Are You Wise to Employee Engagement? (TED Video)

Be careful of employee engagement rules or using incentives to foster employee engagement.

Learn more about employee engagement from this wise presentation from Barry Schwartz on how we stopped being wise. He offers wisdom as an approach that not only engages the person doing the work but engages our caring and others. He advocates that we re-moralize work.

Barry offers engaging stories and anecdotes to illustrate a wise approach to work and life, such as these three custodians:

• Mike who focuses more on the patient than the task.
• Charlene who focuses more on a family than vacuuming.
• Luke who focuses more on emotion than having to repeat an already done task.

Barry tells us about the dangers of a rules approach to work and cautions us about trying to follow rules of engagement or trying to foster engagement through incentives. Incentives may be counterproductive to the very employee employee engagement we seek.

I appreciated this TED talk about human interactions embracing kindness, care, and empathy even though the worker’s job description does not articulate this human or humane approach. We may be wise to ignore job duties in the pursuit of better work.

A wise person knows how to serve people, not manipulate people, and a wise person also knows how to improvise rather than only doing what the rules or job description tells the person to do.

Strive towards becoming an ordinary employee engagement hero. Engage through wisdom.