Employee Engagement with David Zinger
The best in employee engagement...
Poor PowerPoint presentation can help insomniacs finally get some sleep as someone clicks from slide to boring slide and the person with insomniac slides right into mind numbing sleep. The presenter shows 300 slides in 2 hours and only reads from the slides.
Well designed PowerPoint presentations can engage, enliven, and inform.
I encourage you to click here or click on the image below and scan some of my 99 favorite presentations from Slideshare.
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 Michael Kanazawa’s 5 sentences on engagement:
You can find out more information about Michael work by visiting www.disseropartners.com and about his book at www.bigideastobigresults.com.
Here is a collection of Today at Work.
Can you see happiness in a blade of grass?
What seeds happiness for you?
In February 2009, more employed American adults than in August 2008 said they take pride in their company, see a promising future there, and go “above and beyond” for the company’s good. From the Harvard Business Review daily stat (Source: Modern Survey’s Employee Engagement Index).
How do you explain the change in US numbers?
What are you catching these days? Are you catching what is thrown to you? How do you catch something? Do you make it easy for others to catch what you are throwing their way?
There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart…pursue those. ~ Michael Nolan
A question of catching. The One Ball lends itself so well to catch. Do you focus more on catching or throwing? Stop and think about catching for a moment? Do you relax into catching or do you stiffen up? Are you concerned you might miss “the ball” or that you might drop it? Do you feel you are catching on or always trying to catch up?
Definitions. Let’s start with a few definitions of catch. Here are some common definitions for catch:
When you think of catch which definitions are most at top of mind for you? Do you give enough attention and energy to catching?
How? Catching is difficult to explain, here is a short explanation from How to catch a ball by Karl S. Kruszelnicki
Practically everybody has thrown and caught some kind of a ball. Balls are essential to so many sports – but the weird thing is, we still don’t understand exactly how we catch a ball. Once a ball has been launched, any physicist can solve the equations that will predict exactly where the ball will land. But in a game of baseball, once we hear the crack of the ball on the bat, we don’t sit down and start solving a few differential equations – no, we immediately start moving on a path that takes us to where the ball will land. How do we do it? Well, according to one of the scientists who has tried to solve this deceptively-simple problem, catching a ball involves “physics, engineering control theory, physiology, kinaesthesiology, ethology, perception, and the study of expertise”
Catch of the week. How about making catch your catch of the week. You’ll catch on to catching by becoming more mindful of the act and attitude of catching. Who do you like to play catch with?
Catching employee engagement. In conclusion here are some connections to catching and employee engagement:
Never try to catch two frogs with one hand ~ Chinese Proverb
I have long appreciated the work of Marshall Goldsmith. I have often made use of his ideas ranging from feed-forward to having an accountability partner.
Marshall Goldsmith’s library site offers the best free leadership coaching resources I access. Each month Marshall outlines the featured resources. Click the image below to view his page for April.
In addition, there is an alphabetical listing of his articles.
Click here to read over 100 great free articles written by Marshall.
I guarantee you will experience a higher personal level of employee engagement while also contributing to fuller employee engagement for others if you read and follow Marshall Goldsmith’s contributions.
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 Zane Safrit’s 5 sentences on engagement:
To learn more from Zane Safrit or to learn more about Zane Safrit, click here.
To read how other thought leaders completed these 5 sentences, click here.
This was the most popular slideshare on employee engagement that I created. As I have so many new readers and subscribers I thought I would repost it. View these 26 slides on the pathway to fuller engagement:
If the show does not load properly in the window, click here.
Here is a short interview with Peder Anderlind VP Employee Engagement at Credit Suisse. Peder will be presenting a case study on employee engagement on Thursday April 23rd in Barcelona at the 2nd Annual Employee Engagement Conference. Click the Barcelona button below for the conference brochure.
1. What are the 2 or 3 keys you see to engaging your people.
Leadership (Top management, as well as direct managers) need to be perceived as authentically embracing and living the values of the firm. Unless leadership are seen as “walking the talk”, followership can not be expected, which is an important element to engagement. Managers need to understand what drives/dilutes engagement for their individual team members and need to adapt their interaction with them accordingly. Employees should feel accountability in driving their own level of engagement. Identify barriers to engagement and do something about it.
2. How do you engage the line manager and leadership to drive engagement.
We use every opportunity we can to explain that engagement is correlated to higher retention, higher productivity and an easier time to attract talents to their teams. In essence higher engagement will make them more successful (and expose them to fewer management related challenges). There is also a certain level of competitiveness that comes from sharing data that includes comparisons with their peers. We see a lot of energy from areas that do not want to be perceived as an area with low engagement. We also try to present engagement data within other HR data. For example link of engagement with performance, potential, attrition, profitability…
3. How do you share information and best practices about engagement.
We look for opportunities to broker best practices and experiences between high/low perceptions across the various engagement drivers. We also look for areas working on similar challenges to work together. We have learned however that in many cases it is preferable for areas to reflect on their own solutions around engagement challenges, as 1) it drives accountability, 2) many best practices can not simply be copy/pasted into other areas, as root issues tend to be fairly unique (historical context, culture, leadership and employee profile…) and 3) we want management of the various areas to reflect on human capital opportunities / challenges and being served with solutions tend to reduce time for reflection.
Barcelona Conference. I will be chairing the Employee Engagement Conference in Barcelona. I look forward to hearing more from Peder about engagement at Credit Suisse. Email Julien Salvi julien.salvi@teneoevents.eu to get information or to register for the conference.
Click here for the conference brochure: barcelona-employee-engagement-conference
David Zinger from Winnipeg Canada is an expert on engagement. He founded the 4500 member Employee Engagement Network. His work is designed to increase engagement for your organization.
He is a management consultant with over 25 years of experience. His education services are enhanced by his 20 year background as a University educator for the University of Manitoba and over 15 years managing an employee assistance program for Seagram Ltd.
David's services mix current research with practical approaches to build authentic relationships and achieve powerful results. To learn more about David, click on "About David" on the link bar near the top of this site.
Contact David Zinger at:
Phone (204) 254-2130.
Email dzinger@shaw.ca
