David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker — David Zinger

Employee Engagement: Work Should Be a Force For Good

May 12, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

In April 2014, I personally defined employee engagement as: good work done well with others every day.

I wanted to make engagement both simple and good. I am delighted to see CIPD, the leading work organization in the UK spearhead a strong focus on good work. Here is a wonderful short video by Chief Executive Peter Cheese launching CIPD’s Manifesto for Work 2017, underlining the fundamental importance of good work:

Here is a snippet from this short video:

Work can and should be a force for good. It should be good for individuals, good for organizations, and therefore also good for economies and wider societies. Good work should be purposeful and meaningful. It should be inclusive and it should be fair.

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement speaker, educator, and consultant who works on engagement around the world.

Personal Tracking and Employee Engagement

May 9, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

The next step in employee engagement for individuals and organizations is to fully engage the quantified self.

I define employee engagement as: good work done well with others every day. I believe employees are personally responsible for their own engagement while each of us is accountable for the influence we have on the engagement levels of other employees.

Our antiquated methods of survey data and analytics in employee engagement do little to help us measure and master engagement. The bi-annual or annual survey of engagement is a data anachronism resembling a flip phone in the age of smart phones and pulse surveys are at best bandages losing their stickiness to halt the haemorrhaging of useful data.

What if we offered employees a device to help them with their daily engagement, a device that acts like their own engagement version of Jiminy Cricket, which measures what matters?

Let’s imagine a day in the life of an employee connected to a personal engagement device

Prabir wakes up and checks his E-Zone (Engagement Zone) watch to determine his rest and recovery overnight because he wants to know his physical readiness for the day ahead.

His device takes his heart rate and other biomeasures to give him a baseline of physical energy for the day as he arrives at work. Based on the measures, it offers Prabir two suggestions to sustain his energy and engagement for the day.

His engagement monitoring device helps him determine his engagement zone, the period of work between 5 and 90 minutes that is ideal for him to stay fully engaged with a task. It tracks his level of vigor, absorption, and dedication for each task based on the work of Arnold Bakker on work engagement and suggests the length of time Prabir should stay on task before switching to something else. Prabir does this because it helps him stay in the flow and assists him in doing more vital ‘deep work’ as outlined by Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and author of Deep Work.

When Prabir is working with a team, he gets measures of honest signals based on the work of Sandy Pentland, to determine how effectively his team is working. His device monitors overall psychological safety at work and notifies him when safety may be at risk for himself or others. The devise both triggers and keeps a measure of Prabir’s high-quality interactions based on the work of Jane Dutton and the contributions of these interactions to his energy and the energy of the overall workplace.

Throughout the day the device takes measure of his engagement. Prabir has his own engagement dashboard, including a personal profile of his engagement strengths and challenges. The device can be configured by Prabir to give him engagement nudges at appropriate times.

Prabir owns his own data but he has the option to aggregate his engagement data with the teams he works with, his department, and the larger organization.

There are additional social and gamification options that he can choose to activate if they help him to be more engaged. Prabir’s engagement device is loaded with notifications and recommendations to enhance and enliven engagement. Over time, Prabir’s interaction with his engagement device has created customized and personalized analytic recommendations that guide him in being more effective, efficient, and engaged.

We do not have to imagine most of what was offered in Prabir’s day as the technology and research behind it is already available or will be through rapid development and refinement. The current use of health tracking and smart phones demonstrates how engaged people are with mobile technology and tracking devices. According to a research by Deloitte, on an average, people look at their phones over 40 times a day while those in the age group 18-24 years, look at their phones over 80 times a day. And the number of “looks” has been steadily increasing. Moreover, a GfK survey that studied 20,000 people in 16 countries reveals that 1 in 3 people track their health and fitness already with an app or device.

Data is part of the essential lifeblood of an individual, and it should be owned by the individual with an option to share with the organization. It should not be a resource we pay survey consultancies with large fees, only to be returned as slick PowerPoint slides and a generic list of drivers and levers. We need to create and sustain real-time and relevant engagement benchmarks laced with immediate measurement and feedback.

When we make data more personal and owned first by the very person creating it, we need to step up fully and address issues of honesty, trust, and psychological safety in organizations where we no longer hide behind anonymous data gathering approaches. New engagement technologies will function as a trigger to focus on building bonds of trust between individuals and organizations because the organization will not have access to the data without trust. The new currency for data collection for employee engagement will be human trust not large survey consulting fees.

In 2009, roughly when the first Fitbit appeared, I wrote about Sandy Pentland’s work on “honest signals” and the application of social measures to determine real-time social and team engagement. His group measured elements like synchrony and mimicry to measure unconscious channels of communication between people.

New engagement technologies will function as a trigger to focus on building bonds of trust between individuals and organizations In the near future, we envision a new generation of management tools that are enabled by the sociometer’s capability to produce real-time maps of an organization’s information flow and function. These sensible organizations will use these new sensing capabilities to make sure that the sales department really is talking to the marketing department, and that employees aren’t overloaded and miserable.

The next step in employee engagement for individuals and organizations is to fully engage the quantified self. Technology challenges in doing this may be less than the ethical and psychological safety challenges that will be required for this to work. This technological opportunity might not only transform metrics and analytics, it may contribute to increased levels of trust and safety for individuals and organizations. Sandy Pentland alluded to this in 2009,

To achieve this, it will take special care to strike a balance between the “big brother” nature of such information and the benefits that can be reaped. We believe that this balance can be achieved by giving employees control of their own information, creating a transparent system with immediate benefits to everyone.

So, how are you preparing for the next big thing in employee engagement?

References

1 http://www.davidzinger.com/honest-signals-andemployee- engagement-part-1-2138/

This article originally appeared in People Matters: Click here to open the PDF of this article from People Matters.

David Zinger is a workplace engagement educator focused on personal engagement, work engagement, and employee engagement

A Personal Employee Engagement Watershed: Stop Putting Lipstick on Camels

April 26, 2017 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Whoever said “it’s nothing personal” was not talking about work.

Iguazu Falls in Argentina (February 2017) by David Zinger

This post is personal. I apologize in advance for not offering you levers, drivers, or 11 action items to boost engagement. I took the pictures in the post, I am not inserting stock photography of people jumping with joy at work – perhaps stock photography should be only used for livestock not to represent real people at work.

I hope sharing a personal experience encourages you to reflect upon your own personal experiences with work.

At the end of this post, I will outline new directions and implications of what I learned for my future contributions to work, management, leadership, and employee engagement .

I experienced an employee engagement watershed day on November 3, 2016. A watershed is an event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or state of affairs.

On November 3rd, I was conducting a 2-day workshop on Employee Engagement in Troubling Times in Dubai with 3 people from Egypt. On the second day their phones starting vibrating and ringing around morning coffee break bringing them distressing economic news. During our second day together, the Egyptian currency was devalued 40%. Interest rates were raised 3% and subsidies were removed from basic goods. They were still doing the same work but within the course of just a few hours it was worth less, by about 50%.

Later that day, after I had returned to my hotel room in Dubai , my wife called me from Winnipeg, Canada, half way around the world from Dubai. Susan told me that she had been walked out of her leadership position without cause at a health care facility. I am not saying this because Susan is my wife, I am saying this because it is true: Susan is one of the most engaged people I know. She has extremely high levels of work engagement yet her years of work and contribution, irrespective of her engagement, was taken from her in a few minutes in a vacuous meeting room.

That day felt devastating and demoralizing. External events can literally make work worth less or make you feel worthless in relationship to your work. I felt a sense of violation against the hard work people were doing. Perhaps because I was in Dubai it triggered the belief that my work in employee engagement was equivalent to putting lipstick on camels.

Regardless of how much lipstick you apply, it is still a camel!

It was over 5 months ago that I felt washed away and carried downstream away from my work on employee engagement over the past 10 years.

During this interval, I had the good fortune in February to visit the powerful and mighty Iguazu Falls in Argentina. Iguazu Falls personifies a real watershed. I saw and felt the power of rushing water. My wife, son, and I took a boat that went through some of the falls. We were drenched and the pressure of the water left us feeling that we had experience a liquid sandblast. Yet, the next day we walked to an isolated falls where you could relax under the water and be rejuvenated and refreshed through the power of falling water.

I intend to transform the November 3rd watershed day away from being sandblasted by organizations and towards being refreshed by the stream of possibilities that lie, often dormant, in our work and engagement.

Not only do I feel differently, I want it to change how I work, and what I work on.

It is time for me to put the lipstick tube down and face up to all that is involved in engagement at work. I intend to be stronger and more personal in my writing, expressions, and work on engagement. You can see some of the early developments of this in my recent posts on LinkedIn and my regular contributions on the Halogen TalentSpace blog:

My posts on LinkedIn have become more personal and more down to earth. See some of my popular recent posts here. I especially invite you to read my post: Engaged Employees Are Wanted But Not Always Welcomed.
My posts on Halogen are embracing more personal stories — see them here. Read my current post: The Great Engagement Robbery: How Others Influence Engagement.

Watch for a stronger more personal focus on my keynotes, coaching, consulting, workshops, and online courses during the next eight months in 2017.

In addition, a major project during 2017 is researching and interviewing people for my fifth book on engagement and work. The working title is Wisdom at Work. I am interviewing 100 people who have retired to draw out their stories, perspectives, and wisdom on how to work. I chose retired people as they offer a full perspective on work and career and they are removed from day-to-day work and organizational politics. I believe they will feel freer to open up about work and engagement. I have only interviewed 12 of my 100 people but I have learned so much already, including:

Often the most personal is the most universal.
It is harder to define work than you might think.
Recognition from peers and clients trumps recognition from organizations and bosses.
You don’t have to like all of your work but if you don’t like 80% of your work you need to make changes.
You can create your own psychological safety at work…

Don’t forget, work is personal.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert and educator who won’t be buying any lipstick for camels in the near future.

Stephen Goldberg Interviews David Zinger on Employee Engagement

March 9, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Here is an interview I did with Stephen Goldberg on the ABC’s of employee engagement:

David Zinger is an employee engagement consultant, coach, educator, and speaker.

Employee Engagement: Replacing Employees with Robots

March 6, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

A winning cartoon from John Junson on replacing employees with robots: