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Employee Engagement: Learn to Love Your Bricks

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How fully do you engage with the work right in front of you?

one-brick

You know the story of the three bricklayers at the same work site.

When asked what they were doing one says, “I am laying bricks.” The next one says, “I am making a building.” The third says, “I am creating a cathedral.”

The story is often told as a moral story about seeing a greater purpose and meaning to your work. The third bricklayer is pointed out as a person with purpose. But I am partial to the first bricklayer who saw what was right in front of him. I am not opposed to cathedral builders and greater purposes but I believe we need to learn to love our bricks.

Feel your work.
See what you are making or doing right now.
Engage fully with what is right in front of you.
Dwell in the here and now.
Dedicate yourself to your bricks.
Be absorbed by your bricks.
Bring energy to your bricks.

We can always engage with the process even when we don’t have control over the final outcome. Know you did your work and you did your work well.

The church steering committee can always cancel the cathedral building project, your boss can fire you, the architect can demolish your wall, or an earthquake can crumble your building — but no one can take what you did away from you when you engage fully each day with your bricks.

There is an old zen saying,

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Just change the word enlightenment to engagement and work can give you all you will ever need in the moment of working.

Bricks can be each customer on the phone, the surgery you are doing right now, or the road you are navigating with your truck or bus.

Your brick is always the work right in front of you in this current moment.

Go ahead, get some kicks out of your bricks.

What’s your brick?

This post was inspired by my wife’s current experiences of work and is dedicated to Albert Johnson from Smiley Saskatchewan

 

—
David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and speaker whose bricks today were the chiclet keys on his keyboard and the words appearing on his screen.

 

 

5 Reasons to Engage with the Employee Engagement Network Right Now

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Employee Engagement Network Symbol

I encourage you to visit the Employee Engagement Network every week.

When you visit you will get:

  1. A new weekly cartoon to lighten your workload
  2. New blog posts on leadership, management, and engagement to enrich your viewpoint
  3. A fresh employee engagement video to help see work differently
  4. A new employee engagement tweet of the day or week to stay fully up-to-date on engagement
  5. A new slide presentation to engage your brain

The network has a wonderful design and is especially curated for engagement by myself.

Start your visit now, click here.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert.

The ABC’s of Engagement can Lighten the Dark Side of High Employee Engagement

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The New Employee Engagement: Putting a little light into the darkness of employee engagement.

3 Musts of the New Employee Engagement

Lewis Garrad and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote a Harvard Business Review blog on August 16 entitled: The Dark Side of High Employee Engagement. I encourage you to read it and to read the comments that follow the post. I appreciate the critical perspective on engagement.

I believe we should all keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out (this quote seems to have many attributions so we might want to be cautious about citing the source). I encourage you to be critical of the field of engagement and be critical of the criticisms of engagement. I appreciate skeptics but also encourage cynics to be skeptical of their cynicism.

It is very unfortunate that the authors refer to “meta-analytic studies” “correlations” “recent study” “research shows” “Studies” “our own research” “it is true”  and “research has found” without citing the actual sources.  Just as I am not a fan of anonymous surveys for employee engagement I am not a fan of citing anonymous research – most undergraduate university students would lose a lot of marks for submitting an essay when they fail to be specific about their sources.

I also wish just once the authors would offer their definition of employee engagement or the definition that they are using.  There are many definitions of engagement (Engaging for Success Report, 2009). My personal definition of engagement is neither perfect nor definitive but at least is a step towards clarity by defining engagement as: good work done well with others every day.

The provocative nature of the piece is encouraging, the potential threats of engagement are disconcerting, and the conclusion we need to take a more balanced view of employee engagement…and the common understanding of engagement as “happiness” is too simplistic is helpful. But I hope that getting along and getting ahead are not mutually exclusive and that engagement does not push an employee into burnout but may help them leave work with more energy. And to go out on a limb I also believe that work has the potential to contribute to our overall wellbeing. To me engagement is about the ABC‘s: Achieve results, Build relationships, Cultivate wellbeing. We need all 3.

Thanks Lewis and Tomas for writing a post to trigger some critical reflection on engagement as I see it and work with it, and I trust if you write another post you will be more specific with your definitions and sources.

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

Employee Engagement: What’s Cooking?

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I  recently  devoured Dan Charnas’ intriguing book, Work Clean: What Great Chefs Can Teach Us About Organizations. The book outlines the method of mise-en-place. Mise-en-place is a way of working, being focused and disciplined — many chefs believe it is a way of life.

I enjoyed reading the book and could not help but think of the important lessons for all of us as we engage in our work, either inside the kitchen or anywhere we encounter our work.

Work Clean Cover

The key take-away for me was a focus on preparation, process, and presence. These 3 P’s offer strong guidance for anyone wishing to enhance their engagement.

  • Chefs commit to a way of working where preparation is central. You always need to be thinking ahead as cooking cannot happen without the prep coming first. Charnas stated that preparation becomes, “a kind of spiritual practice: humble, tireless, and nonnegotiable.”
  • Process is how we execute the plan. Chefs pursue the best process to do just about everything. Dan says that process is about “becoming a high-functioning human being and being happier for it.” It makes both our work and ourselves better.
  • Presence is fully showing up for our work. It is about being fully engaged, becoming one with the work and being mindfully engaged in everything we do.

Preparation, process, and presence are not abstract concepts. They demand a fourth “P” – Practice. We need to make engaged work a daily practice. This fits well with my 8 word definition of employee engagement: good work done well with others every day.

Dan suggests three commitments for engaged work:

  1. Commit to preparation with a 30-minute daily planning session.
  2. Commit to a process that makes you better.
  3. Commit to being present in whatever you do.

I invite you to read the book to learn more, but even more importantly, I strongly encourage you to infuse your work with preparation, process, and presence as the essential ingredients in your employee engagement.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who enjoys cleaning the kitchen in creating a culinary tabula rasa for the next meal.

 

The New Employee Engagement

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The New Employee Engagement is good work, done well, with others, every day.

3 Musts of the New Employee Engagement

Engagement is not given to us.

Engagement is not something done to us.

Engagement is both our right and our responsibility.

It goes with us.

Each of us is responsible for own engagement while together we are mutually accountable for everyone’s engagement.

Powerful engagement is as simple as ABC: Achieve Results, Build Relationships, and Cultivate Wellbeing.