simple employee engagement

Employee Engagement Is Not A Problem

October 9, 2015 by David Zinger 3 Comments

Employee Engagement: Problem or Experience?

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Ultimately to me, engagement is not a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be lived, a result to be achieved, a relationship to be built, and a work-based pathway to well-being. ~ David Zinger

Keep that in mind as you work today. If you want a little more about this read my Linkedin post: Employee Engagement: What’s Your Problem?

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and global speaker. David will be giving the morning keynote on the pyramid of employee engagement in Istanbul, Turkey this November.

Employee Engagement Flavors: Find Your True Vanilla

April 21, 2015 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Find Your True Vanilla

Vanilla Ice Cream

I think employee engagement is simple. Please notice that I did not say that employee engagement is easy. We seem to keep expanding employee engagement with hundreds of survey questions and more approaches than you see in a desperate single’s bar on a Friday night. If you are not successful with employee engagement your approach might be part of the cause for a the lack of success.

In my ideal world employee engagement is good work done well with others every day. We don’t have a million statistics and accompanying pie charts — pies should be for eating not representing employee engagement levels. We work with the verb of engage and place the passive noun of engagement into the deep freeze of inertia-laden words.

We are each responsible for our own engagement while being fully cognizant of how what we do impacts other people’s engagement.

We can transform disengagement into engagement in about 12 seconds when we immerse ourselves in the work in front of us and connect to the people around us.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the 10,000 flavors of engagement but it you are stuck and not producing the engagement you would like to see, abandon all the flavors, find your true vanilla, and work with that every day. And if you are successful you can add some sprinkles or branch out into other flavors.

David Zinger employee engagement speaker, consultant, and coach.

Employee Engagement: How to Make a Small, Simple, Significant, Strategic and Sustainable Difference

January 29, 2015 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

The 4 Enablers of Employee Engagement Made Simple

My passion and pursuit of employee engagement has taken over 14,000 hours yet resulted in me striving to make employee engagement small and simple. For example, my definition of engagement is just 8 words: good work done well with others every day. Although this is a simple definition of engagement, it does not mean that it is easy, yet I do believe it is attainable. This simple yet elegant definition avoids a lot of the excess jargon floating around employee engagement — which is itself a part of that jargon.

I admire the work of the Engage for Success Movement in the UK. I consider David MacLeod to be a friend and I am enriched by everyone who has been involved in the movement. One element that stood out for me from their work was using the term enablers rather than drivers or levers. It seemed real, kind, and more engaging.

Here is a short explanation of the four enablers from the Engage for Success Site:

Although there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach and no master model for successful employee engagement there were four common themes that emerged from the extensive research captured in the Engaging For Success report to government (also known as the MacLeod Report). Taken together, they include many of the key elements that go to make successful employee engagement.

These four enablers of engagement have proved to be useful lenses which can help organisations assess the effectiveness of their approaches.

Visible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.

Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch their people.

There is employee voice throughout the organisations, for reinforcing and challenging views, between functions and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.

There is organisational integrity – the values on the wall are reflected in day to day behaviours. There is no ‘say –do’ gap.

To me that simply means good story, good managers, good voice, and good ethics. Surely that is within reach in every organization. I am not revising the four enablers rather offering a simple image and 8 words to make it memorable and then actionable.

I don’t need a great story or great managers or great voice or even great ethics. To me, good is good enough. In the next post I will outline a few good behaviors and actions that contribute to good story, managers, voice, and ethics.

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

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who is working around the globe to make work, work!