The state of ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity is enough to have a disengaging impact even on those of us who are very engaged. Fear can supplant focus and worry can substitute for work.

Terrence Seamon started a forum on the Employee Engagement Network to discuss employee engagement in a downturn. I wrote a few comments and realized I compelled to write a detailed post because I have strong recommendations on this topic.

Terrence asked what managers should be doing to manage employee engagement during a downturn.

Here is what I initially wrote on the forum:

I think one of the big keys is not to respond out of fear. We are engaged because it benefits each of us: satisfaction, happiness, contribution, value, controlling what we can control, etc.. Sometimes engagement can help us not to worry but rather focus on the task at hand. I don’t think a downturn should be an excuse to stop engagement initiatives, it may be time to redouble the investment for the benefit of the individual, the organization, the customer, and the economy. So when we have an economic downturn we need an engagement up-turn to balance the social, psychological, and economic impact by doing what we can, with what we’ve got, where we are, to make a difference for all.

To build on what I wrote and to add structure to the comment I offered, I will write a detailed list of the important keys in part 2 of this post on Tuesday October 14th.

Get the news!

I receive news alerts on employee engagement. If you are interested in the latest news and blog posts on the topic I have created a new page at the Employee Engagement Network.

This page lists all the latest articles and posts on the topic. I appreciate having this all in one place as opposed to searching a number of emails.

If you want to read the news, click here.

Photo Credit: Newspaper and tea by http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackcustard/81680010/

Yes! outlines 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive.

If you want to influence others to higher levels of employee engagement strive to enhance your request with the personal touch.

An ounce of personalized extra effort is worth a pound of persuasion. the more personalized you make a request, the more likely you’ll be to get someone to agree that request. More specifically, this research shows that in the office or in the community, a personalized sticky not could highlight the importance of your reports and communications and prevent them from becoming the proverbial needle in a haystack of other reports, letters, and mailings that are also vying for attention. What’s more, the timeliness and quality of compliance with your request are likely to be enhance as well.

Photo credit: and yes I said yes by http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsgreg/707054525/

Reggie Jackson stated about preparation:

Preparation can be defined in three words, leave nothing undone.

Photo Credit: Kemp Swings For the Fence by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mykalburns/2889363556/

1. When given the opportunity to use our ability to reason, make decisions, and take responsibility for our actions, we experience joy at work.

2. The purpose of business is not to maximize profits for shareholders but to steward our resources to serve the world in an economically sustainable way.

3. Attempt to create the most fun workplace in the history of the world.

4. Eliminate management, organization charts, job descriptions, and hourly wages.

5. Fairness means treating everybody differently.

6. Principles and values must guide all decisions.

7. Put other stakeholders (shareholders, customers, suppliers, etc) equal to or above yourself.

8. Everyone must get advice before making a decision. If you don’t seek advice, “you’re fired.”

9. A “good” decision should make all the stakeholders unhappy because no individual or group got all they wanted.

10. Lead with passion, humility, and love.

Can we find both joy and engagement as employees?

by David Zinger

Part 2 of a 2 Part Interview

Jerry Pounds is a management consultant with over 30 years of experience in applying positive reinforcement, reward, and recognition strategies to business and industry.  He has written and spoken on the application and problematic nature of corporate motivational and rewards programs and personally trained thousands of executives, managers, and supervisors in the use of praise and rewards. Jerry is a thoughtful and engaging blogger and writes Positive Influence a blog that offers positive strategies that encourage employee engagement.

4.  What should we know about recognition within organizations?

Recognition has to be used thoughtfully-recognition can easily destroy teamwork and create internal competition-irrespective of management’s intentions.  Public group recognition needs to be followed by private, individual feedback.  Your best employees need to get input that corroborates their self-perception-but not in front of other employees.

Celebrate group performance with food and laughter.  Good fellowship and good will create altruism and set the stage for discretionary effort.  If you have a supervisor who knows how to use positive reinforcement, the discretionary effort prompted by creating a positive emotional environment can be positively reinforced when it occurs.

Anytime management recognizes someone as the best, the most, the leader…it creates discord among employees.  Recognition systems seldom factor in barriers and constraints-some employees have to work twice as hard as others just to do an average job because they are limited by dysfunctional processes and antiquated systems.

5. You are very focused on managers in your blog. It seems you like the down-to-earth direct gumption and interaction of managers. Can you briefly elaborate on this?

Everyone is spending too much time trying to learn how to be leaders and managers.  Learn how to be a healthy human being first.  Employee engagement is a product of emotional bonding with one’s supervisor-of a healthy interpersonal relationship. Supervisors need to understand how their behavior creates a positive or negative emotional bond.

Use self-management to reframe your role as a supervisor; acknowledge with humility that people don’t work for you; you are there to take care of them.  The role of a leader is auspicious; the supervisor is in charge of his or her flock-their welfare is your responsibility. Make an effort to adopt that mindset.

Stop trying to learn how to be a better boss and learn how to be a humane coach…a kind mentor.  Think of how much better the workplace would be if everyone in authority was a trained counselor-if they knew how to get people to do their best without using raw authority.  Managing the emotions-the feelings of your employees is the fastest route to discretionary effort.

6.  Jerry, in conclusion, you have a number of great posts on your site. Do you have one or two favorites you would recommend to readers?

• All the World’s a Stage;
• Participative Positive Reinforcement: The Power of Peer Reinforcement;
• Reinforcing Work Dialogs: The Emotional Catalyst for Employee Engagement:
• Reinforcing Work Dialogs: The Key to Engagement;
• Positive Reinforcement the Way Nature Intended.

I strongly encourage you to subscribe to Jerry’s blog and make his blog part of your regular study to improve employee engagement.

by David Zinger

Part 1 of a 2 Part Interview

Jerry Pounds is a management consultant with over 30 years of experience in applying positive reinforcement, reward, and recognition strategies to business and industry.  He has written and spoken on the application and problematic nature of corporate motivational and rewards programs and personally trained thousands of executives, managers, and supervisors in the use of praise and rewards. Jerry is a thoughtful and engaging blogger and writes Positive Influence a blog that offers positive strategies that encourage employee engagement.

1. Jerry, what got you so interested and involved in positive strategies to encourage employee engagement? 

While I was working my way through college, I got a job as a clinical assistant at a psychiatric hospital that used behavior modification.  Positive reinforcement was used to encourage behaviors that would get the patients back into the community as productive people. 

In 1971 I began consulting to business and industry—where the command and control leadership model promoted a “that’s what the hell that get paid for,” approach to managing people. That model did not work; I knew that positive reinforcement would work to elicit high levels of engagement and performance.  Having worked at hourly jobs for several years, I knew what it was like to work for punitive, authoritarian supervisors. 
 

2. What are 3 to 5 key actions a manager can take to encourage employee engagement? 

1. Treat all of your direct reports with respect.  I think real engagement is emotional commitment to the company which is direct product of your relationship to your supervisor. The supervisor’s verbal and non-verbal behavior has to send the message that they respect the employee, even when they are presenting corrective feedback. You have to be in charge of your emotions and be aware of your own behavior—the effect it has on others.  Envision a moral leader—someone you respect and honor—and talk to everyone as if you were talking to him or her.  I use Albert Schweitzer.
2. Talk to your employees—I mean talk, not lecture or posture. Show an active interest in their daily job life. I don’t mean socialize, although that’s fine at some level.  I mean talk to them about the job, safety, their work, systems, processes, resources—give them feedback about what they have done that is contributory; let them know what they need to do differently
3. Learn how to listen—one of the hardest things for anyone in a position of authority to do.  Talking at people becomes a habit.  Listening is one of the best ways to positively reinforce people.  Look them in the eye, nod your head as they speak, and punch good comments with—“Right; uh huh; that’s great; how did that work…?”  Attention is a positive reinforcer that we don’t use tactically.  

3. What is the strength of a behavioral model to focus on engagement? 

The behavioral model has been misinterpreted as a prescription for praise.  I don’t like that word when used in the work setting—and neither do managers or employees.  Providing employees with objective positive and corrective feedback is good for them and for business. 

The behavioral model points out the value of managing behavior in addition to results.  Results are easy to throw plaques and tangible rewards at; managing (strengthening critical safe or productive behavior) requires a manager to be where the work is being done—where employees are behaving.  It requires the manager to provide some form of positive verbal or non-verbal consequence for employee behavior that is linked to safety, quality, or customer service. 

If you talk to your employees frequently (several times a week) and weave performance coaching feedback into the dialog, it has the proper effect.  Noting the things an employee did right is positive reinforcement—most of the time.  Walking out into the workplace every week or so and saying something appreciatory about something they did comes across as insincere and manipulative. 

Positive reinforcement, recognition, and rewards can be perceived as gimmicks if they are not delivered properly. Nobody wants to work for someone who is using tactics with them—trying scripted approaches to get them to work harder.  Nobody wants to work for someone who cannot talk and listen respectfully, treat them with dignity and behave like a human.  You have to be able to say, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake.”  Or, “You were right about X, I should have listened to you.”

Read part 2 in the next post on Employee Engagement Zingers.

by David Zinger

Troubling surveys. I am troubled by the plethora of employee engagement surveys and assessments. There are endless statistics generated to look at the various percentages of employees who range from full engagement to disengagement.

Change in 10 seconds. I believe that many of us have our relationship with work change in 10 seconds.

Fluctuating engagement. When I look at my own work - my engagement with each task and each person fluctuates. I am engaged in one task for the first hour of the day…I procrastinate on the next thing demanding my attention and end up doing an Internet search on puffins rather than making some important phone calls.

Disengagement as texting during meetings. I engage fully with one of the teams I am on and go the extra mile with full discretionary effort yet while sitting in a meeting with the next team I am barely present and thinking about other tasks while I watch 3 other members of the team text-ing their way right out of the meeting as the engage with their Blackberries.

Macro and mirco engagement. So we have these global assessements or macro views of employee engagement but our engagement fluctuates guite a lot each day. We must ensure that our macro view of engagement does not blind us to these micro moment changes of engagement. Perhaps we might be missing phenomenal levels of engagement by reducing it to a single number. Reducing employee engagement to a singe number may be a gross oversimplification of engagement that does a diservice to the actual daily fluctuations of engagement.

22% disengagement for 56% of their time. Rather than a number saying 22% of our employees are disengaged, we may need to refine this to say 22% of our employees are disengaged about 56% of their time. So even if your are a “disengaged” employee, if I find out what engages you I might help you work effectively most of the time.

Strengths as engagement. I believe this is where the current work of Marcus Buckingham on strengths is so important. Rather than create a list of strengths we look at those activities that strengthen us. From his perspective, strengths are those activities we fully engage in.

Leader action plan. Spot what engages people where you work, have discussions about this with them, and work at crafting their jobs to help them fully engage with their strengths.

Engaged in writing to stay disengaged from grading. By the way, I was 100% engaged with writing this article but I know I am engaged here as a partial avoidance or disengagement from marking student papers in the university course I am teaching.

What about you? What do you think about employee engagement assessments? Are we missing the moment? Write a comment and let us know.

400 Posts. This is the 400th. post of Employee Engagement Zingers. This number has been achieved one post at a time and I hope that you have found the writing helpful for employee engagement, strength based leadership, and general life engagement.

Leader/Manager Focus. I plan to make some changes later this fall. You will find more detailed posts offering some specific education and engagement actions. I also plan to offer specific guidance and writing for leaders and managers to enhance their own engagement and to improve the employee engagement of their organizations.

Good-bye Slacker Manager - Hello Fully Engaged Zinger. I have been writing 1/2 of Slacker Manager for the past 13 months. In addition to 400 posts here I wrote 200 posts in the last 13 months at Slacker Manager. I will end my relationship with Slacker Manager on October 30th. I had always appreciated the paradox of being so focused on engagement while also writing a blog called: Slacker Manager. The message beginning November 2008 is clear…no more slack!

The leading employee engagement site. I plan to devote more time to post on this site and ensure it remains the leading site for people interested in the various facets, strategies, tactics, assessments, implications, and applications of employee engagement.

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

by David Zinger

Getting Up and Getting Back. Leadership and engagement are more than getting to the top or the mountain or achieving quarterly results. We need to come down from our heights and establish connections with others.

Brotherhood of the rope. This site’s original focus was on strength based leadership. I have also written previously about the Brotherhood of the Rope. This was a concept used by Edmund Hillary about the physical and psychological connection between climbers. On mountains and life there is a curious intersection of results and relationships. Hillary was appalled when 42 climbers achieved the summit of Everest yet failed to try and save the life of David Sharp in the spring of 2006. David died on the mountain.

Dead Lucky. Two week later Lincoln Hall was rescued in some similar circumstances. I just finished reading Hall’s book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest. Until reading this book I never realized how much was entailed in Lincoln getting down from Everest including being bullied and beaten, fighting terrible frostbite, and warding off hallucinations. It could take hours to move inches.

Loss. In his own words: The day I climbed Mount Everest was the day I died. I lost my life, the tips of eight fingers, a toe and a half, thirty-seven pounds, and two-thirds of the energy I need to live in my normal fashion.

United yet fallible. Yet Hall wrote about never giving up. I appreciated his conclusions on the last page of this inspiring, frightening, and educational book:

My habitual responses to everyday issues were deprogrammed. I found myself holding fewer opinions when I realized that they only created dichotomies, and the next step from there is judgment. Too often we judge when we have no need to do so, and just as often we ignore…What I do have is a stronger feeling of the unity of which I am a part…I am just as fallible and imperfect as I have always been.

Hall-way learning. Hopefully none of us will ever have to go through Hall’s ordeal but by reading the book and thinking about our own lives perhaps we can learn from his experience. I encourage you to read the book to draw your own conclusions.

One step. I hope it might contribute to a combination of more sensitivity and tenacity, fused with an appreciation of complexity. This would also be wedded with the reality that ascending or descending is done one step at a time.

Gumption. My conclusions from reading the book were a further confirmation that everything is more complex than it seems, we often only get half the story, it often isn’t over when we think it is over, yet we can accomplish much when we don’t give up and we encounter others who are prepared to sacrifice to help us.

Your question. How are you fusing relationships and results in your life, family, and work?

You’ll need to register with BrightTALK but this will also give you access to creating your own monthly talk!

I appreciate her daily discipline and the simple elegance of the things she draws. I encourage you to take a few moments before clicking away to appreciate the image. Use it as a micro-moment disengagement to refresh yourself before getting reengaged in your performance.

From Elizabeth Perry: http://www.elizabethperry.com/woolgathering/2008/09/cough-drop.html

Here are the first 14 of the 125 outstanding blogs displayed on Alltop that can contribute to your career development.

1. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/
2. http://feeds.feedburner.com/wsj/career_journal?format=xml
3. http://www.45things.com/blog.php
4. http://www.jobacle.com/blog/
5. http://blog.standoutjobs.com/
6. http://www.brazencareerist.com/
7. http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/get_a_life_blog/
8. http://blog.generationrelations.com/
9. http://www.jtanddale.com/
10. http://www.allthingsworkplace.com/
11. http://fortifyservices.blogspot.com/
12. http://www.jongordon.com/blog/
13. http://shiftingcareers.blogs.nytimes.com/
14. http://www.davidzinger.com/

But wait before you go clicking on each one, there is a much easier way to monitor and mine these blogs for gems of career development.

Click here to vist Alltop: Top Career News and preview all 125 blogs on a page. Each blog has the title for the last five posts and if you scan over the title you will be able to read the first section of each post. This means that you can quickly scan over 600 career posts on one page…now that’s fast and extensive career development.

Alltop has careers covered along with just about everything else from A to Y.

by David Zinger

John Kotter has done a lot of work to help us manage and navigate through organizational change. Kotter is back with A Sense of Urgency.

Kotter maintains the number one problem organizations face when trying to execute change is creating a sense of urgency. We need to create and recreate urgency because it is not a natural state of affairs.

In the field of employee engagement, how urgent are your actions, initiatives, and programs? I encourage you to make them more urgent by reading this post and using the resources listed at the end of this article.

Here are 3 quotations from Kotter’s Change This Manifesto on Urgency published today (September 10th.).

The few people who do have smoke pouring into their offices are furious that somebody has started a fire. But instead of demonstrating a real sense of urgency to solve the problem, starting today, they complain.

In a fast-moving and changing world, a sleepy or steadfast contentment with the status quo can create disaster—literally, disaster.

With a true sense of urgency, people want to come to work each day ready to cooperate energetically and responsively with intelligent initiatives from others. And they do.

Kotter offers 4 tactics to establish urgency:

1. Bring the outside in.
2. Behave with urgency everyday.
3. Find opportunity in crises.
4. Deal with the NoNos

Are you ready to get Urgent? Here is how to proceed.

• Immediately Read Kotter’s free Change This Manifesto: It All Starts With A Sense of Urgency.
• Go online and purchase Kotter’s Book: A Sense of Urgency.
• While you wait for the book watch the following Harvard Business Review 10:41 minute interview with John on The Importance of Urgency.
• Get started now by taking urgent action on engagement for yourself and for your organization.

If the video failed to load in this window you can watch it here.

I wasn’t going to upload this post until tomorrow but I got the sense of urgency.

And now, I hope you…GET URGENT!

Micheal Stallard wrote a wonderful book on employee engagement: Fired Up or Burned Out. Michael knows that connections are the keys to engagement and he does a wonderful job of keeping this at the top of our minds (and hearts).

I have the honor of joining Michael on Thursday September 11 at 11 a.m. Eastern time for a 1/2 hour discussion of engagement and connection. I invite you to join us for this free and informative webinar.

Visit Michael’s site at http://www.michaelleestallard.com/ to get the details and the link to connect with us.

Die Happy Today

This is not meant as a fluffy question where you go out and seize buckets of lists or yell Latin phrases such as carpe diem at the top of your lungs. It is meant more as the first wake up call of the day before we hit the snooze button.

Part of my answer to this question is a site I have hosted since Ground Hog Day 2008.

Click here to sample Die Happy Today. The site embrace wonderful images with quick thoughts. It is meant to be viewed in about 10 to 30 seconds. Then, get on with life.

I encourage you to visit the site and take a quick scroll down the range of posts, enjoy the pictures, and come back every so often to ensure that you die happy today.

Here is the reason  this site came into existence:

Why are you writing Die Happy Today? The title came to me on a flight from Winnipeg to Halifax in December 2007. I would have preferred an extra Diet Coke or cookies but the flight on Westjet left me with the question. If the plane crashed, would I die happy today?

This is not a theoretical question as I was a private pilot, took a plane from an incipient spin into a full spin, fell from about 4,000 feet, waited for my life to pass before my eyes - it didn’t happen - and I ended up with about 100 feet to spare from literally going six feet under. I often suppress this especially when I fly but at 54 it is time to unleash the learning.

I want this site to be very useful to you (not to make you afraid of flying) and I also want it to function as a reminder…if this was the last day would I die happy?

If the answer is yes, we are on track and doing well. If the answer is no than we better figure out what we need to do. By the way, happiness to me is not being some goofy looking yellow smiley face, it is a lot more complex than that. We’ll get into that over the next year.

If we are not alive and happy, what are the chances we will be engaged for the work we need to do?

Mitch Ditkoff wrote a helpful manifesto if you are trying to develop breakthrough ideas.

Here are 5 of the 17  ideas that Mitch offers the reader:

1. Follow your fascination
2. Immerse
3. Tolerate ambiguity
4. Hang out with diverse groups of people
5. Look for happy accidents

Click here to read the PDF of the entire manifesto and get busy developing breakthrough ideas to foster employee engagement.