Why Your Organization Should Forget About Employee Engagement

Just don’t do it. I believe many organizations and companies would be best served by doing nothing in regards to employee engagement. I believe this recommendation is startling at a site devoted to employee engagement and by someone who has devoted their focus to all things related to employee engagement. Let me explain this contradiction.

Ready, willing, and able? Your organization does an engagement survey and you uncover or discover low engagement scores. Leadership is concerned and decides to improve the engagement scores by the next major survey. Before taking action, leadership needs to determine if they are ready, willing, and able to act on this desire. If they do not fully invest in employee engagement improvement they may actually be contributing to further disengagement.

Before you begin. Here are some sample questions you should ponder before going any further after getting low engagement scores:

• Do we believe we can change engagement in this organization?
• Do we have the will to improve engagement?
• Do we have the skill to improve engagement?
• Do we know the key variables to improve?
• Do we know how to improve these key variables.
• Will we allocate adequate resources (people, energy, money) to improving engagement?
• Will we integrate engagement work throughout the organization or will it reside only in HR or internal communications?
• Will engagement be an important line function?
• Will we adequately train our leaders, managers, supervisors, and staff to improve their own engagement and the engagement of others?

Stop it. Here is the radical thought. If you or your organization are not ready to fully embrace what is required than perhaps you might be best served by not engaging in an engagement program. Radical non-intervention may at least prevent a further deterioration of engagement scores due to cynicism.  A mediocre engagement initiative may result in more cynicism, tax limited energies, or create another flavor of the month organizational program that erodes decreasing levels of faith and trust in the organization.

If. If you don’t see the compelling reason to improve engagement, if you are not ready, willing, or able to improve engagement, if you don’t have the capacity to make a significant difference, then let it go.

Just do it (but do it right)! By the way, I hope you won’t do this. I hope you will fully engage in engagement work. Can we expect to reach full engagement of employees if we don’t fully engage in the very approaches, strategies, tactics, and tools we are using to create engagement?

Coming soon. In future Tuesday posts I will outline the rationale, reasons, and requirements to successfully enhance employee engagement.

Contact David Zinger. If you would like customized coaching, consulting, or training on employee engagement contact David Zinger today for a free consult. Click here to start or revitalize your employee engagement approach.

Visit The Employee Engagement Network

Engage 5 with Judy Nelson

Engage 5 is a weekly feature of Employee Engagement Zingers. Engage-5 asks leading thinkers, writers, consultants, and others involved in employee engagement to complete 5 sentences.

Read Judy Nelson’s 5 sentences on engagement:

1. I define employee engagement as the situation when the CEO, the HR director and the vast majority of the employees can’t wait to get to work Monday morning—and not because they want to get away from home!
2. Our biggest challenge in employee engagement is hiring the right people, training them well and creating a culture that insists on human dignity and engagement
3. A powerful way to create greater employee engagement is to demonstrate to employees the power in strategic vulnerability: i.e., the CEO is able to say “I don’t know” and “I need your help.”
4. I am personally most engaged at work when I know what my role is, feel well-trained and supported to do my job and have the freedom to make decisions and grow professionally.
5. To learn more about employee engagement, I encourage people to join the Employee Engagement Network and participate by asking questions and considering new ways of looking at old challenges.

To learn more about Judy or learn more from Judy Nelson, click here.

Stop the Meeting Madness: Overcoming Meeting Disengagement

Are your meetings becoming disengaging time wasters?

Seth Godin offers 9 tips to improve meetings. Here are 5 of the 9 ideas:

1. Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
2. Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
3. The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
4. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
5. If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

To read Seth Godin’s full list, click here.

Ensure that employees are engaged at your next meeting.

Visit The Employee Engagement Network

Employee Engagement Zingers Schedule

Employee Engagement Zingers has over 500 articles relating to employee engagement and strength based leadership. I encourage you to read the excellent posts developed over the past 5 years at this site.

The Current Schedule:

Monday features guest contributions in a series called Engage 5. A wide variety of employee engagement thought leaders share their completion to the same 5 engaging sentences each week.

Tuesday features the major employee engagement article of the week. Tuesday is when the feature article of the week appears. It is often longer and involves a longer focus on a key element of employee engagement. The Tuesday feature may also include a series of articles on a key topic.

Thursday features The One Ball. The one ball outlines a more personal and practical approach to various elements of engagement. Each of these posts is branded with the image of a childhool rubber ball with a key word on the white stripe of the red, white, and blue ball.

Saturday features the Today At Work cartoon. This is a fine series of exclusive cartoons created for Employee Engagement Zingers and The Employee Engagement Network by Mr. John Junson.

Engagement Extras. Occasionally there will be timely extras offered on a variety of  employee engagement ideas.