Here are 22 awful employee engagement mistakes.

1. Rules are for Rulers. Thinking employee engagement can be reduced to rules. Rules are for Rulers and board games, not for people. I don’t want to work for someone who thinks they are my Ruler or that they can Monopolize me.
2. HR and Beyond. Thinking employee engagement is just another HR issue. And while we are at it, I think it is time for HR to morph into this century. Just as we let go of Personnel it is time to let go of HR and become Internal Community Mobilizers or Internal People Artists or something that doesn’t just keep pairing humans with the word resource.
3. Measure madness. Thinking employee engagement is simply taking a survey or a pulse or some other measure of a person. Often these surveys contribute to disengagement and breed cynicism.
4. Them is us. Leaders and managers and supervisors looking at employee engagement as something that they are not a part of too. Leaders, managers, and supervisors…you are employees too. Don’t ever refer to employees as them because, “them is us.”
5. The answers begins with the questions. Thinking an external consultant has the best questions for your survey and failing to ask your employees what questions you should be asking about engagement. We don’t play a part in things we didn’t have a hand in creating.
6. Finish strong with a call to action. Not finishing the employee engagement survey (if you simply have to have one) with the question: What do you need to do right now to enhance your own engagement?
7. Villains and victims. Looking for villain to blame for lack of engagement, perceiving yourself to be a victim and then acting as if you are helpless. Management must stop villainizing unions just as unions must stop villainizing management. Do you really want to be a victim and spend your working days thinking you are helpless?
8. Be happy. Confusing employee engagement with having happy employees of satisfied employees and not focusing on the results that will make a difference. If organizations do not stay economically viable they will be valuable to no one including employees.
9. Stop the secret. Naively searching for the secrets that will unlock employee engagement and falling prey to clever copywriters or marketers who try and sell you tired and worn out tips cleverly disguised as secrets.
10. Better systems. Believing the answer to employee engagement relies in a better system like a new performance management system and failing to see the importance of authentic, connected, and engaged dialogue.
11. No time to talk. Thinking engaging dialogue will take too much time. I believe NASA has proven it can occur in about 45 seconds and save lives.
12. Don’t you trust me? Foisting all kinds of initiatives and deceits upon employees and bemoaning employees lack of trust as you call them your greatest resource and fire them at the first sign of trouble.
13. Avoiding immediacy with social media. Engaging employees through email, slogans, and cute You Tube CEO videos while failing to really show up and  talk with them face-to-face.
14. We need disengagement. Believing inflated statistics of disengagement offered by clever categorization schemes designed by consulting companies with vested interests in having disengaged employees as a problem to be solved. Why don’t I find these huge numbers of disengaged employees when I go from company to company talking directly with employees.
15. What’s in a name? Believing anonymous survey data. Engagement needs a name and a face and authentic safe conversation that join all of us together. Part of the problem with engagement is that employees feel ignored or anonymous…so do you really want me to believe that an anonymous survey is actually a step in the right direction towards engagement.
16. Vampires and stakes. Using the term employee engagement as a euphemism for “we just want to suck more work out of our people.”  We are not vampires and we all need to have a stake in our work.
17. Catch a WIFM. Employees thinking that there is no benefit for them to be engaged at work. When you engage at work you are more engaged at home, your work will be more rewarding and your days will be less taxing, and you are accepting payment for your services and if the organization is so disengaging then engage in changing the organization or leave.
18. Joined at the hip. Always combining the word engagement with employee and neglecting employer engagement. Engagement is bidirectional and needs energy and input from everyone.
19. This is business. Only getting on board with employee engagement because you are convinced of the business case and not doing it because in your heart you know it is the right thing for your customers, your employees, and your shareholders or stakeholders.
20. Drop that carrot. Don’t use the image or word carrot in reference to employees. We are not horses and even horses probably aren’t too fond of the carrot and stick. So stick your carrot and find a better more respectful metaphor for motivation and employees.
21. Declare a truce on the talent war. Drop the war metaphor too. There is not a war for talent. Make love not war. Remember that love doesn’t mean being mushy, holding hands, and singing Kumbaya around the conference table — it means having the discipline, concentration, and patience to make the workplace a safe place to create results and enhance relationships.
22. We all make mistakes. Thinking you know the mistakes of employee engagement and making the mistake of writing them down as if they are rules that can be corrected. See, we all make mistakes and I am sure you spotted some of mine here.

Embracing our humanness. Engagement is a human endeavor. Humans are fallible. Let’s openly and honestly see our mistakes, do what we can to correct them, and learn from them as we move forward into new richer and healthier mistakes.

Employee Engagement and Serving Customers

One of the keys in the Zinger Model of Employee Engagement is Serving Customers.  I am very fortunate to have received the two following stories from Doug Shaw outlining being an engaged employee and providing fully engaged service to customers.

I appreciate that Doug was able to incorporate the employee engagement in one sentence exercise from the Employee Engagement Network.

Stop Doing Dumb Things to Customers

December 2008. Myself and a few colleagues were so frustrated by the company’s unwillingness to listen to the front line and customers. In turn this led to lots of dumb things happening. We invited colleagues from all across the business to come together and talk about two things.

1. Their best customer experience in the past 7 days.
2. What single thing could BT do to stop doing dumb things to customers? The event was buzzing, really buzzing.

We shared stories and agreed on just a few improvement ideas. You can read about the ideas here. One in particular was to be more open, more public, less groupthink and corporatetalk, more real, more engaging.

So – I took the output from the event and began to share it internally and externally. The response was great, we very quickly had thousands of people reading and contributing. Everything from congratulations, constructive criticism, more ideas, people poo-pooing the whole concept, everything.

We started to integrate other engagement ideas, for example we ran a version of David Zinger’s excellent engagement in one sentence. We had loads of contributions and hundreds of people downloaded the paper we put online. We started a discussion group on linkedin and made connections with other networks, all very open source thinking.

By the time I left BT in June 2009 the internal blog was one of the most read in the whole of BT, people loved it and looked forward to it coming out. It became a place people went to have a bit of a laugh, dial out some of the fear in the workplace and get a sense of purpose. Also some of the ideas we’d been sent and talked about had come to life. Having been co-created they were being owned, and done. Why? Well this whole thing reflected and supported our front line colleagues and through them, our customers. They were represented, and given a voice. I am extremely proud of the effect this experiment had on colleagues, customers and me. I continue to develop the public blog.

My Customer Challenge Cup

When I worked for BT plc, the company ran a My Customer Challenge Cup. Staff were encouraged to enter the challenge by identifying customer problems and proposing ways of solving the problems. Initial rounds were judged online, then semis at a local hotel with a grand final at a nice holiday destination. I don’t know how many teams enter, but it’s a lot. This has been running for a few years and I think it’s a great piece of employee/customer engagement. Here’s an entry to the competition I was proud to captain in 2008:

A colleague and I discovered we were trashing all our old mobile phones to landfill waste. At the same time we read a customer survey stating that our customers wanted us to recycle more and keep doing our bit for charity. We engaged with all relevant stakeholders to build a contract with a third party who took over the phone disposal/recycling/reuse process. We developed a simple system for our employees and customers to return unwanted handsets which then get dealt with according to their suitability. The company gains by reducing hazardous waste and meeting stated customer needs. The company also saved around £3m through the contract. The customer gains by seeing us act responsibly and our charity gains by receiving some of the profit from sale of reusable handsets. We publicised this idea through an internal customer satisfaction competition, and we put details in internal press and our shareholder report magazine and our annual CSR report. Thousands of people participated in the scheme, I know that well over 20,000 handsets had passed through the scheme in less than 18 months.

If you would like to visit Doug Shaw’s excellent blog site: Stop Doing Dumb Things To Customers: Great ideas helping to create powerful customer experiences click here.

I encourage you to leverage Doug’s stories for either the ideas he offers or for your own stories of employee engagement. What are your stories and experiences demonstrating the links between employee engagement and engaged customer service?

I believe employee engagement can contribute to happiness and that happiness contributes to employee engagement. To see how happiness fits in the Zinger Employee Engagement Model, click here.

I very much enjoyed this slideshare presentation on How to Stay Happy.

Cartoon by John Junson:

Employee engagement and employee recognition can be very powerful when fused with a program to help employees and employers find healthy ways to address the impact of family violence in the workplace!

Manitoba caring. I am so proud of the Province of Manitoba and their initiative to support employees and employers in developing powerful and helpful responses in the workplace to employees experiencing family violence.

Family violence does not stay at home when Manitobans go to work

Family Violence and the Workplace: It’s everyone’s business

Gratitude. I feel honored to co-facilitate 1/2 day sessions with Ms. Joy Dupont from the Department of Justice to help people in the workplace (managers, peers, union members, etc) develop understanding and healthy responses to family violence.

Resource kit. If you would like to view the rich, informative, and helpful kit, click here.

Family violence topics. The workshop and online kit includes:

• Introduction to Employer’s Toolkit
• What is Family Violence?
• Why Employers Should Care About Family Violence
• Tips on Talking to an Employee About Family Violence
• Family Violence and the Law
• What Employers Can do

Deep engagement and recognition. It is not my intention to outline the entire initiative but to help you realize that this initiative is also a very powerful way to create recognition in the workplace and to foster robust and authentic employee engagement.

Recognize this. Employee recognition occurs when we “really” see what is going on with the people we work with.We often think of workplace recognition as being a long service pin, an award, or verbal praise for a job well done. I believe this program demonstrates a very robust form of recognition: really seeing what is going on for employees, having the gumption to be available to talk about it or even initiate the discussion, and putting multiple resources in place to inform and help employees.

A workplace caring community. When recognition takes place at that level within an organization we have a strong connected community that cares for employees and takes robust steps to helping them create work/life balance.

Now that’s employee engagement. When family violence situations are handled well by an employer they are taking powerful steps to contribute to employee engagement. During the training, we show a short video in the course and here are a few comments from the people talking about their experiences:

I am so proud of my company, a fellow employee who witnessed how his company responded to a co-workers situation of family violence.

I am happy to work here, an employee who experienced family violence and the company efforts to help her.

The people around here walk on water, I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else, I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else, from an employee who was so appreciative of the help she recieved from the company, her boss, and fellow employees.

Take heart. Don’t overlook this powerful pathways to employee engagement and recognition that reside within the hearts, minds, and connections within organizations and between individuals.

55

Freedom 55. In Canada, we have an insurance company who has extolled the virtues of financial planning through the campaign of Freedom 55. It looks like with good financial planning you can enjoy a life of leisure and cruising.

Free choice. I turned 55 today and I feel free. I am not looking for freedom from work I am looking for the freedom to make choices and to contribute for the next 20 years to the field of employee engagement. One of the beautiful aspects about the time we live in, from my perspective, is the freedom to choose and the number of options available for working.

Retired is tired. For some people, retirement means being tired twice: first tired of working than tired from not working.

Beginner’s mind. At 55 I feel like I am just beginning and bringing some of the freshness of what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki stated about beginners mind: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. We have so many potential pathways to foster authentic and fuller levels of employee engagement for the benefit of all.

2010 to 2030! Watch out for the next 20 years at www.davidzinger.com and www.employeeengagement.ning.com, we’ve only just begun.

Engage along with me, the best is yet to be,

David Zinger

I just turned 55 on September 24, 2009.

It is time to go ALL IN.

I am fully engaged and will work to fully engage others.

Watch for many development for the next 20 years.

I have so many people to thank. Here is just a handful…

• Jack Zinger, my sandwich of father and son
• Genevieve Hornstein (my mother who changed her name but never lost empathy),
• Susan Gerlach, who else would stay married to me over the past 20 years and be the mother of 3 children we both adore,
• Jack who I mentioned already and Katharine and Luke Zinger, you have given me the gift, challenge, and learning of being a father,
• Neil and Valerie Zinger my brother and sister who took me under their wings and helped me take flight
• John Junson and Tony Fast who have been my friends for over 35 years…I am so loyal to both of you and value a friendship that has lasted a lifetime
• Peter Dyck who has been my mentor and friend and the person who has been to more “M” restaurants we me than anyone else,
• David Hewlett and Susan Morrow, how often as a couple do you find friends with the same name,
• Jack Gerlach for his incredible stories and Betty who was the best mother-in-law a son-in-law could ever ask for,
• My neighbours on Harry Wyatt who taught me about a neighbourhood community,

• Bruce and Debbie MacLeod who keep me running and moving quickly at cards,
• Andy and Marie Wheeler who open their hearts and cottage to Susan and I.
• Sarah and Joey Bertschinger and Rico and Deneen and the rest of that family for letting me have a wonderful black lab without having to do the daily dog owner stuff,

• Dushyanta Persaud my PZ partner, friend and co-worker,
• Richard Carreiro my mentor friend, and thesis advisor,
• Ray Perry my mentor from Psychology
• Jean-Francois Hivon who will always be Jean-Francois and not just JF,
• Gail Pishack my Saskatchwan soul mate,
• Denise Bisonnette who evoked poetry from a pragmatist,
• Peter Hart a wonderful people artist who recognized me and helped me to recognize myself,
• Aganetha Dyck who taught me about bees and plans to teach me so much more,
• All my fantastic blogging buddies (Rosa Say, Phil Gerbyshak, Lisa Haneberg, Steve Roesler, JD Meier, Dan Oestreich, CV Harquail, the JJL community, and about 400 others) who have given me so much of themselves over the past 5 years.

It is my birthday and I will not blow out candles because all of you listed above and so many many more of you that I failed to mention here…have lit my fire!

I would not be me without all of you.

Thank you for the best gift I could ever imagine…a small piece of each of you. WOW.

Thank you to those I mentioned and thank you to everyone else I failed to mention who have given me so much.

I plan to fully honor each of you during the next 20 years of my work in engagement!

Stop The Blame Drain.

A recent article on employee engagement declared: “Not Enough Employee Engagement? Blame Your Boss.”

Poor drainage. Are you caught in the employee engagement blame drain.

Low IQ. Wally Bock, a blogger I admire very much,  wrote the article at Human Resources IQ. I  hated the title (Wally did not write the title) and liked the article:  Not Enough Employee Engagement? Blame Your Boss.

Training, support, and development. I appreciated how Wally concluded the article:

You increase productivity and employee engagement when you have good supervisors. We’ve known this for decades. But still most companies don’t pay attention. We as organizations need to do a better job of selecting people who are likely to do a good job as supervisors. We need to give them the proper training in supervisory skills and support them in their work. Most importantly, we need to help them develop.

Right on. I can certainly live, thrive, work, and engage with that perspective.

Engagement abdication. When we blame the boss (or anyone else for that matter) we abdicate our personal responsibility for engagement. We place our relationship to work in another person’s hands.

4-year old wisdom. I refuse to do this because even if you manage me, and manage me poorly, I live by the statement of my son when he was 4 years old. He stomped his feet, and defiantly declared: “You’re not the boss of me.”

Don’t blame. I know relationships play a big role in engagement and having a toxic supervisor or manager can certainly have a detrimental impact on employee engagement. But don’t blame. Yes managers and leaders and supervisors are pivotal in engagement but don’t blame them if you are disengaged.

Engaged corrections. And of course, don’t blame yourself or something else. Take a good look at the situation, get some perspective, and determine how you can engage in something to make it better. For example, here are a few quick alternatives:

• Ensure you have done what you can directly with the boss to improve the situation.
• Bosses, like employees, need healthy performance management feedback.
• Hold Crucial Conversations on the facts, your stories, and what you really want.
• Give the organization helpful information about the situation so that they can address the issue or issues.
• Make it your pet project to change the boss.
• Find a way to work around the bad boss.
• Put energy into getting into another department or workplace.

If you can laugh, you can last. Of course always remember, if you can laugh you can last. Don’t let anyone take your humor from you. It may even be okay in this situation to act like a 4 year old, stomp your feet, and shout: “You’re not the boss of me!”