Employee Engagement and Happiness

Employee engagement is seeing a stronger focus on well-being in 2010. Happiness is a part of our well-being. I encourage you to watch this video and take steps to enhance your happiness.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. He offers exceptional contributions on employee engagement for leaders, managers, and employees. David founded and moderates the 2270 member Employee Engagement Network. His website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and strength based leadership. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Book David for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement today for 2010.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  Phone 204 254 2130  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Dance the MOJO 2-Step!

Are you taking the right steps to finding your Mojo at work? Marshall Goldsmith defined Mojo as “that positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.”  I just finished rereading Marshall Goldsmith’s book Mojo.  Click here to read my previous review.

Dance a Daily MOJO 2-Step Assessment:

Step 1: Track Your Tasks.

Record your activities for a day.

Step 2: Analyze your Tasks

How much long term benefit or meaning did I experience form each task?

How much short term satisfaction or happiness did I experience from each task?

Meaning and happiness. If you don’t score high on meaning and happiness it is time to enhance your mojo.

MOJO Meter App & Beyond the 2 Step. If you want to learn more read MOJO: How to get it, how to keepit, how to get it back if you lose it. To get more detailed analysis or tools including a MOJO meter app visit www.mojothebook.com.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with global organizations and individuals to foster engagement.  David  is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant. He founded the 2751 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020!

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Employee Morale: Driving Performance in Challenging Times by David Bowles and Cary Cooper.

David and Cary created a well-written and well thought out book on employee morale and the links between morale and performance. The biggest benefit of morale is individual and organizational performance and the authors present the evidence for “morale correlating highly with, and driving, performance is strong and growing” (p.59). Morale can empower of disable the organization’s ability to achieve its goals.

A question (questions) of morale. Here is a thoughtful section that began Chapter 2:

Its Monday morning in Beijing, London or Sydney; do you really know how your employees there are doing?

And then:

• How do you know?
• From whom did you learn it?
• Do those from whom you learned it represent the whole organization?
• When did you least find out?
• Could there have been a shift since then?
• Are you SURE that what you know is true?
• What are the consequences if what you think is true, is not?

Management upgrade. The most practical chapter was chapter 5 on creating/maintaining the high morale organization.  We can manage morale and the strongest effect on morale is a “management upgrade.” The authors offer a number of perspective and suggestions around strengthening morale through strengthening management.

I recommend the book and it would make a great textbook for a university course or Morale and Organizational Behavior.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with organizations and individuals foster engagement.  He is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant who founded the 2700 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts/articles on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020.

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Employee Engagement Extra

Here is David Clarke’s well-designed short slide share presentation on motivation and engagement using Dan Pink’s drive perspective.

Enjoy and engage.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with global organizations and individuals to foster engagement.  David  is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant. He founded the 2751 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020!

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

See What I Mean?

There is a mean in meaning

but there doesn’t have to be

meanness at work.

The meaning of work

works for me

when I work on me

while working with meaning.

Say what you mean,

mean what you say,

and never be mean.

That’s what I mean.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with global organizations and individuals to foster engagement.  David  is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant. He founded the 2751 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020!

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Disheartening News on Employee Engagement

Less than 1 in 5 public-service employees in the UK

trust senior managers or are consulted by them on important decisions

Summary comment. Ben Willmott, senior public policy adviser, CIPD, stated:

“Against this background it is worrying to see that public-sector employees have increasingly negative attitudes to their senior managers, with less than a fifth saying they trust senior managers or are consulted by them on important decisions.

One of the difficulties facing senior public sector managers in the current environment, in which major spending cuts have been announced but few details have been released, is that they too may also be in the dark and may not yet know how many jobs will have to go.

However it is important that, if this is the case, they communicate the situation to staff and continue to have an open dialogue with employees as more information comes through. People are more likely to accept tough decisions if they are kept informed and given the right information at the right time.”

Cautious perspective. I am not in the UK, so I am not seeing this directly but I believe that trust is a must or employee engagement is a bust. I hope this situation can be improved for employees, managers, leaders, and all the stakeholders who feel the impact of this. We must strive to ensure that work matters.

Help. To my friends and readers in the UK, is this as bad as it sounds?

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with organizations and individuals foster engagement.  He is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant who founded the 2700 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts/articles on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020.

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Right off the top…

Quick Picks and Great Pics.

Click here or on the image below to engage with us!

The Employee Engagement Network has over 2700 members who bring their eclectic and extensive experience and views to all things related to employee engagement.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with organizations and individuals foster engagement.  He is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant who founded the 2700 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts/articles on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020.

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Perfect Tens

The countdown is over and the Employee Engagement Network’s fifth Free E-Book is now available.

Here are the Top 10 Ways to Use This Book:

Click on the cover below to read your top Tens!

Top Tens of Employee Engagement

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with organizations and individuals foster engagement.  He is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant who founded the 2700 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts/articles on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020.

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Perfect 10

Here is an outline of the list and contributors to the Top Tens of Employee Engagement.  You can click on the cover or the link at the end to read or download the e-book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Top Ten Today At Work Cartoons ~ John Junson
Strategies to Impact Engagement Across an Organization ~ Jennifer Schulte
Ten Questions Designed To Engage ~ Steve Roesler
10 Ways to Spot an Engaged Employee ~ Ian Buckingham
Top Ten Ways to Define and Refine Your Culture to Engage ~ Tim Wright
10 Rules of Employee Engagement ~ Susan Stamm
10 Ways to Build an Employee Engagement Improvement Strategy that Really Works! ~ Faye Schmidt
Ch-ch-changes! Ten Tips for Keeping Employees Engaged During Change ~ Lisa Forsyth
10 Tips for Engaging a Project Team ~ Raven Young
Ten Engaging Conversations ~ Debbie Payne
10 Ways to Engage Remote Teams ~ Wayne Turmel
Generational Engagement: 10 Ways to Engage Gen X & Gen Y Employees! ~ Scott Span
10 Engagement Traps, Tips and Talking Points for Managers ~ Michael Aitken
10 Steps to: Realizing Engagement through Global Strategic Recognition ~ Derek Irvine
10 Ways to Build, Grow and Support your Offshore Outsourcing Team ~ Katherine M. Hingst
Employee engagement: How to be engaged when you work for someone who isn’t. ~ Maureen Mack
10 Quick and Easy Ways to Engage Employees Every Day ~ Sanna Wolstenholme
Engaging Leadership (and Leaders) ~ John Kmiec
10 Skills to Engage in Your Work ~ Scot Herrick
Ten Tips for Managers ~ Jean Douglas
Top 10 Things Engaging Managers Do ~ Kelley Eskridge
Ten Ways for Leaders to Connect with Employees ~ Michael Lee Stallard
The Engaging Manager ~ Terrence H. Seamon
10 Engagement-Building Behaviors for the Boss ~ Wally Bock
Engaging People from the Very Top – The CEOs Top 10 Engagement List ~ Dr Neal Knight-Turvey
10 Ways to Create a Sense of Community When Leading A Remote Team ~ Alec Satin
Deep Constructive Conversations and Engagement ~ Mario Gastaldi
A Top Ten Tunes of Engagement ~ David Marklew
The Ten Green Engagement Commandments ~ Samantha Lizars and Peter Eyres
10 Ways to Measure the Impact of Employee Engagement Interventions ~ Stephen J. Gill
10 Principles of Employee Engagement ~ David Zinger

Click here or on the cover at the top of the post to download or view the free Employee Engagement Top 10 Book.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with organizations and individuals foster engagement.  He is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant who founded the 2700 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts/articles on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020.

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com

Number 6.

I was honored to be in the Top Ten as the sixth place Top 25 Online Leadership Influencers by HR Examiner. This assessment is done based on reach, resonance, and relevance. It was an honor to finish just 3 places behind Tom Peters.

Here is the summary of the ranking:

Here is the  outline of HR Examiner’s method and conclusion:

Dr. Todd Dewett, a professor at Wright State University agreed to partner with us on this project. Dr. Dewett specializes in leadership and organizational effectiveness. We asked him to help tailor the algorithm we used to crawl the web to figure out who matters on the topic of leadership.

If you’ve followed the previous Top 25 lists, you might remember the Traackr process. First, we build a set of keywords thst describe the area under investigsation. Traackr then scavenges the web with spiders and scrapers to capture all of the results of searches featuring those terms.

That body of data is then mined to determine the names that reoccur most often. Those names are further evaluated to determine a score on each of three variables:

Together, the three measures are combined into a single score which is the foundation of ranking.

Finding 1: The list appears to have missed virtually everyone with a name in the leadesrship business.There are plenty of ways to generate a list that matches predetermined expectations. For instance, Jurgen Appelo has used an algorithm to compile a list of the Top 150 Blogs on Leadership. He combines Google Page Rank, Bing hit count, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Authority, Twitter Grader, PostRank and FeedBurner count into a single measure. (The method is described here). Jurgen’s approach begins with a list of the blogs you want to rank. The Traackr algorithm is more oriented to discovery. Implication: Established authors and thinkers are losing ground to newer voices.

Finding 2: No One Group Owns Leadership Thought There are several groups of people who believe they have a clear franchise on the ‘leadershipbusiness’. Motivational consultants and authors, the academics who specialize in Leadership and Organizational Development,leadership trainers, sports organizations and the military are just a few of the groups who think they ‘own’ the franchise. In fact, what seems to be happening is that amatuers, bloggers and social media enthusiasts are developing first mover advantage on the social web. Leadership (and other academic specialties) appear to be in the process of being disrupted. Implication: Older and more established voices need to learn new communications channels in order to stay relevant.

Finding 3: There is a Shift in The Importance of Breadth versus Depth Another way of digesting this point is to notice that speed and volume trump ‘quality’ in the current web content environment. As long as search engines reward based on the volume of work, thoughtful and better researched material will fall to the bottom of search results. In a prior time, influence couldn’t be measured in any particular way. These early experiments involve measuring based on output and content. An inherent bias towards quantity will be hard to overcome without sematic search.Implication: Communicating in the new media is critical to being heard.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., works with organizations and individuals foster engagement.  He is a writer, educator, speaker, and consultant who founded the 2700 member Employee Engagement Network. David’s website offers you  1100 free posts/articles on the engagement. David is committed to fostering a movement to increase employee engagement 20% by 2020.

Connect with David Zinger today to improve engagement where you work.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca  -  Phone 204 254 2130  -  Website: www.davidzinger.com