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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.

What we Lost Shifting Personal Engagement to Employee Engagement

January 24, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

William Kahn if the founding father of employee engagement. We conducted a 2-part interview on his views and experiences with engagement.

An interview with William Kahn, the founding father of employee engagement. https://t.co/TT9gts7hmP

— David Zinger (@davidzinger) January 23, 2017

Here is a quote from William during the interview on what we lost as we shifted terminology from personal engagement to employee engagement,

The shift in the industry to “employee” engagement is, in many ways, a reversal of that idea, and of my intention. The industry focus is on how leaders can get people to work harder and with more energy on behalf of their organizations, with less focus on whether people are bringing their best, cherished selves into that work. I think that the power of the ideas about personal engagement gets lost in that reimagined focus.

To read the full interview go here.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement speaker and expert. He founded the 7200 member Employee Engagement Network.

9 Lessons From Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice

December 10, 2013 by David Zinger 1 Comment

39 Lessons from Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice: The Psychology of Engagement

Lessons 4 to 11: (Reading time: 5 minutes)

Routledge publishing released a new employee engagement textbook, Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice edited by Catherine Truss, Rick Delbridge, Kerstin Alfes, Amanda Shantz and Emma Soane. This post will outline 9 lessons from the four chapters in part 1 of the textbook: The psychology of engagement. My lessons are illustrative and idiosyncratic rather then comprehensive and general. They are also a little quirky and may imply more than the authors intended.

The lessons:

4. We can not afford to be psyched out at work. Because of changes in work over the previous few decades the workplace requires psychological skills and abilities from the workforce. For example, organizational change requires adaptation while job crafting requires personal initiative. Employees need to bring their entire person to work and their psychological abilities and skills will influence levels of engagement. While there has been extensive focus on the social media elements of work, this section of the book brings the psychological elements of work into sharper focus.

5. DAVE makes a difference at work. Wilmar Schaufeli and others believe that work engagement is composed of vigor, dedication, and absorption. With the addition of energy I created the acronym DAVE: Dedication, Absorption, Vigor, and Energy. Ultimately we want the vigor of high levels of energy, resilience and persistence; the dedication of pride, involvement, and significance; and the absorption of concentration and flow within work. Use DAVE to assess your own level of engagement and the level of engagement of those you work with.

6. Get the picture on work engagement with the JD-R model. The jobs demands-resources model has been used as a frequent framework for engagement. As you read this book play close attention of the components and interactions of this model. We need both job and personal resources for work. These interact with job demands. In work we can move towards work engagement or burnout and this pathway will influence work outcomes. This model offers some useful perspective on engagement but as with any model we are best to remember Korzybski’s line: “the map is not the territory.”

7. At work, it can be a positive thing to be a deviant and we need to appreciate inquiry. Positive deviancy and appreciative inquiry are two positive-oriented models that can be used to examine or foster engagement. We can benefit from a study of our most engaged employees, especially in situations where the mass of our employees are disengaged. What do they do differently that we can learn to teach others to be more engaged? I adore the line from positive deviancy, “never do anything about me without me.” When this line is lived employee engagement becomes a collaborative effort. Appreciative inquiry also contributes to building engagement through the use of fuller organizational involvement and great questions to promote deeper understanding and change.

8. PsyCap is the new superHERO for employee engagement. PsyCap refers to an individual’s positive psychological state or psychological capital. PsyCap becomes a HERO as we broaden and build an employee’s Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism. I think we would be served well to focus more on efficacy (the sense one can produce an outcome) than self-esteem at work. I also think that building resilience, and understanding the framework of learned optimism, would help many employees manage the negative effect that setbacks have on engagement. The textbook offers a brilliant array of important psychological concepts and constructs that can move the dial on engagement.

9. We tend to undervalue the importance and contribution of relationships in engagement. Relationships are the building blocks of organizations and they affect how work gets done. Engagement wilts or thrives often based on relationship. We must bring relationships to the foreground of engagement rather than sitting in the background. Maybe Gallup’s Q12 question about having a best friend at work isn’t as creepy as many people think.

10. To weather yourself through stormy seas at work, tie yourself to the MAST. Kahn, has been instrumental in the development of personal engagement and the overall study of engagement. He focuses a lot on meaningfulness, availability, and safety. If you add trust to meaning, availability, and safety you can construct the acronym MAST. To help employees stand tall and upright at work and to have them sail into their work build a strong workplace MAST: meaningfulness, availability, safety, and trust.

11. Safety at work is more than wearing a hard hat. In my own work, I would argue that more organizations have a bigger safety problem than an engagement problem. For example, the heavy reliance on anonymous surveys indicate that it is not safe to disclose your level of engagement or disengagement at work and that disengagement may be treated as a personal punishable offence. To rephrase Kahn’s definition into a question: Am I able to show and employ myself without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status or career?

12. Engagement grows as employee voice is amplified and acted upon. One of the four enablers of engagement according to the growing UK’s Engage for Success movement is employee voice. There are so many tools to create safety and communication of employee voice. Are employees ready, willing and able to voice concerns, speak up about conflict, voice difficult experiences, engage in challenging conversations, and voice their experiences at work. I believe that engagement is more of an experience to be lived than a problem to be solved. Engaged employees have safe ways to express their experience. If you are a leader your mantra for 2014 should be: listen up!

Previous Posts: Click on the titles below to read the previous posts on this textbook:

Deciphering 39 Powerful Lessons from an Employee Engagement Textbook

Next post in the series: 9 lessons from the HRM implications of employee engagement.

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement speaker and expert currently working on a 12 module course on employee engagement based on the pyramid of engagement.

Employee Engagement Made Simple

December 3, 2013 by David Zinger 3 Comments

Employee Engagement One Day at a Time

(Reading time: 1 minute)

Engage each day. Accept the invitation to engage at work every day. Engage daily with specific results that matter to you and the organization. Engage with the key performances that will achieve your results. Engage fully each day with progress while minimizing and managing setbacks. Engage fully with relationships and connections at work because engagement is never a solo endeavor. Engage each day in recognizing others, both for who they are and what they do. Engage the moment as multiple moments make up each day. Engage your strengths daily and ensure you leverage your strengths in the service of others. Engage with a compelling why for work. Engage so fully with work that work makes you well. Engage your energy at work so that work is an energy gain versus an energy drain. Repeat daily.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who helps organizations and individuals create better engagement at work.