8 Employee Engagement Lessons From Barcelona
I recently returned from Chairing the Second Annual Employee Engagement Conference in Barcelona sponsored by Teneo Events.
Here are 8 lessons from the two days at the conference and being a tourist in Barcelona:
Comprehending complexity. Employee engagement is an incredibly complex undertaking in organizations with thousands of employees spread around the globe. I have an enhanced respect for the challenges and contributions of employee engagement specialists in large multinational organizations and I salute the conference participants who are so engaged in their engagement work.
Question questions. Do we believe the answer to employee engagement is asking another question or a better question or should we call surveys into question? Yes, I know the importance of data and research but I see far too many surveys that result in bell curves and depleted precious resources that could heighten rather than just measure engagement.
Engagement score. I attended an FC Barcelona game where 100,000 fans paid large sums of money to be fully engaged with their football team. It made me think that maybe if we could get our employees to wear jerseys and pay for their seats in their cubicles we might foster more engagement. Seriously, we should study major sports teams and learn how they create such passionate and engaged loyalty and determine how we could transfer this to our organizations.
Engagement legacy. I, along with just about every other tourist in Barcelona, was in awe of Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. I salute his genius and vision and ability to conceive and begin to construct something so powerful. The church may be completed in 15 more years, 100 years after his death. It made me think about how short a view we have in most organizations (generally we want 1/4ly results) and what kind of employee engagement legacy we with to leave behind?
Conference voices. The conference featured a powerful pluralism of voices on employee engagement..
- Peder Anderline from Credit Suisse taught us to look at employee engagement data in new and creative ways, such as excel heat maps, and to use data as the invitation for leaders and managers to improve engagement.
- Kate Erskine from Aviva taught us the power of yellow, “get me…get the plot…get it done,” and the journey of Aviva’s corporate brand promise.
- Jonathan Matthews from the Hay Insight Group taught us how stylish leaders can create amazing results. Styles range from “do what I tell you” and “come with me” to “do as I do, now” and ” “people come first.”
- Sarah Cook from Stairway Consultancy led us through group WIFI and how to achieve excellence in employee engagement knowledge.
- Jonathon Scott, a former Green Beret, taught us about heart from his military experience and being human in our organizations to produce robust and authentic engagement.
- Guillaume Delacour taught us about the Goodyear Dunlop path of employee engagement and offered us a “good buy on tires.” I believe in employee engagement, this is where the rubber meets the road.
- Todd Holzman from Cambridge Leadership helped us create powerful and honest engaging conversations based on analysis, attention, agreement, and action.
- Wenceslao Rios from Pepsico International taught us about the challenges of engagement work in a very large organization and the intricacies of the Pepsi generation.
Miro’s simplicity. I visited the Miro museum and was impressed with the chronological perspective of Miro’s work and his striving to create “maximum intensity with minimum means.” His art is a trigger to feed imagination and encourage meditation. We must balance the science and mathematics of engagement with the authentic art of engagement and Miro gives us a model of simplicity to communicate through the complexity.
Oui, si, yes. I was in awe of how the European delegates were so comfortable with so many languages and might speak in 3 languages while holding a two minute conversation with another person. I believe we must learn to speak the many languages of engagement (mathematics, geometry, psychology, anthropology, science, arts, etc.).
Engaged communities. Barcelona has a rich community history of architects and artists. I was impressed at the conference with how we came together as a community. In the evening between Day 1 and Day 2, twenty-two delegates went out together, sat together around a large square table, and shared a meal and more conversation. If organizations fail to become rich and diverse yet connected communities they will be thwarted in achieving high levels of authentic engagement.
Picture Collage taken and created by David Zinger, April 2009
John Wooden: Coaching for Employee Engagement
John Wooden was the very successful UCLA basketball coach. John stated: “success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
If you have never examined his pyramid of success I encourage you to take some time to view it and ponder the relationship between the pyramid and successful employee engagement. To view and interact with the pyramid, click here.
Watch this wonderful video of John Wooden from a TED Talk.
Can you construct your own pyramid of employee engagement?
Engage-5 with Peter Hart
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 Peter Hart’s 5 sentences on engagement:
- I define employee engagement as employees who enjoy what they do and go above and beyond everyday because they enjoy it.
- Our biggest challenge in employee engagement is to get our managers to engage their employees everyday.
- A powerful way to create greater employee engagement is to know your employee’s names and their stories and speak to them everyday.
- I am personally most engaged at work when I engage my employees one on one.
- To learn more about employee engagement, I encourage people to read Rodd Wagner and James Harter’s book 12: The Elements of Great Managing.
To learn more from Peter Hart or to learn more about Peter Hart , click here or here.
Free Employee Engagement RSS Feeds
Part of my service on the Employee Engagement Network is to offer you a quick visual overview of some of the latest blog posts in Employee Engagement. If you like what you see just click on the post title and you can read the article.
Click here to visit this page from the Employee Engagement Network.
The One Ball: Nothing
Can you do….nothing?
Leo Babuata wrote about nothing on Zen Habits:
Sure, we all know how to do nothing. We all know how to lay around and waste time. But many of us are too busy to do it much, and when we do it, our minds are often on other things. We cannot relax and enjoy the nothingness. Doing nothing can be a waste of time, or it can be an art form.
How well do you do nothing? Can you see the value of it? Can complete disengagement be the stimulus of rest and rejuvenation for the response of full and robust employee engagement?
I encourage you to click here to read Leo’s suggestions on nothing.
He concluded the post: Finally, the Art of Doing Nothing cannot be mastered overnight. It will take hours and hours of practice, of hard work (doing nothing isn’t easy!). But you will enjoy every minute of it! Try it today.
Employee Engagement: I See You (Recognition)
How well do you see? More precisely, how well do you see the people you work with. I believe that many people in the workplace feel unnoticed.
Carefully read the this from the start of the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.
Among the tribes of northern Natal in South Africa, the most common greeting, equivalent to “hello” in English, is the expression: Sawa bona. It literally means, “I see you.” If you are a member of the tribe, you might reply by saying Sikhona, “I am here.” The order of the exhange is important: until you see me, I do not exist. It’s as if, when you see me, you bring me into existence…If you grow up with this perspective, your identity is based upon the fact that you are seen — that the people around you respect and acknowledge you as a person.
How well do you see? Count the number of times the white team passes the ball:
Did you see the moon-walking bear? Yes this is an old test but I believe we are put to the test everyday to see the people we work with and to let them know they are seen.
As a child I was a fan of Romper Room, the children TV series. At the end of each show the teacher would pull out the magic mirror and pretend to see people watching her. I liked this clip because she “saw me.” In the workplace we don’t need a magic mirror but we do need to see people and let them know they are seen. If you are invisible you will not be engaged. Make the people you work with visible and watch the magic of engagement unfold.
Photo credit: The mechanic eye by http://www.flickr.com/photos/bogenfreund/1808719569/
Engage-5 with Ana-Maria Calin
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 Ana-Maria Calin’s 5 sentences on engagement:
- I define employee engagement as a work-related state of well-being, whereby employees invest very high levels of physical, mental and emotional resources in their job performance.
- Our biggest challenge in employee engagement is to communicate engagement with emotion and back our enthusiasm with proof, so that cynicism can be avoided.
- A powerful way to create greater employee engagement is to promote creation of engagement as a “pass-it-on”, top-down task: engage managers at all levels to engage everyone they come in contact with at work also, not necessarily ALL their employees (impossible in huge teams, or departments).
- I am personally most engaged at work when I MUST not do my work, but I WANT to do it.
- To learn more about employee engagement, I encourage people to find a way of building a bridge between the humanity of employees and the cold, dead rationality of organizations’ needs and scopes.
Ana-Maria is a student at “Politehnica” University in Bucharest, Romania
The One Ball: Small Kaizen
Find the all in small.
Click on any of the balls above to see how one small click can expand Kaizen!
Kazien. Kaizen is is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. Robet Maurer wrote a wonderful book called The Kaizen Way: One Small Step Can Change Your Life. Maurer does a superb job of helping us focus on the small. He encourages and guides us to take small comfortable steps towards improvement.
Small steps. His six suggested small strategies:
- Ask small question to inspire creativity and dispel fear.
- Think small thoughts to develop new habits and skills.
- Take small actions to guarantee success
- Solve small problems embedded in bigger problems
- Give and receive small rewards to produce better results
- Recognize and dwell in the small, often ignored, crucial moments.
Moon shot. As Neil Armstrong stated when he stepped on the moon. “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Our small steps, actions, and thoughts can take one giant step through fear while also moving us much closer to our desired outcomes.
A small energy boost. We seem to believe that small = insignificant. I believe that small is the new significant. We are so overloaded that we often neglect to see the power in small acts, questions, or interactions. For example, Jane Dutton demonstrated the power of small interactions (HQI: High Quality Interactions) to be the single greatest contributor to organizational energy. One of these interactions can occur in two seconds and many of them woven through the day energize other people, ourselves, and our organizations.
Small Toss. Have you ever thrown a ball to a young child. You often get them to cup their hands, you stand very close, and you make a very small toss of the ball into their waiting hands and watch the glee spread over their face when they catch the ball. Start thinking of the glee you can create for yourself by thinking small thoughts, asking small questions, or taking samll actions. Here are 3 suggestions:
- Read Maurer’s book, The Kaizen Way – transfrom his small suggestions into small and significant actions.
- Practice small acts such as taking a few second to really look at a co-worker or to voice something you noticed or appreciated about them.
- Chop stress into managable chunks by continually thinking about the smallest and most significant actions you can take to handle various strssful situations.
Confront the difficult when it is still easy;
Accomplish he great task by a series of small acts.
~ Tao Te Ching.
This moment. Maurer concludes his book with this small question: What more important task does this life hold than to draw out the possiblity in each moment?
Employee Engagement: An Interview with Sarah Cook
Read the following interview with Sarah Cook from The Stairway Consultancy Ltd. Sarah will be presenting and facilitating a session Thursday April 23rd on Excellence in Employee Engagement at the Barcelona Employee Engagement Conference.
Click the colorful button below to see a conference brochure.
1. Briefly how did you develop the idea of a WIFI model of employee engagement?
My own practical experience of helping organisations better engage with team members in order to deliver excellent customer service, led me to identify that well being, information, fairness and involvement are key to ensuring that employees give off their best. The research that we have conducted at The Stairway Consultancy has shown that these are the key ingredients to engagement, although the degreee to which they are used and how they are applied may vary from company to company.
2. How do you see WELL-BEING fitting into employee engagement?
I define well being as the degree to which employees feel good about the organisation and how motivated they feel to give discretionary effort. This is a factor of how the company is perceived externally such as via efforts the business makes in relation to Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Branding as well as how employees are treated internally in relation to staff welfare such as the use of Family friendly policies, the promotion of equality and diversity, work-life balance, Job design and structure
3. What is the role of INFORMATION in engagement
People want to know where the organisation is going, what it needs to achieve and the part they play in this. Being informed in an appropriate and regular manner is a key element of engagement.
4. How can FAIRNESS be an important part of employee engagement?
Being treated in a fair and consistent manner encourages a climate of openness and respect. Importantly this aspect covers the treatment that individuals receive from their direct line manager as well as the leadership of the organisation. It also covers all aspects of the employee journey from how the individual is recruited and selected through to performance management, reward and recognition.
5. How do we foster INVOLVEMENT in engagement?
Managers can create a sense of ownership in their team members by involving them in decisions affecting their jobs using such methods as empowerment , coaching and providing access to senior management.
Sarah Cook – Managing Director – The Stairway Consultancy Ltd.
Friendly Cartoons
My friend John does wonderful cartoons that make me happy about work. View a slideshare of his cartoons here:
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