We Will Miss Studs Terkel’s Voice: A Powerful Writer on Working

Studs Terkel died today. He was 96. He was significant to employee engagement for the book Working he wrote over 30 years ago. The full title of the book was, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

You could consider the book one of the earliest books on employee engagement and employee disengagement.

When it appeared, “Working” was a revelation, a window on the thoughts of Americans who were rarely heard from: hospital aides, skycaps, gravediggers. Many of the interviews follow a similar, surprising trajectory, beginning with mundane workplace details but quickly moving on to existential thoughts. Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, “for daily meaning as well as daily bread

Here is a quotation from Terkel:

But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count. ~ Studs Terkel

Engaged with Cycles

Take a close look at the image…it begins to move. To fully engage is to move even when we are in a cycle of work.

Doing work which has to be done over and over again helps us recognize the natural cycles of growth and decay, of birth and death, and thus become aware of the dynamic order of the universe. “Ordinary” work, as the root meaning of the term indicates, is work that is in harmony with the order we perceive in the natural environment. ~ Fritjof Capra

Photo Credit: Origami Half Amazing Circle by http://www.flickr.com/photos/kacey/463218354/

Employee Engagement: Learning From Game Play and Design

Are you game for employee engagement?

The future of engagement will be so much less about punching a clock and so much more about logging on or checking in, enjoying play and work, getting good at something with great feedback to keep us moving to the next level, finding easy ways to make connections, to spend time with people we like, and acting as a part of something much bigger than ourselves.

Jan McGonigal offered this exceptional 20 minute video to get you thinking differently about employee engagement and our lives in the future. Games have become so much more than child’s play. To be fully engaged as adults we need to not only understand games but engage in games that are changing the ways and methods of engagement.

Click here to watch this video as Jane McGonigal talks with Daniel Zalewski about alternate-reality gaming. From “Stories from the Near Future,” the May 2008 New Yorker Conference.

Games are much more than monopoly. We may learn  much about engagement through games. Jane argues that current gaming offers us much to learn about engagement and happiness. Is your organization responding to the economy of engagement with:

• satisfying work to do
• being good at something
• spending time with people we like
• the chance to be a part of something bigger

Engaging Short Snappers: Lessons From Seth Godin and Tom Peters

I encourage you to view some of the 1 to 3 minute video clips with Seth Godin and Tom Peters talking about a number of issues related to business, leadership, and engagement.

The Open Forum hosted Tom and Seth voicing their views on inside the entrepreneurial mind. Many of their comments and applications and implications for employee engagement.

I love how the videos are packaged in 2 or 3 minute sections – Seth and Tom are asked a question and voice their responses. I encourage you to watch:

• Are Gen X Employees different?
• No one cares about you
• loyal employee versus loyal customer – who is more important
• the importance of decency
• the delicate balance of leadership

Click here to go to the page that lists the topics and length of each video clip.

Slide Into Changing Poverty: Your Two Cents

View this 8 slide presentation on what you can do about poverty this week with just two cents a word!

Good Labor and Caring: Thanks Dan

One of the most wonderful things about having a blog or interactive website is the ability of others to add to your thinking through their comments.

I received a wonderful comment from Dan Oestreich about The Great Wall of Saskatchewan article and 10 slide story about the great wall. I thought it was so well-written that I wanted to ensure others got a chance to see it as Dan says much about engagement:

What a beautiful story and image.  I think we forget sometimes in the apparent complexity of knowledge work about the underpinnings of what is good labor. It’s easier to see the value of the stones that make a wall, and to imagine each one of the stones, how it is placed and balanced; the talent of the wall-maker and that person’s dedication.

Sometimes we forget that each project, each relationship, each moment to moment transaction today is like one of those stones. Perhaps we can no longer drive along a road to see how they’ve accumulated into a monument; yet to my mind they are no less real for being subjective products.

Maybe there’s just a thin file folder someplace lost in a cabinet in the basement, but it represents years of personal work, now more or less invisible.  The beauty of such a legacy is that in some way it is like those zen poems written on old pieces of newspaper into which a fish had been wrapped. The poem was sent on its way in the universe with only an expectation of its transience. It dissolved within a few hours of having been written, or was crumbled up and tossed in the fire. In another world, we could build a wall from stones; today, we type words onto a screen — and all that washed away much faster even than footprints next to a wave.

Yet, God love us, we keep making our marks and investing our hearts in our accomplishments, even, perhaps, just delivering the mail. Tomorrow there will be more, and after that there will be more, and so on and so on. And yet we do know the difference between mail delivered well and not delivered so well, and we take pride in it, all of it, because the heart knows good work, and no matter what it is, no matter how evanescent, the beautiful thing is just that we care. And that makes all the difference in the world.

I encourage you to read more from Dan at Unfolding Leadership.

Flow or Go: Happy @ Work?

When you look into the mirror of yourself and work, what do you see?

Here is a snippet to think about from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure…the apathy of many people around us is not due to their being physically or mentally exhausted. The problem seems to lie more in the modern worker’s relation to his job, and the way he perceives his goals in relation to it…many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside, an effort that takes life away from the ledger of their existence.

Photo Credit: A perfect world by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesjordan/2128261974/

Your Work Legacy and the Great Wall of Saskatchewan

Just outside of Smiley Saskatchewan is the Great Wall of Saskatchewan.

This is a project of love, legacy, and tenacious obsession on the part of Albert Johnson who spent 30 years building the wall.  Check out this short 10 slide story I created about Albert Johnson’s wall.

To view the 10 slides:click here.

You might not spend 30 years building a wall but when your work is done, what will you leave behind?

Change Poverty Oct 26 to Nov 1

If you are a blogger, Change Poverty. Click the penny below.

Zengagement and Results

Foster employee engagement – see results.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results. ~ Albert Einstein

Photo Credit: Fueling the Fire by http://www.flickr.com/photos/akahodag/1419156372/