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.
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:
- 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!
- 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
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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:
- Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
The One Ball: Transitions and Employee Engagement
Bounce into where you are and bounce out once you are done.
Arrivals and departures. Many of us lack a sense of mindfulness about the power of transitions. I often ask participants during employee engagement workshops the following two questions:
- How do you get to work?
- How do you get home?
Physical answers. After they stop looking at me like I am shallow and asking the obvious they comply and they begin to talk with a partner about their drive, route, or the bus/subway that gets them to work and whisks them home at the end of the day.
Lights on but nobody there. After this I suggest the real arrival is psychological. How do we show up at work and for work? Not just in body but also in mind, emotions, and spirit. How do we leave work behind at the end of the day to rest, rejuvenate, and get ready for the next day?
Begin with the end. William Bridges let us know that transitions begin with an end, have a neutral zone in between and end with a beginning. To really get to work we must end a mental, emotional, and spiritual focus on home. A good transition can help us move into full engagement. Perhaps it is a change of clothing, a cup of coffee, talking with a certain person, going for a jog, reading some inspirational reading or escapist fiction.
Body, mind, emotion, and spirit. I encourage you to find your unique way in and out of work. To be able to fully bounce into what you are doing and to bounce away from it once it is over. To be fully where we are in mind, body, emotion, and spirit makes for rich and enriching levels of engagement.
Team transitions. If you are a leader I encourage you to set up a department or team transition routine. Perhaps a quick huddle to check in with each person or a 10 minute tour through the work site to stop and talk with people around the office or to go online and use one of the many social media tools to make emotional and task connections.
Transitions create life/work engagement. Transitions offer great opportunities for engagement and when we leverage strong and powerful transitions rituals or routines we create a very healthy movement between work and home. Transitions are the small, subtle, and very significant acts that create powerful and potent life/work engagement.
Transition Primers. Here are some easy transitional rituals or routines to prime your thinking on this approach to engagement but I believe the best transition is the one that you develop that works best for you. You know it is working if you are fully (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritually) at work when you are there and you are able to leave work at work so when you return home you are fully playing with your child or engaging in your hobby and not ruminating about the day. Sample primers include:
- Having a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper to wake up.
- Going online and making a few relationship connections.
- Jumping into the shower to wake up for work or having a bath after work to soak away the day.
- Walking the dog before or after work.
- Walking, jogging, or cycling to work.
- Listening to music or audiotapes.
- Talking with someone before work or after work.
- Meditating or using brief yet mindful breathing to inspire yourself for work and to let go of work.
- Going to the gym or jogging to move through the neutral zone between work and home.
- Changing your clothing to signify a transition.
- Kissing your children goodbye before going to work and taking time to really play with them when you get home.
- Turning on your computer and turning yourself on to work and then turning off your computer at the end of work to also turn off your thoughts of work.
- Etc.
Master transitions to master employee engagement. When we master transitions we master the entry points of engagement and the exit point of healthy disengagement from work.
If you would like to read more ONE BALL posts click here.
Water-like Happiness
Water is such a powerful force. Living on the Red River in Canada and watching the snow melt and the rain come we are in a spring state of fear and preparation for flooding. We need to do what we can and manage what we can’t. I thought about this incredible power of flowing water and wondered how well we flow through life and if we let ourselves go while still moving forward how much we could experiences and accomplish.
May your flow into happiness.
Photo credit: FallingWater by http://www.flickr.com/photos/wouterpostma/335640243/
Employee Engagement: It’s Your Move.
Get on board with the employee engagement questions that appear after this “board.”
- Does your workplace have you in check?
- What’s your next employee engagement move?
- Do you know how your people move?
- Can your people move differently in the game of work?
- Are your people on board with engagement?
- What game are you playing?
- When do you clear the board and start again?
- Are you enjoying the game?
- Can you think differently inside the square, outside the box, and within the game?
Photo Credit: Cabel’s Board on Flickr by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakerome/2426595054/
No Bull Happiness?
Perhaps happiness is not from a charging bull market but a bull made of jelly beans.
As Jackie Gleason used to say, “how sweet it is.”
Do you need bull for happiness?
Photo credit: Jelly bean bull (207/365) by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mk1971/2141971940/
Engage 5 with Rosa Say
Each week another engagement thought leader completes 5 employee engagement sentences. Read Rosa Say’s Engage 5 responses:
- I define employee engagement as when work is fully intentional, it feels useful and meaningful, and it delivers self-worth along with tangible business results.
- Our biggest challenge in employee engagement is that management and leadership are still considered org chart roles versus self-motivational behaviors.
- A powerful way to create greater employee engagement is to teach the financial literacy that excites and energizes those with an entrepreneurial mindset, getting people to work “on” a business and not just swallowed up “in” it.
- I am personally most engaged with work when I’m learning, thus I must feel trusted and supported enough to play full out, “asking for forgiveness versus permission” if it gets to that point.
- To learn more about employee engagement, I encourage people to work on improving their teaming and partnership strategies, for though we learn most from others, we rarely engage in truly collaborative conversation.
If you want to learn more about Rosa Say or learn more from Rosa Say, click here. If you would like to read the reponses of other thought leaders to the same 5 sentences, click here.
1000+ Members!!!!
1000 members and climbing…
This weekend the Employee Engagement Network has gone over 1000 members.
I am so pleased that this is the place to be for employee engagement.
Watch for many more features on the network including additional Today At Work… cartoons.
David Zinger
Cartoon Feature: Today at Work…
We now have an exclusive and regular cartoon feature at this site and the Employee Engagement Network. Enjoy and let me know what you think. Thanks to Mr. John Junson for his contributions and cartoons!
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Contact David at (204) 254-2130 or Email dzinger@shaw.ca
View or Print One Page Bio. - Click On Image 
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- If you only had one sentence... Read or download the Free E-Book on Employee Engagement! Click on the cover for this terrific 44 page PDF resource.
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David Zinger Posts- In Gaudi’s Grip: If I was an Information Architect
- 11 Questions for Employee Engagement based on Daniel Kahneman’s Work
- Employee Engagement: 50 Companies to Admire and Imitate
- 12 Employee Engagement Eclectic Resource Zingers (No. 11)
- Today At Work – Episode 49
- Employee Engagement: Connective Leadership
- Employee Engagement is Knot a Problem
- Employee Engagement: 4 Ways to Belong
- 15 Employee Engagement Eclectic Resource Zingers (No. 10)
- Daily Engagement: Baseline Data and Goal Setting
- Today At Work – Episode 48
- Employee Engagement Humor: Is Your Leadership Team Focused?
- Employee Engagement: The Zinger 2020 Vision
- A Primer in Employee Engagement and Enterprise 2.0
- Daily Engagement: Engaged Strategic Improvisation
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- Visit and join the over 2125 member Employee Engagement Network by clicking on the network symbol:
