Are your employees getting enough sleep?

Sleep on it. We may not want employees to sleep on the job but we do want employees to get enough sleep for the job. Here is some important information from the Harvard Daily Stat:

People who suffer from insomnia take sick days twice as often as those who do not, according to a report by The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. The study found that over a six-month period, the condition cost employers an average of 4.4 days of wages for each untreated sufferer, plus indirect costs due to lower productivity and mistakes made because of lack of sleep.

The Harvard Daily Stat ran more information on napping a second day in a row. Who would have thought they would want to be caught napping? Here is the second tidbit:

Salary Nap 34% of American adults take a nap on a typical day. Napping is most common at the lower end of the pay scale — 42% of those with annual incomes below $30,000 told the Pew Research Center they had napped in the previous 24 hours — and it declines as income rises. 21% of those with yearly pay between $75,000 and $99,000 reported napping, the lowest of any income group. The urge (or the time) to nap returns among those who make more than $100,000: 33% had napped in the past day.

Are you helping employees get enough sleep for work and are you ensuring that their work is not keeping them up at night with worry or concern?

Photo Credit: wisdom of the night on Flickr by http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/2766737671/

Design your thinking to think like an employee engagement designer.

Garr Reynold’s Zen Magic. Garr Reynolds shares 10 tips about things that designers do or know that the rest of us can benefit from.  Here are the 10 tips plus a link to his slide presentation. After reading and viewing the tips I encourage you to read the longer article at this blog.

Apply it to employee engagement. Most importantly in our context, think about how you can apply these concepts to employee engagement.

The tips:

1. Embrace constraints
2. Practice restraint
3. Adopt the beginner’s mind
4. Check your ego at the door
5. Focus on the experience of the design
6. Become a master storyteller
7. Think communication not decoration
8. Obsess about ideas not tools
9. Clarity your intention
10. Sharpen your vision and curiosity and learn form the lessons around you
11. (Bonus) Learn the rules and know when to break them.

Motivation and Employee Engagement.

Kurt Nelson from Lantern created this colorful and informative slide presentation on motivation. Check out his work on motive + action. Kurt provided an overview of the 4 major factors of motivation:

• Acquire
• Bond
• Challenge & Comprehend
• Defend

Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, a father-son wrote an exceptional book about happiness, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth. Many of the experts on happiness are claiming it is one of the best, if not the best, book ever written on the subject.

Here is a very intriguing snippet from Gretchen Rubin’s interview with the Deniers:

Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?

Ed: Analyzing data always makes me happy. Seriously. Possibly I am a weird person. But when I examine data, I almost always feel that I am discovering something new. And it is a quiet activity that is calm, and I can just think and examine what is going on in the world via the data. I think what this example shows is that the happy activity need not be recreational; it could even be “work,” which might in some cases seem like play. And it shows the tremendous diversity — we don’t need to try “comfort food” just because some magazine recommends that. We need to find our own comfort activities.

A happy trinity of work:

• Can you identify what makes you happier?
• Can you blur the lines between work and play?
• Did you think it was possible to find happiness in examining data?

Take time and make efforts to ensure that you engage in work that contributes to your happiness and employee engagement will never feel like an onerous imposition.

David Zinger is a leading expert on employee engagement. He is committed to creating authentic and sustained employee engagement for the benefit of all. Contact David at (204) 254-2130 or Email dzinger@shaw.ca.

How well do we engage in validating others in letting them know what we see and in bringing out the best in them?

Don’t park your recognition for others.

Don’t wait to validate.

Seek out validation.

And smile smile smile.

A wonderful classic video on validation. It may be 16 minutes long but if you ask me it is worth every second to watch it. Enjoy.

If the video fails to open in this window, click here.

Are we providing the close connections or tools for employees to create record setting employee engagement?

The new swim suit trumps. Most of us are now well aware of the controversy in swimming about the use of the high tech suits that are contributing to record setting performance. There were 29 world records in 5 days and 7 world records set in 90 minutes. The technology has created heated controversy in sports and the world class swimming community as the new suit seems to trump what swimmers were able to do before.

What helps your people move? The new suit helps swimmers move quicker through the water. What helps your people move quicker or more effectively through their daily performances? Are you on the lookout for the tools or assistance we can offer employees to create and sustain their best performance?

On the surface. In most of our workplaces I don’t think it will be an article of clothing. Perhaps it is a new piece of software or opening up the firewalls to allow for more authentic and effective use of social media tools. Perhaps it is creating more flexibility in when and how people work.

The deep end. I suspect that some of our robust engaged performance will come not from something only skin deep. I think it will be our conversations, our connections, our sense of commitment to meaningful results. When you dive into yourself or your organization, what are the 2 or 3 keys things if people did differently would make the biggest difference. I love the work coming out of Vital Smarts and The Influencer that encourages people to zero in on results but then identify the 2 or 3 vital behaviors or moments that will make the biggest difference.

Suit up. I encourage you to dive deeply and swim quickly in search of the connections and tools that will help your people (and yourself) perform at your best.

Do you have a “swim” tip? I would love to hear from you if you already have something that creates fabulous performance in your organization. What is it and why does it work so well?

David Zinger is a leading expert on employee engagement. He is committed to creating authentic and sustained employee engagement for the benefit of all. Contact David at (204) 254-2130 or Email dzinger@shaw.ca.

Photo Credit: Will Trubridge on Flickr by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayhem/3601351382/

I believe happiness is part of employee engagement. Are you happy?

Here is a slide show on how to stay happy in an imperfect world: