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You are here: Home / Archives for David Zinger

David Zinger talks about Employee Engagement with the Engagement Zone

May 1, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

This interview originally appeared on the Engagement Zone site one month ago. I invite you to read it if you’d like more information about my perspective on employee engagement.

David Zinger – CEO of The Employee Engagement Network

 

 

 

We at The Engagement Zone sat down with the CEO of The Employee Engagement Network & Engagement 101 Fellow – David Zinger. 

David Zinger an employee engagement speaker, author and coach that founded the Employee Engagement Network. With 15 years’ experience as a counsellor and coach at Seagram, Zinger has a depth of experience in working with employees and helping them reach their full potential.

In this interview, we ask David about the keys of employee engagement and where he sees the field in the future.

EZ: What does employee engagement mean to you?

DAVID: Employee engagement is all about the ABC’s of work: Achieve results. Build relationships. Cultivate wellbeing. I define it in 8 words: good work done well with others every day.

EZ: What are your three tips for companies looking to drive engagement in their organisations?

DAVID: Stop being mechanical. Employee engagement is not about driving and levers, it is a human experience. We need to move away from engagement as something we do “to” or “for” employees into something we do with employees. Stop thinking about engagement as a noun and view it as a verb – engage – requiring engaging actions every day.

Employees are responsible for their own engagement and we are each accountable for our influence on other’s engagement. Ensure that you help all employees (leaders, managers, frontline) be ready, able, and willing to do what is necessary to engage based on personal responsibility.

Stop trusting consultancies and tips (even ones like this from me). Test them for yourself and your organization to see if they work. Move from best case to test case. Your people are smarter than you think — they could develop a survey that is unique for your organization. And if you think you need to benchmark just use the standard bell curve from statistics and you have a decent benchmark free of charge. Engagement requires relationships so enliven this classic line from positive deviancy: never do anything about me without me.

EZ: What do you feel are the biggest pitfalls that companies should look to avoid when executing their engagement strategy?

DAVID:

  • Stop looking for engagement, there is no way to engagement, to engage is the way.
  • Never go on a retreat to create strategy rather charge into the organization and draw the strategy out rather than giving strategy as something ready-made.
  • Work towards more open and transparent approaches to engagement.
  • Stop making people invisible by giving them anonymous surveys that make it impossible to personalize the feedback you received from employees in an anonymous survey. Employees should be the first to see their own engagement levels if you believe in personal responsibility for employee engagement.
  • Strive towards making your organization as psychologically safe as possible and one day you could stop all this anonymous stuff and make engagement authentic and real.
  • Disengagement should not be a punishable offence; it needs to be a trigger for an engaging conversation.
  • Never sell or pay for your personal and organizational data to be taken from you. You should own your own engagement data and individuals within the organization should own their engagement data.

EZ: Why do employees fail to buy in when companies try to ramp up engagement?

DAVID: Employees fail to buy in because of the “buy in” metaphor. Stop selling engagement. Engagement needs to be seen much more as an experience to be lived, shared, and worked with than a problem to be solved. If you want to get everyone on the same page they must be invited to write on the page.

EZ: What skills are most useful for everyone to have when trying to move towards a culture of engagement?

DAVID:

  • The ability and skills to listen.
  • The ability to get comfortable with error and mistakes.
  • The ability to have engaging conversations any time there is a positive or negative variance from expectation.
  • Skills in understanding “the numbers” and to have a stat for every story and a story for every stat.
  • The skills to make work psychologically safe for both ourselves and others.
  • Robust relationships skills wedded with know how to infuse wellbeing into the very fabric of our work.
  • The ability to simultaneously connect and care for both results and relationships.

 

EZ: You’re a judge for the Employee Engagement awards. What will you be looking for in the entries?

DAVID: If I was a judge, I am on a quest to see that all 3 of the ABC’s of work are covered.

  • Is this creating results that matter to organizations and individuals?
  • Does engagement build relationships?
  • Is engagement integrated into how the organizations works, manages and leads.
  • Does engagement create wellbeing derived from the very act of working?
  • Is engagement of benefit to all?

I want to see a genuine and authentic mixture of pride and humility in an entry.

EZ: How important do you think it is to connect Employee Engagement to Customer Engagement and why?

DAVID: We are in this together and engagement is connection so yes they are linked. Perhaps we could just call it people or human engagement and people can be either employees or customers and often we are both.

EZ: What’s the best EE idea you’ve seen a company roll out/attempt and wish you’d had that idea yourself?

DAVID: I love to see companies that don’t trust all this engagement stuff. They test it and I love when I see even a quasi-experimental design used to offer more control and to get at engagement causation. I think it is wonderful and creatively disruptive to have operations or finance be the engagement champions rather than automatically thinking it should only be housed in HR or Internal Communications. The best ideas fuse engagement with other key interests so that what you are doing in improving performance management, engagement, wellbeing, and operations occur all at the same time with key actions and behavior to engage!

EZ: What’s the worst and glad that you didn’t?

DAVID: When the anonymous survey numbers become the sole focus of engagement and some managers demand that employees give them high numbers. Any idea that is manipulation disguised as engagement — so that what is called engagement does just the opposite and creates deeper disengagement.

EZ: Since you entered the world of work, what’s the best experience you’ve had?

DAVID: The best has always been embedded in relationships that made work better, made me better and made the other person better. This “better” is all 3 of the ABC’s at one: results, relationships, and wellbeing.

EZ: What’s the worst?

DAVID: When I have witnessed people with very high work engagement let go because the organization was threatened by their high level of engagement and their willingness to challenge the status quo. Sometimes I think organizations fail to understand what it fully means to be engaged and are disguising manipulation as engagement as a feeble attempt to get better profits or performance.

EZ: If you could only roll out only one programme, which of the following would you choose and why? Wellbeing, Leadership Development or Recognition.

DAVID: Engagement is a daily process, not a program. Programs tend to have a shorter shelf life than behavioral processes integrated into everyday practice. Engagement offers us the opportunity not to be “siloed” by department or function. Engagement is best as the verb engage and engaging actions can be infused into all we do.

EZ: Which person (dead or alive) would you love to be able to come in and speak to your workforce/colleagues?

DAVID: Charlie Chaplin, because he wouldn’t say much but he once said, “life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long shot.” I also know, if we can laugh, we can last :).

Seriously, one of Engage for Success’ four enablers is employee voice so I want to hear genuine, real, and authentic employee voice fused with the full realization that in organizations we are all employees from the first day hire to the retiring CEO.

EZ: Favourite song to crank up after a tough day at work?

DAVID: I want the music of work that is inside of us be turned into a symphony of relationships creating results and wellbeing simultaneously. I sometimes hum at work and I love how Shonda Rhimes called full engagement, “The Hum”. I strongly encourage you to view this 2-minute summary video on “The Hum”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUvRbJc30vw

Meaningful results are vital. I think we should all hear the lyrics from the Spice Girls annoying earworm song Wannabe: “so tell me what you want what you really really want.” Engagement must help both individuals and organizations work on meaningful results that matters to both so we should have ongoing conversations with organizations letting employee know what they “want, what they really really want” and employees are asked what they “want, what they really, really want” as employees craft their work for the benefit of themselves and the organization.

EZ: Best place in the world you have visited?

David Zinger with his wife Susan

David’s wife Susan and youngest son, Luke

DAVID: I have been around the world and have visited so many wonderful places from the Taj Mahal in India to Iguazu Falls in Argentina but it is never the place that is best — it is the people I travel with and the people we meet. Engaging people can transform a dreary airport waiting lounge into a wonderful place of meeting and conversation. I like sites while I love people.

EZ: The place in the world you’d most like to visit?

DAVID: There is an old quotation that goes, “If you make where you are going more important than where you are, there may be no point in going.” So, this is not so much about a place for me as it is about time and dwelling fully in the present moment. I visit the present moment occasionally but the past, the future, and endless thoughts churning though my mind make dwelling in the present a challenging visit to prolong yet I strive to keep going there again and again and again.

EZ: Where is employee engagement headed as we move towards 2020?

I think employee engagement is going in two directions at once and both spell the end of engagement.

The first direction is that engagement will die as a management fad that failed to deliver on its promise.

The second is that engagement dies or disappears because it fully integrates into how we work, manage, and lead so that we do not need to use it as a distinct phrase. I often say, there is no way to engagement, to engage is the way. My work is to help employee engagement die the second death so engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

To get in touch with David Zinger, go to the following websites or send him an email:

www.davidzinger.com

www.employeeengagement.ning.com

david@davidzinger.com

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger, David Zinger employee engagement educator, employee engagement 2020, employee engagement interview, Engagement Zone, future of employee engagement, speaker

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.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger, David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker, Dubai, Egypt employee engagement, Employee Engagement, fired, Iguzau Falls, lipstick on a camel, personal engagement, watershed, Winnipeg, Wisdom at Work, work engagement, working wisdom

Where do you go to learn about work, engagement, management and leadership?

January 16, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

This last weekend I left Winnipeg and -33 degrees to go to Santiago and plus 33 degrees.

I am looking forward to learning about employee engagement, work, leadership, management, and Chile while I am there. I have travelled the world to teach about employee engagement but the reward for me has been to travel the word to learn about engagement. If nothing else, Santiago will unfreeze my view of work (and I won’t have to shovel snow for a month)!

The poetry of Pablo Neruda has opened my heart before I even touched down in Santiago. I invite you to read my short LinkedIN post about this.

You don’t have to be a world traveller but I believe it is valuable to ask yourself: Where do I go to learn about work, engagement, management, and leadership?

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and speaker who travels the world in search of engagement.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: Chile and employee engagement, David Zinger, employee engagement speaker, leadership, management, work, work engagement

Career Zingers #8: Trash Talk for 2018

January 12, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Career Development: Empty Your Bins

On a cold January morning, the garbage truck and recycling truck picked up my trash and recyclables. Every week two large bins of material from my home either gets thrown out or recycled. Too many of us in our career development are always trying to add, attain, obtain, or achieve. I invite you to respond to the following three questions: (1) Am I able to identify what I need to throw out of my life versus what I can reuse or recycle? (2) What is weighing me down in my career that I need to trash? (3) What skills, strengths, and experience can I recycle or transform into a new way of working? Before you add more to your career, take out the trash!

…

David Zinger is focused on career, employee, and work engagement in 2018.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: Attain vs. Abstain, career development, career engagement, David Zinger, Employee Engagement, Trash Talk

Are your managers and leaders strong enough for employee engagement?

December 14, 2016 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Yesterday I wrote a short post on LinkedIN.

Within 12 hours it was my most popular post on LinkedIn this year. It was from my heart and looked at wanting but not necessarily welcoming engaged employees.

Read the full post by clicking on the title: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/engaged-employees-wanted-always-welcomed-david-zinger.

Here is a short video about the topic:

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert from Winnipeg, Canada

 

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger, Employee Engagement, employee engagement speaker, leadership, management

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David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

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