Employee Engagement with David Zinger
The best in employee engagement...
Remember to pause and take care of your health. I love to insert pictures from Elizabeth Perry’s daily drawing at woolgathering.
I appreciate her daily discipline and the simple elegance of the things she draws. I encourage you to take a few moments before clicking away to appreciate the image. Use it as a micro-moment disengagement to refresh yourself before getting reengaged in your performance.
From Elizabeth Perry: http://www.elizabethperry.com/woolgathering/2008/09/cough-drop.html
I encourage you to read this thoughtful and entertaining post by Jerry Pounds from Sailing to Byzantium. The post is called Death Can Be Embarrassing.
Here is a paragraph from his post:
Well, I hope this get you motivated to do something with your life so that you can have a respectable death. Even if you do fall down the basement stairs in a drunken stupor—if you made a few friends and live in a descent city—it will read well in the obits and the preacher they hire for your service will be able to say a few things without sounding awkward like he is making stuff up.
Photo Credit: Black Sail by http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallsco/1093818618/
Career development is a very important part of effective employee engagement. We must manage our own career to enhance and enrich our level of engagement at work. If we are disengaged the following career blogs can help us determine our next actions or chart a new course.
Here are the first 14 of the 125 outstanding blogs displayed on Alltop that can contribute to your career development.
But wait before you go clicking on each one, there is a much easier way to monitor and mine these blogs for gems of career development.
Click here to vist Alltop: Top Career News and preview all 125 blogs on a page. Each blog has the title for the last five posts and if you scan over the title you will be able to read the first section of each post. This means that you can quickly scan over 600 career posts on one page…now that’s fast and extensive career development.
Alltop has careers covered along with just about everything else from A to Y.
How do you get your mind out of the gutter?
This image makes me think of Buddhist tonglen perspectives on transformations of tough situations and thoughts.
In the tonglen practice of giving and receiving, we take on, through compassion all the various mental and physical sufferings of all beings: their fear, frustration, pain, anger, guilt, bitterness, doubt, and rage, and we give them, through love, all our happiness, and well-being, peace of mind, healing, and fulfillment.
Photo Credit: Lapsana apogonoides by http://flickr.com/photos/jam343/1703693/
Welcome back Kotter: A Sense of Urgency
by David Zinger
John Kotter has done a lot of work to help us manage and navigate through organizational change. Kotter is back with A Sense of Urgency.
Kotter maintains the number one problem organizations face when trying to execute change is creating a sense of urgency. We need to create and recreate urgency because it is not a natural state of affairs.
In the field of employee engagement, how urgent are your actions, initiatives, and programs? I encourage you to make them more urgent by reading this post and using the resources listed at the end of this article.
Here are 3 quotations from Kotter’s Change This Manifesto on Urgency published today (September 10th.).
The few people who do have smoke pouring into their offices are furious that somebody has started a fire. But instead of demonstrating a real sense of urgency to solve the problem, starting today, they complain.
In a fast-moving and changing world, a sleepy or steadfast contentment with the status quo can create disaster—literally, disaster.
With a true sense of urgency, people want to come to work each day ready to cooperate energetically and responsively with intelligent initiatives from others. And they do.
Kotter offers 4 tactics to establish urgency:
Are you ready to get Urgent? Here is how to proceed.
If the video failed to load in this window you can watch it here.
I wasn’t going to upload this post until tomorrow but I got the sense of urgency.
And now, I hope you…GET URGENT!
Micheal Stallard wrote a wonderful book on employee engagement: Fired Up or Burned Out. Michael knows that connections are the keys to engagement and he does a wonderful job of keeping this at the top of our minds (and hearts).
I have the honor of joining Michael on Thursday September 11 at 11 a.m. Eastern time for a 1/2 hour discussion of engagement and connection. I invite you to join us for this free and informative webinar.
Visit Michael’s site at http://www.michaelleestallard.com/ to get the details and the link to connect with us.
If today was you last day, would you die happy today?
Die Happy Today
This is not meant as a fluffy question where you go out and seize buckets of lists or yell Latin phrases such as carpe diem at the top of your lungs. It is meant more as the first wake up call of the day before we hit the snooze button.
Part of my answer to this question is a site I have hosted since Ground Hog Day 2008.
Click here to sample Die Happy Today. The site embrace wonderful images with quick thoughts. It is meant to be viewed in about 10 to 30 seconds. Then, get on with life.
I encourage you to visit the site and take a quick scroll down the range of posts, enjoy the pictures, and come back every so often to ensure that you die happy today.
Here is the reason this site came into existence:
Why are you writing Die Happy Today? The title came to me on a flight from Winnipeg to Halifax in December 2007. I would have preferred an extra Diet Coke or cookies but the flight on Westjet left me with the question. If the plane crashed, would I die happy today?
This is not a theoretical question as I was a private pilot, took a plane from an incipient spin into a full spin, fell from about 4,000 feet, waited for my life to pass before my eyes – it didn’t happen – and I ended up with about 100 feet to spare from literally going six feet under. I often suppress this especially when I fly but at 54 it is time to unleash the learning.
I want this site to be very useful to you (not to make you afraid of flying) and I also want it to function as a reminder…if this was the last day would I die happy?
If the answer is yes, we are on track and doing well. If the answer is no than we better figure out what we need to do. By the way, happiness to me is not being some goofy looking yellow smiley face, it is a lot more complex than that. We’ll get into that over the next year.
If we are not alive and happy, what are the chances we will be engaged for the work we need to do?
Tree of Light
According to a study by Prof. Ronit Peled from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev: “We can carefully say that experiencing more than one severe and/or mild to moderate life event is a risk factor for breast cancer among young women. On the other hand, a general feeling of happiness and optimism can play a protective role.”
Photo Credit: Tree of Light by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jphilipson/2100627902/
The Los Angeles Times offered Sonja’s Pathway to Happiness.
Are you on the path?
Source: “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want,” by Sonja Lyubomirsky
Photo Credit: Magic Path by http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/1021782142/
I love the breadth of manifestos available at www.changethis.com. This is one of my favorite spots to check each month on the Internet as new manifesto are published early each month.
Mitch Ditkoff wrote a helpful manifesto if you are trying to develop breakthrough ideas.
Here are 5 of the 17 ideas that Mitch offers the reader:
Click here to read the PDF of the entire manifesto and get busy developing breakthrough ideas to foster employee engagement.
Full employee engagement demands rest, recovery, and rejuvenation.
Of course a good cup of coffe on the weeknd keeps me going for the weekend activities.
Have a sip, enjoy, and re-engage on Monday.
Elizabeth Perry
Photo Credit: http://www.elizabethperry.com/woolgathering/2008/09/coffee-1.html
Employee Engagement Rants x 6
by David Zinger
What gets to you about employee engagement? Here are 6 things that are getting to me right now:
Let’s stop calling it employee engagement. It seems when we call it employee engagement that we blame employees for not being engaged, we are blind to the fact that leaders and managers are also employees, and employees feel that engagement is something done to them rather than something that enriches them. I will still use the term but in my mind I am thinking work engagement rather than employee engagement.
No more carrots, no more sticks, no more motivational tricks. There is not a magic panacea to engage people at work. Lets appreciate the complexity and diversity of work while engaging in personal and interpersonal action to foster authentic, real, and robust engagement.
Face the fear. Let’s get fear into the open to see how it actually operates and inhibits performance. If you don’t think fear influences engagement then I think you are wearing organizational or personal blinders. Fears range from negative judgments – to being fired – to more work if successful – to what if I fully engage but still don’t perform up to expectations, etc.
No more rules of engagement. I am tired of people writing rules of engagement. The rules of engagement are about war and work needs to stop being war and we need to stop telling people there are 5, 8 or 10 simple rules they must follow for successful engagement.
Social media is not THE answer. Yes, social media can be a good response to foster more engagement but people can also use social media to avoid work and become disengaged with people right in front of them. Social media is a powerful tool that can be engaging or disengaging. It is all about how we use this tool rather than the tool itself.
Engagement doesn’t measure up. Measurement can be useful in engagement but measurement does not equal engagement and we spend far too much money on measurement when we could make our measures simple while making our interventions robust.
How about you? What is your mini employee engagement rant? I encourge you to write a mini rant comment. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
David Zinger from Winnipeg Canada is an expert on engagement. He founded the 4500 member Employee Engagement Network. His work is designed to increase engagement for your organization.
He is a management consultant with over 25 years of experience. His education services are enhanced by his 20 year background as a University educator for the University of Manitoba and over 15 years managing an employee assistance program for Seagram Ltd.
David's services mix current research with practical approaches to build authentic relationships and achieve powerful results. To learn more about David, click on "About David" on the link bar near the top of this site.
Contact David Zinger at:
Phone (204) 254-2130.
Email dzinger@shaw.ca
