, with the response being typically an improvement. Some of the early studies involved changing the lighting conditions within a factory.

According to Wikipedia:

Although illumination research of workplace lighting formed the basis of the Hawthorne effect, other changes such as maintaining clean work stations, clearing floors of obstacles, and even relocating workstations resulted in increased productivity for short periods of time. Thus the term is used to identify any type of short-lived increase in productivity. In short, people will be more productive when appreciated or when watched.

The lengthy Wikipedia article goes into the specific research and concerns with research methodology and conclusions from the research.

I am not here to critique the research, I am here to encourage each of us to think of the impact on productivity of people we work with when we appreciate them and pay attention to what they are doing. Attentive and communicated mindfulness of how others are working may have a positive impact on their engagement.

Go ahead, turn the light on in your workplace and strive towards more enlightened engagement as you pay attention and connect with others.

Photo Credit: Flaming lightbulb by http://flickr.com/photos/repoort/320223818/

A recent large scale employee engagement survey categorized some workers as hamsters: “those working hard but at the wrong things.” Initially I thought it was a cute image to understand engagement. Later I began to wonder about the appropriateness of using the term hamster to refer to employees.

What do you think? Should we refer to a group of employees as hamsters? You make the call.

Take 3 seconds to click the button below and vote yes or no.

There is additional space to write a comment. I will write about your responses to this survey next week.