How does engagement play out with you?

Here is are two short 3 act engagement plays I wrote on Twitter. Each act was limited to less than 140 characters.

Employee Disengagement – Tragedy

Act 1: Alarm goes…keep hitting snooze button…hope day ends.

Act 2: Get to work late…who cares…go for coffee…wonder if paper cut is big enough for long term disability.

Act 3: Avoid coworkers and bosses…avoid work…just plain avoid until 5:00. Go home, repeat tomorrow.

Employee Engagement – Adventure

Act 1: Wake up…really wake up. Have coffee. Think about day. Head to work with anticipation and box of donuts.

Act 2. Connect with peers, leaders, work, organization. Make a contribution that benefits both myself and organization.

Act 3. Go home and engage fully with family and community. Sleep well and dream about an engaged tomorrow.

Photo Credit: Closed red curtain at the Coolidge Corner Theatre by http://www.flickr.com/photos/brokentrinkets/3074887475/

I love the Hostmanship approach to organizations that originated in Europe. I have written about it previously on this site.

Service is the  first foundation of Hostmanship.

To engage means a willingness to serve. Read the following description of service from Hostmanship.

Serving someone else is an often misunderstood art in the time we live in. Being misled, we have begun to believe that service is the same thing as voluntarily act as a doormat, to let someone “place himself above” and let us “sit below” the other person.

Let us now reclaim the word and return to it its proper meaning. To serve is to be there for someone else. To listen, to understand and to ask oneself: “What can I do to make you feel better right now?’ To help someone reach their goals and thus become successful in life.

A characteristic of the serving organization is that is has a serving leadership. Leaders who serve their employees. Where they primarily care about the world and daily life of their employees, so that the employees themselves shall feel free enough to serve when meeting others.

How many servings of employee engagement are you receiving?

• Are you there for your peers and your customers?
• Is someone there for you?
• Do you focus on what you can do to make someone feel better by reaching goals and becoming successful?
• Do you have a serving versus a self-serving bias in leadership?
• Does your organization’s leadership care about your world and your daily life?
• Are you freed up to have energy and time to be of service to others?

Click here to read more about the art of Hostmanship.

Hostmanship is the art of making people feel welcome. Hostmanship is about the empowerment of people on all levels in the organization that strives for excellence. It´s about faith and trust in peoples’ capacity and will to perform well in their relationship with colleagues and customers.

During these uncertain times there is a genuine need to make people feel welcome within organizations and to ensure we are all of service to each other. We don’t need doormats or hierarchies or people motivated by fear and survival. We need strong communities that care about each other and their daily lives. We need to demonstrate trust and faith in each other as we we find, create, and sustain authentic connected ways to strive for excellence.

Be a good host — order up an extra serving of employee engagement excellence.

The Employee Engagement Network is 1 year old today. We have gone from an idea to over 750 members in one year!

This is the place to be for Employee Engagement.

Join us by clicking here!

Shift happens. Let’s shift engagement from an employee focus to a work focus.

Detach engagement from employee role. I believe it is time to move beyond employee engagement to un-employee engagement. Un-employee engagement detaches engagement from our role of employee and attaches it to the work we do.

Flexible engagement. We must encourage and educate all people in the workplace for engagement. Engagement helps an organization remain viable and an employee valuable but if the nature of work changes (layoffs etc.) the person maintains their full engagement towards work and it is easier to shift how they engage in new work, roles, or contexts.

Engagement – now and forever. I am saddened by how many “employees” (front line workers, leaders, managers) have experienced layoffs over the past 4 months (over 2 million in the United States). Every day we read a new headline announcing a few thousand more employees released by a floundering organization. Did these organizations do enough to engage people while they were at work and to develop powerful engagement practices for new roles or contexts?

Engaged performance / engaged project management. Do our organizations do enough to prepare current organizational contributors for changes in employment and work? We are doing all of our employees a disservice with a narrow focus on employee engagement. Would we be of greater assistance to employees and their current and future approaches to work by joining engagement with more transferable words such as work engagement, performance engagement or engaged project management? I believe we would and I have subtlety shifted my approach to engagement in this direction over the past 18 months. With the economic upheaval I think this engagement shift must be more dramatic and bold.

Legacy of engagement. Should an employee lose their job or decide to be self-employed they would have a more transferable perspective or outlook on engagement in regards to their work. It takes tremendous energy, stamina and determination to engage in looking for, or creating, work after a layoff.

Employee engagement is antiquated. Within organizations we need to maximize engagement, perhaps more now than ever,  but it is becoming both antiquated and counterproductive to attach the word engagement to the narrow role of employee.

Adaptive, agile and authentic career engagement. If organizations foster engaged performance, engaged work, and engaged project management they are helping people within the organization develop skills, attitudes, emotions, and perspective that they can utilize within the organization and also take with them wherever or however they work. Career development is one of the keys to foster employee engagement and we can make a powerful contribution to work by fostering adaptive, agile, authentic, and creative career engagement.

We did our best. Organizations must be economically viable. If they need to cut positions they can feel more comfortable letting go of people they prepared to engage in work regardless of who they work for or how they go about working.

Are you ready for “un-employee engagement?” What do you think? Is it time to join engagement with other terms at work? Are you ready for a fresh approach moving beyond a simplistic engagement in a specific role to a more pervasive engagement in work or un-employee engagement?

Future posts. Watch for further explanations and discussion of how we can move beyond employee engagement.

Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

Watch for The One Ball article series here on Tuesday.

The focus this Tuesday is Engaged Performance.

Defining performance. The best definition of performance I know is quite simple: Performance is anything worthy of your attention. You don’t have to be in public to perform, other people don’t need to know you are engaged in performance, but you have determined that something is worthy of your attention — writing a report, meeting with a co-worker, creating a presentation, delivering a presentation, meditating, spending time with someone you love, or walking the dog. These are all performances! What kind of performer are you? What is most worthy of your attention at work?

Are you looking for some good reading. You will do yourself a world of good by checking out some of the exceptional writers I follow. My thinking would not be what it is today without the fine contributions of these gifted bloggers:

Engage others with hello.

I appreciate NPR’s collection of essays stating the strong belief of many individuals.

What do you believe?

What do you believe about employee engagement?

Here are a few snippet’s from Howard White’s NPR This I Believe story:

The Power of Hello

I work at a company where there are about a gazillion employees. I can’t say that I know them all by name, but I know my fair share of them. I think that almost all of them know me. I’d say that’s the reason I’ve been able to go wherever it is I’ve made it to in this world. It’s all based on one simple principle: I believe every single person deserves to be acknowledged, however small or simple the greeting.

I’ve become vice president but that hasn’t changed the way I approach people. I still follow my mother’s advice. I speak to everyone I see, no matter where I am. I’ve learned that speaking to people creates a pathway into their world, and it lets them come into mine, too.

The day you speak to someone that has their head held down and when they lift it up and smile, you realize how powerful it is just to open your mouth and say, “Hello.”

Click here to read or listen to the full version of Howard White’s Power of Hello.

Inspired?

Now write your own statement of belief by following these NPR guidelines:

1. Tell a story
2. Be brief
3. Name your belief
4. Be positive
5. Be personal

I encourage all of us to write our own 350 to 500 word personal and positive story on employee engagement.

When you have finished your story, send it to me or let me know. You may even want to send it to NPR by clicking here.

This I Believe. I will write my belief story and post it here within the next two months.

I wrote a guest post for Terrence Seamon’s Site: Here We Are. Now What?

Here are two paragraphs from the post on how we (organizations and individuals) can thrive in this most challenging economy:

First off, we must move more from me to WE. As organizations, if you say people are your greatest resource, do you back that up or do you chop them off as soon as economic challenges begin to loom on the horizon? As individuals, do we fully contribute to our organizations to help them become as viable as we are valuable?

Lighten up. We don’t lighten up by throwing people overboard. We don’t lighten up as individuals by not thinking deeply about our own career. We lighten up by realizing if we can laugh, we can last. Charlie Chaplin said it so very well: Life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long-shot. Don’t take too long to get a long shot. If you laugh, you last.

Click here to read the entire post at Terrence’s site. I encourage you to read his blog and look for other exceptional employee engagement contributors soon.

Photo Credit: Light My Path by http://www.flickr.com/photos/grafixer/3180236074/