Employee Engagement Dialogues

Employee Engagement Dialogues: Happiness and Engagement

May 15, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement Dialogues: Alex Kjeulf and David Zinger

Recording and transcript. Here is the recording and transcript for a 20 minute dialogue with Alex Kjeulf on happiness and engagement. Alexander is the founder of Woohoo inc. and one of the world’s leading experts on happiness at work. He has a masters degree in computer science from The University of Southern Denmark and is the author of 3 books including the international bestseller Happy Hour is 9 to 5 – How to Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work. In his spare time Alexander reads. A lot. He also does Crossfit and watches tons of movies.

Employee Engagement and Happiness from David Zinger on Vimeo.

David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger, and I want to really welcome you today to a focused dialogue on engagement and happiness. I’m so thrilled to have Alex Kjerulf from Denmark here with us today to talk about happiness. He’s The Chief Happiness Officer and has done tremendous work on happiness for, I would say before it was popular; Alex, welcome. [00:27]

Alexander Kjerulf: Thank you so much, David. [00:29]

David Zinger: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself – I know we have a slide up on your background – but what steered you in the direction of happiness and work? [00:37]

Alexander Kjerulf: Oh yeah, well I used to be in the IT business; I had my own IT company that I co-founded with two other people in Copenhagen way back in 1997, and when we started this IT company sort of our #1 goal was to make it a happy workplace. I mean sure we wanted to have a profit and have great clients and so on, but more than anything else we wanted a happy workplace where people could have fun. We ran that company for five years, it became quite successful, and then we sold it in 2002, and I sort of stopped at that point and asked myself what is my vision, what is my passion, you know, what do I want to contribute to the world, and I realized that what I was really passionate about was not IT solutions anymore; it was this idea of happiness at work, how do you create really happy workplaces where people just love to work, and so I founded my current company which is called Woo Hoo inc., and not woohoo, the company’s called WOOHOO! Yeah and just picking up the phone is a hoot. I founded the company in 2003. In fact, May 1st, 2003, we had our first paying client, so as of yesterday we’ve been doing this for nine years now making people happy at work. We do speeches, workshops, consulting work for workplaces all around the world. [01:55]

David Zinger: Well, congratulations, and so the primary focus in the audience is around the world of employee engagement, and the way I see engagement, it’s a little bit of a buzz word. I just define it as connection; connection to our work, connection to each other, connection to results, connections to customers. Before we launch into happiness and the connection between happiness, and engagement, and work, what engages you currently most with your work, Alex? [02:21]

Alexander Kjerulf: You know what really gives me a major kick is seeing that the work we do has an impact. In fact, we sat down last year to sort of formalize our company values and vision, and our vision is it’s a world where happiness at work is the rule and not the exception, and we defined certain values, and sort of our most important value is we optimize for impact, you know, we want to make a difference in everything we do. So, when I hear back from a client that we had a workshop with you three years ago, we’re still using the principles, it still helps us make the company more effective, or when I hear from people who have read our books or read the website I just love that kind of thing. I got an email from a lady saying she had been considering quitting her really crappy job for ages, and finally she got up the courage to do it, and that was because one of our articles, and that’s the kind of thing that really engages me. [03:27]

David Zinger: So, really seeing the results and the elements of what you’re doing. So, the big question in the short period of time we have is what is the relationship between work, happiness, and engagement, and if I can, you know, in doing some research to interview, and looking at your material, again I’ve been looking at it for years; I was really struck by your talk about the connection between happiness, results, and relationship, because I think so often people think of happiness as something extra, and outside, and oh my god I’m too busy for happiness, but you really seem to have weaved it right with results and relationships. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. [04:03]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah, I think the two major sources of happiness in the workplace are results and relationships, you know when you do good work that you can be proud of, that work that is meaningful to you, that makes us happy, and also good relationships, you know when you like your co-workers, you like your boss, you like your employers, you like your clients for that matter. Those are the two major sources of happiness, positive emotion in the workplace, and what we know now from decades of research in psychology, sociology, and neurology is that happiness has a major impact on our performance at work, and when we are happy we are more productive, we are more creative, we are more helpful towards other people, we deliver better customer service. Happy people are better managers and so on, so very simply put, we are more effective and more successful when we like what we do, which of course goes completely against the old idea that work, you know, it’s all about hard work, it’s all about effort. Right, it’s all about suffering, and the more you suffer, the more effective you will be, and of course this is completely wrong. [05:10]

David Zinger: Yeah, and I mean Tony Hsieh from Zappos did a whole bunch of work on happiness and you’ve predated him by many years in what you’re doing and how you’re looking at that, and you would say the Scandinavians are one of the few to have a language that has a word for happiness at work; I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that. [05:28]

Alexander Kjerulf: Sure, the word in Danish, it’s arbejdsglæde, and this is going to sound really weird of course to the rest of the world, but arbejde in Danish means work, and glaede is gladness, happiness, so arbejdsglæde is literally just work-happiness, and the cool thing about this is that this word exists only in the Scandinavian languages. We’ve checked and there is no word for this in any other language in the world except Danish, Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian, and this is not a coincidence; there is a long standing, you know, decades old tradition inScandinavia for focusing on happy workplaces. This is something we’ve been doing for 40-50 years now and this is something they do not have in the rest of the world, this focus on creating great workplaces. [06:14]

David Zinger: I was watching your TED Talk recently. You made a nice distinction between satisfaction and happiness, because I think some people would just equate those two things together. [06:24]

Alexander Kjerulf: Oh yeah. Yes, that’s actually one of the misguided preconceptions we’re fighting is that it’s employee satisfaction, and of course you know the sources of satisfaction – are you satisfied with your work – the sources of that are there’s stuff like, you know, salary bonuses, perks, your job title, promotions, raises, that kind of thing, those are the things that make us satisfied, but those are not the things that make us happy, and the research confirms this again, and the thing is that those benefits I talk about, you know, being more productive, and more creative, and so on, you don’t get those benefits from being satisfied. You know, overall I’m very satisfied with my job. You get those benefits when you’re happy right here and right now; when you’re sitting at your desk today going oh my god, I love my job, it’s awesome! That’s when you’re more productive, and more creative, and so on. So, and there’s nothing wrong with job satisfaction in and of itself, it’s just that it shouldn’t be the major focus of our careers, and work lives, and workplaces. We should really focus on happiness, because that is where we get all those performance benefits and that’s when the company makes more money. [07:35]

David Zinger: Yeah, and it seems to me that satisfaction is a fairly anemic measure of how we are at work, and when it’s reduced to a bi-annual or an annual survey that we call engagement, it’s got very little to do with happiness and engagement, because those seem to be things of the day-to-day and the moment-to-moment. [07:52]

Alexander Kjerulf: Exactly. [07:54]

David Zinger: Right now I have one of your websites up – The Chief Happiness Officer, and you have a ton of excellent blog posts, and articles, and resources on there. How long have you been at that and if people go there what should they be looking for? [08:10]

Alexander Kjerulf: Well, I started blogging in 2002, believe it or not, I mean everybody and their dog was getting a blog at the time, so I thought what the hell, I’ll get one too, and been blogging every since, and the blog has been getting really, really popular; I think we have about a million visitors a year, which is just awesome, and on there are we have different categories. We focus a lot on… I think our main focus is still what can I do, and you know what can I do tomorrow to make tomorrow a great work day, because happiness at work is something you do, it’s something we do together every single day. I mean we create a happy workday today or we don’t and then we do it again tomorrow or we don’t. It’s not like you can sit around and just wait for somebody else to come and make you happy, so that’s really the main thing we have on there is, you know, tons of tips, and videos, and articles on what can I do tomorrow to be happier and more engaged with work? Actually, I’d like to ask you, David, because you, you know, I really wanted to ask you this: how do you see the connection between happiness at work and engagement, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m not sure I have a clear answer. [09:16]

David Zinger: Well, you know I think there’s a very, very strong connection, I mean engagement tends to contribute to happiness or wellbeing and wellbeing or happiness contributes to engagement. I, originally when I created a pyramid of engagement that had 10 sources, happiness was one of them. I’ve since changed the label to wellbeing with happiness embedded in that, and yet I think sometimes the danger of that is that then people don’t look closely and see the key component of happiness in there, and you know I think we’re beyond that for most people in the field thinking of happiness as something fluffy, or something extra, or a soft skill or something, but I still think, and many people in the workplace they’re still equating happiness as something extra, or frilly, or whatever, and I think that’s doing a disservice to an experience that we spend so much of our time at. [10:12]

Alexander Kjerulf: Exactly. It sounds like we agree that happiness and engagement, it’s not like it’s the same thing, but they’re very closely tied together. Would that be fair to say? [10:23]

David Zinger: Yeah, I think, you know and we need to engage with our sense of wellbeing and happiness, and its bidirectional; I see all engagement as bidirectional. [10:33]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah. [10:33]

David Zinger: We engage with our work as our work engages us. We bring a happiness to work and our work can make us happy, and so that bidirectional element is important. I liked your term that we’re responsible for our own happiness, but our managers and organizations are also responsible for setting up the conditions. [10:53]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yes, exactly, I mean as a manager you can create conditions where it’s almost impossible to be happy at work, and let’s face it, a lot of managers do, but also again as a manager, as a workplace you can create conditions where it’s very, very easy to be happy, however no matter how good those conditions are, you can never make people, you know, you can never force people to be happy; that’s just not the way it works. People have to want to be happy within those conditions, and I think they… [11:23]

David Zinger: And so you’re… Sorry about that, but usually happy hour is after 5:00PM, and your popular book is Happy Hour is 9-5. [11:32]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah. [11:32]

David Zinger: And it’s happy hours; it’s hour after hour with that, and that’s… [11:38]

Alexander Kjerulf: There’s a famous episode of the Drew Carey Show where they say, you know, where they talk about these people who needed the bar, and they complain about their jobs, and they complain about their spouses, and they complain about everything, and that’s called happy hour, and so I thought, you know, what if happy hour wasn’t from 5:00PM – 6:00PM at the local bar, what if happy hour was, you know, 9-5; what if we could actually wake up in the morning and be excited about going to work, and I think that’s where most people should be, not necessarily every single day, but most days. [12:10]

David Zinger: And that’s a book that’s in a number of languages and accessible from a number of resources from your website and other sources and even some of it’s freely available; if people are starving for money they can always read the book online with that. [12:24]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah, the English translation is available completely free on the blog on www.PositiveSharing.com if anyone wants to read there. [12:31]

David Zinger: And if we go back even further, not only do you have a book, you have a manifesto on happiness, and I’ve always liked the people at the Change This site, and it’s a delightful manifesto because it’s short, it’s got I think what, about 25 points in the manifesto if I remember correct? [12:48]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah, very good, exactly. [12:49]

David Zinger: What stands out in your mind right now out of those items in the manifesto that seems to be either what’s really challenging workplaces or what seems to be improving for workplaces? [13:01]

Alexander Kjerulf: I think it really, really comes… For me it always comes back to the same thing, which is that my happiness at work is my responsibility, and you know if I want to be happy at work I have to start with myself. Not that I have to go it alone, OK, it’s just that I have to be responsible for my own work life, and for my own life in general, and one area I see right now that’s really challenging for people is if you have this horrible job, can you still quit, you know, in these uncertain economic times with the financial crisis and so on, can you quit your job, and right now I see a lot of people staying on in jobs they absolutely hate, and I think that’s horrible. I think this is something, you know, we know from the research that hating your job can make you sick, it can ruin your career, it can even ruin your relationship with your partner; it can in the end kill you, so I always encourage people to, you know, if you really hate your job, quit, move on, sometimes it is the only way even in these times. [14:13]

David Zinger: Yeah and you’re not minimizing the economic currency, but there’s a currency of happiness and wellbeing. If we don’t attend to that currency, as you say at the end of that first page in the manifesto – because the future belongs to the happy – and you would also say the present does too. [14:29]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah, exactly. I think it does, and the thing is when people are considering should I quit, what they really focus on is, you know, if I quit, what will I lose, and you may lose, you know, you will lose your salary, and you may lose your healthcare benefits, and you may lose your pension, and your co-workers, and so on, but the question people never ask themselves is if I stay at this job that I absolutely hate, what might that cost me, and I think you’re not having a balanced look at it unless you also consider that question, and in the end staying at that horrible job that you absolutely hate, it can kill you, yeah. [15:09]

David Zinger: Yeah and you have a number of rules of productivity, and particularly in the field of engagement. I get so frustrated with our field when we do these biannual or annual measures and somehow believe that we kept our engagement. There are shifts wildly from day-to-day, and I love your point #1 – your productivity will vary wildly from day-to-day and this is normal. [15:30]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yes. [15:31]

David Zinger: And what role does happiness have in that wild productivity? [15:35]

Alexander Kjerulf: I think… Well, one way I apply is that when I come into work in the morning I don’t necessarily go by my to-do list, you know, it’s not like I start working on the top of the list and then go to the next item, the next item. There’s all this stuff and I ask myself, you know, what do I feel like doing today; do I feel like, you know, tackling emails, do I feel like calling some clients, do I feel like writing a new blog post, and then I do that, and some days I will come into work and I will feel like doing absolutely nothing, and on those days I will go home or go do something else, because why hang out at work if you’re not getting anything done anyway, and my point is this is normal. I mean this is… For knowledge workers your productivity depends on your creativity, you know, on your ability to think of new things, on your ability to write, or whatever. There are some days you will do great work and there are some days you will do no work, and this is completely normal. [16:36]

David Zinger: OK. Well, we don’t have too much time left, and I’m pulling this question out of left field, it just kind of occurs to me. The statistics suggest that we are now… You talked about knowledge workers, that we’re the billion mobile workers. What’s the potential or the challenge for happiness for people who are mobile workers, any thoughts about that? [16:59]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yes, one challenge for mobile workers is relationships. I mean if you work out of this one office in this department, then you’ll have co-workers, you have a boss, and you have strong relationships; people who know what you’re doing, who can give you encouragement, criticism, praise, advice, companionship, and as a mobile worker that becomes a lot harder, so that’s a challenge, and as a mobile worker you may have to find your relationships somewhere else, maybe in networks, or knowledge groups, or whatever. However, the cool thing about mobile workers is that they often get to choose. They have more ambivalence over what they do, so they have more of a chance of picking, you know, interesting tasks, challenging tasks, meaningful tasks, however only if they remember to do so. [17:50]

David Zinger: So, in some ways there’s a little bit of a bigger challenge on the relationship, and yet the upside is you’ve got a little bit more direct control of how you move through the results and what you’re trying to achieve along the way with that. [18:02]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yes, and you have more freedom over how you work, and where you work, and when you work, which is fantastic. I mean a lot of mornings I work out of a café instead of going to our office, which is you know, which I like doing. [18:14]

David Zinger: I guess one final thought. You know sometimes I think we equate happiness with everybody wearing clown noses, and jumping up in joy, and you know wild on airlines or whatever. Any thoughts about, for lack of a better term, and this is my term – quiet happiness – you know that happiness that just kind of resonates inside, and yes it can be shared, but sometimes just that happiness we feel as we’re working, and no one else may almost notice it, any thoughts about that? [18:41]

Alexander Kjerulf: I think yes, and we’ve got to remember that happiness looks different on different people, right, I mean some people when they’re happy you can instantly tell, and they’ll be jumping, and shouting, and singing, and laughing, and that’s fantastic, and other people, you know, when they’re really happy, and engaged, and fulfilled they’ll just be sitting quietly at their desk doing their work feeling fantastic, and this is exactly the way it should be, and you can not equate happiness at work with sort of all of that, you know, let’s say the wild stuff that you mentioned; the clown noses, and the partying, and the dancing, and so on. That’s only one element and some people will derive a lot of happiness from that, whereas other people will derive most of their happiness from just sitting at their desk doing their jobs knowing that they do it really, really well, and we’ve got to remember… I think this is the main point here: everybody’s different, everybody’s different, and if you try to treat everybody the same we’ll make a lot of people unhappy. [19:37]

David Zinger: Yeah, and so one of the last screenshots I have here is your Woohoo site, and I was watching your TEDx Talk, and actually showing you at work; I got a screenshot of you at work and you’re happy as you’re presenting it and you’re even showing some pictures of people coming to the conference who may not be quite so happy with that, and so people… [20:00]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah, I just want to correct you here that it’s not woohoo, it’s WOOHOO! [20:02]

David Zinger: Oh, I don’t give enough emphasis. It’s all in the emphasis, right? [20:06]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yeah, exactly. [20:08]

David Zinger: WOOHOO! Did I get it? [20:09]

Alexander Kjerulf: There you go. [20:11]

David Zinger: Got to get that voice lifted up, and you got the audience engaged, so if anybody’s unfamiliar with Alex, I highly recommend going to www.PositiveSharing.com and looking at the blog, and coming to this site and watching the video or if you type his name into YouTube, there’s a number of videos of you presenting or whatever, and probably a much richer experience would be to get Alex or one of the members of his team to come out and spend some time with you. [20:38]

Alexander Kjerulf: I think that’s a fantastic idea. [20:40]

David Zinger: Just as we’re closing, any last thought, say if someone’s listening to this early in the morning of something they should consider, or think about, or do to increase their happiness for the day? [20:52]

Alexander Kjerulf: Yes, absolutely, and I think well, we keep coming back to this one tip, and it’s probably one of the most basic findings of positive psychology, which we use as the foundation of all of our work, is that the best way to become happy yourself is to make somebody else happy. There’s quite consistent finding in these studies is that whenever you do something for yourself, that makes you a little happier, but when you do something for somebody else, it makes you a lot happier. So, my challenge to people listening to this is what could you do today to make somebody else happy at work; a co-worker, a client, a vendor, your boss, an employee, some completely random person at work. Could you do something to make somebody else happy at work, you know, praise people, do a random act of workplace kindness, whatever, but could you do one thing today to make somebody else happy at work, and I can promise you it’ll come right back to you. [21:48]

David Zinger: Oh, well said, and really some people started to say that stress is a Staph infection, and certainly laughter can be contagious, and humor certainly is a pathway out of it. [22:00]

Alexander Kjerulf: Absolutely. [22:02]

David Zinger: Well, thank you very much for taking time with us and joining us today; it’s really been a privilege… [22:07] END

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert. He developed the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and David is the founder and host of the 4800 member Employee Engagement Network.

Employee Engagement Dialogue: Magnetic Engagement

May 10, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

A conversation with Kevin Sheridan and David Zinger

I encourage you to listen to this 20 minute conversation with Kevin Sheridan about his views and experiences with employee engagement. There is also a transcript for the recording with time stamps you can use to go to specific sections of the dialogue.

Kevin Sheridan and David Zinger on Magnetic Employee Engagement from David Zinger on Vimeo.

David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger. I want to welcome you to a brief dialogue on engagement with Kevin Sheridan and myself on magnetic employee engagement. It’s really my honor and privilege to bring Kevin to this dialogue. He’s written a fantastic book on magnetic culture, has such a background; he’s not only a mountain climber, he’s a guy who’s into the numbers, but also into lots of practical elements. Welcome to the dialogue, Kevin. [00:41]

Kevin Sheridan: Thanks so much, David, happy to be here. [00:45]

David Zinger: Maybe you can tell us a couple of things about yourself or your background of how you got interested in engagement, and then maybe on a more personal level, what engages you most in your work, Kevin?[00:57]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, I’ve really dedicated the last 30 years of my life to studying how employees are feeling in their jobs in all major industries and watched the measure of that transform more from satisfaction to engagement, and really, really excited about the whole concept of engagement delivering a much higher ROI than the world of satisfaction. Actually there’s a pretty colorful comment in the Building a Magnetic Culture book that quotes the front band for the band REM about you can have a lot of shiny, happy people holding hands, but they’re not productive, and for me my engagement comes from innovation, trying to think of the next new angle on building a magnetic culture or building engagement. [01:49]

David Zinger: OK, and so it’s almost like the difference between looking at a beautiful mountain and climbing a mountain, as you voice satisfaction versus engagement? [01:59]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up, because outside of work one of my lifelong passions is high altitude mountaineering, and I’ve been on the journey to climb the seven summits – the highest mountain on every continent, and I’ve been on four of them, summated three of them, and there was a lot of parallels between getting to best in class on engagement and getting to the summit of a high altitude mountain.[02:26]

David Zinger: Yeah, and if people want to skip right to the end of the book if they purchase the book, you’ve got a little bit of a profile of your background in mountaineering. Right now I’m showing the cover of the book. Marshall Goldsmith gave it a ringing endorsement; it was on six best seller lists including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. A book like that obviously takes a lot of work to put together. Do you want to talk just very briefly about the process of putting it together and then what the book is primarily designed to do for managers and organizations? [02:58]

Kevin Sheridan: Absolutely. Well, about a year and a half ago I had one of my rock star millennial employees come into my office from our marketing team and her name is Amelia, and she came and she said Kevin, I just landed you a book deal with McGraw Hill, one of the largest publishers in the world, and Amelia and I shared about seven seconds of euphoria and then we were like oh, now we have to write a book, and it was really a lot of fun because it was almost like expunging all of these case studies and knowledge of over 30 years of experience, and our marketing team helped with the book, and McGraw Hill has been an excellent publisher to work with, and I have to say as a first time author it was quite humbling when the book hit all those best seller lists and you see your name next to the Jim Collins of the world, and it’s just very, very humbling, so, and very rewarding. [03:55]

David Zinger: Well, what stands out in my mind about the book, Kevin, is I mean as you say in the book, you’re a numbers guy, you’ve got the research, you’ve got the background, I mean you went through Harvard, you’ve got the sense of organizations, and you weave together the numbers with very practical perspectives that are more evidence-based than just a perspective on the field. [04:20]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, it’s interesting. I have a little bit of an unusual background. I have been playing in the HR sandbox, if you will, for the last 30 years, yet my background and foundation educationally in the first part of my career is actually in finance, so I’m no stranger to numbers, and what I love about that is often times there’s a natural tension between human resources and finance about, you know, is there a true ROI to some of these people-related expenditures like employee engagement efforts, and employee engagement surveys, and it’s been a lot of fun proving that there is an ROI to that to the finance people. [04:59]

David Zinger: Yeah, and it seems to me that the next generation we’re in already, but it seems for many just they’re starting to understand it as the whole field around predictive analytics and looking at engagement and other variables and being able to predict, you know, sales and all kinds of other factors with that. [05:17]

Kevin Sheridan: Oh, definitely. I mean some of the great outcomes you’re no stranger to, David, the linkage between employee engagement and better customer satisfaction and customer engagement, the effect it has on retaining your best people and lowering your turnover, the effect it has positively on lowering absentees which is significant; I think the average employer in North America it costs them $600 per employee per year on absenteeism, and engaged people are going to show up with their A game everyday – they’re much more likely to show up for work and not leave work early. [05:59]

David Zinger: Yeah. So, the title is Building a Magnetic Culture, and I have the definition of a magnetic culture on the slide here: it draws talented employees to the workplace, empowers them, and sustains an environment. Where did you latch on to the metaphor of the magnet and can you talk about what that says to you? [06:20]

Kevin Sheridan: Sure. It came to us about 10 years ago, we thought about the historical definition of engagement, i.e., the intent to stay, and engaged employees are very loyal to their organization; they don’t want to leave at the drop of a hat, and at the same time they’re ready to exert that extra discretionary effort. So, the magnetism that comes with engagement is not only keeping people employed, but keeping them emotionally and intellectually connected to the overall mission of the organization and they have what I call the two P’s of engagement: they are passionate about what they do and they are very prideful about where they work. So, we actually trademarked the term magnetic culture 10 years ago long before the concept of writing a book on it. [07:09]

David Zinger: And so the real weave there is that passion and pride; I think kind of the two pulls of the magnet really draw people together, and it’s like the magnet works both ways – the organization benefits as does the employee. [07:26]

Kevin Sheridan: Exactly, exactly, and it feeds on itself. There’s a wonderful upward spiral of optimism, and magnetism, and engagement where your engaged population is almost infectious in a wonderful way in terms of their optimism and they’re more apt to be ready to change and be improvement officers, if you will, and be mentors to the people that are in the middle category, which frankly as you know, David, there aren’t enough engaged employees, and the big category of engagement is the one in the middle where people are not engaged and they’re not disengaged, and I’m often reminded of the old Duncan Donuts commercial with the guy that’s 4:30 in the morning and he’s saying to himself time to make the donut. Unfortunately a lot of people approach their job with that level of ambivalence, and it’s not necessarily their fault; I think that leadership and particularly the supervisor really is an opportunity to reengage people and to marry them up with the engaged people, or get them involved, and as you know in the book I talk about the likelihood to volunteer. One great way managers can identify that ambivalent or neutral population is ask for volunteers, and you’ll watch these people not raise their hand, hide under a table or behind a pillar, and sometimes maybe they need to be volun-told where the manager says David, really exciting new initiative we have going here, and you are on the task force, and we’re really excited about your contribution. [09:16]

David Zinger: So, really drawing them in, and the slide I’m looking at now is metrics for magnetism. You have a lot of data in the book, even on page 6 “engaged employees are eight times more likely to feel their supervisor encourages their growth, seven times more likely to feel they receive regular feedback, four times more likely to be satisfied with their job…” On page 85 you talk if you look at 50 people and just have a 10% loss in productivity from those 50 people it’s like you’ve lost five people. What numbers, you know, you’ve been involved in these numbers for such a long time, Kevin, what numbers have really stood out for you around engagement? [09:58]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, the cost of disengagement as it relates to turnover is enormous, and it’s estimated that in North America $350 billion are lost in turnover costs because of disengagement. I mentioned the cost of absenteeism before, that’s significant. The example you just sited has to do with a question that’s pretty ubiquitous in most engagement surveys, which is do you have the resources you need to do your job effectively? A lot of people answer no to that question, and when you look at the loss in productivity of 10% and it’s like losing five people off the payroll in terms of their productivity. One of the great studies that was done a long time ago proving the ROI of engagement was done at the Working School of Business in Pennsylvania, and it proved definitively that the returns, the profitability returns for those organizations that were on the best places to work list were three and a half times higher than an average company in North America, and that’s significant.[11:14]

David Zinger: Oh, that’s just huge, and before we fear… In danger of getting someone fearful that if they open the book it’s just going to be numbers. You’ve given all kinds of examples, personal examples, challenges with an employee, and the best from employees, and one line that really stood out in my mind is one of your employees who said when it’s harvest time it’s harvest time. Can you elaborate on that? [11:42]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, this is a great example of hiring the right people and trying to hire people that have the right attitude that can sustain their level of engagement, and there is a woman on my team that actually started out as my executive assistant. It was really kind of a tough time to start in that job because the previous job incumbent quit working two weeks before her departure, didn’t provide the training that one would have hoped, and meanwhile I was traveling, so as her manager I was not there to consol, and coach, and motivate other than over the phone, and I was frankly very concerned that I was going to lose this special employee that I had just hired. So, when I got back to the office I actually met with her and I started reassuring her, and I said it’s not always going to be like this, and I’m so sorry that you were left with all this mountains of work, and we’ll get through it, and she finally just put her hands in the air, she goes Kevin, I grew up on a farm; when it’s harvest time it’s harvest time, and that was just a beautiful thing to witness, and she has just thrived in her career at HR Solutions and heads up our sales and marketing area, and it’s really a great example of knowing the right people to hire, and I knew that during the interview process as well. [13:04]

David Zinger: Yeah, it’s a great phrase, and then I also put on the lesson of the donuts, and you know your staff were talking about donuts and you weren’t so sure, but in an engaging organization and in a magnetic culture you start to make changes based on what you do experience from your staff. Can you briefly just say the lesson of the donuts? [13:26]

Kevin Sheridan: Yeah, the donuts actually I kind of make fun of myself when I train managers on how to respond to employee survey results, and in particular what might be referred to as quick wins, and a quick win is maybe a plausible suggestion that’s made in the write-in comment section of the survey or maybe made in a focus group session when asking for qualitative feedback about the statistical results. So, years ago, literally 15 years ago one of the first surveys we ever did for my own staff someone wrote in the write-in comment section that, you know, we don’t really have staff meetings as frequently as we should, and by the way, you know, Kevin won’t buy us donuts. Well, part of my work DNA is I come to work to work and I was raised in that baby boomer work ethic, you know, do your share of the work, so that kind of went right over my head, and it took unfortunately three surveys, and by the third survey there were like 15 comments saying he’s still a cheapskate, he won’t buy the donuts, and it’s a classic example of a quick win staring you in the face and you not seeing it, and I can tell you that on the third survey I finally stepped up to the plate – I said not only can we have donuts, you can do whatever you want as it relates to food for our staff meetings. The reaction to that, it was a kin to Moses parting the Red Sea, I mean people were like oh my god we can have donuts at the staff meeting, and… We had one of these quick wins recently as it relates to casual dress. A lot of the younger workers do not want to dress up for work and they want something more casual, and we instituted that about a year ago, and people were screaming when we announced it, we were like wow that’s awesome. So, sometimes a quick win is right there and you just have to be clear enough to see that while it might not be important to you, it is to other people.[15:24]

David Zinger: So, there’s a lot of, you know, in your survey work there’s a lot of key questions, but in your book you also talk about demagnetizers. We don’t have time to get into the depth of that, but I am wondering if you could talk about one demagnetizer at work? [15:39]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, one thing that is in the book as a demagnetizer is when leaders and managers are not genuine and I honestly believe that I think we need to put the human back into human capital management, and part of this is driven by how busy we are, we’re being asked to do more with less, and people forget to just get to know one another, and my advice to leadership and managers is be personal, you know, ask an employee what do you love to do outside of work, or ask them what stokes them towards greater levels of engagement, what do they find passionate about what they do, and get to know them on a personal level, you know, where do their kids go to college, where do they live in town, and I just don’t think there’s enough of that, and people want to know that they’re working for somebody that truly genuinely cares about them, and if they don’t see that it is a demagnetizer. [16:34]

David Zinger: OK, and when you look at taking action you talk about Gandhi’s old quote about be the change expecting the world, and you sent me a slide with a teeter-totter and management on one side, employees on the other. Can you explain that perspective, Kevin? [16:50]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, this is one of the reasons Marshall Goldsmith just wonderfully wrote that jacket cover endorsement you see on the front of the book. Years ago, about four and a half years ago we had a client challenge us that something was missing with the engagement solution, and every vendor in our industry including HR Solutions were delivering results back to management telling management to take them seriously, build meaningful action plans, and implement, and unfortunately a very important constituent was left out of the solution, that being the employee, and as one of our customers said, how can you have employee engagement without the employee; isn’t that the ultimate oxymoron? And the answer is yes. So, we thought how are we going to correct this imbalance, and the urging of this wonderful client that won the Malcolm Baldrige Award just outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey, we actually created a mechanism through which the employee could not only empower themselves to discover which bucket of engagement they fall in based upon how they’re feeling in their job, but we empower them by giving them advice, giving them advice on what they can do to become more engaged. They get a personal employee engagement report. Those of your listeners that are interested in getting one for free can actually order PEER from our website www.HRSolutionsInc.com This is a great way to build engagement from both sides of the fence, and I think what the old model was, it was fairly paternalistic where employees as you see on the teeter-totter are waiting to be engaged, and this corrects that imbalance. [18:40]

David Zinger: Yeah, so you’ve got a lot of practical steps of I put the slide up, on taking action and the personal employee engagement report, and I’m also just putting up the slide on taking action (wwwbuildingamagneticculture.com). Where do you see yourself headed with engagement in the next couple years, Kevin? [19:00]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, there’s much to be done and we will never be complacent in terms of discovering the next new way to look at engagement and build a magnetic culture. One of the things that we’re very proud of and I think it’s missing from a lot of the solutions is most of the vendors out there that are helping companies measure engagement are instilling a one size fits all solution, and as you know David, all the great work you’ve done on this topic, you know, different people have different engagement drivers, so not only should we tailor the measurement tool on those different constituents, whether they be women, or men, or millennial versus traditional, or baby boomers, that’s something that I still think is not being done as frequently as it should. The other big take away that is in the book is if engagement is this important, and you pick up every major HR journal there’s probably a feature article on employee engagement. The sad thing is if it’s that important, why isn’t it being talked about in performance reviews? Only 5% of managers conducting performance reviews have a dialogue with the person about their engagement level asking them what drives your engagement, how can I feed you more of that wonderful stuff, and is there anything that’s detracting from your engagement, and that’s not being done enough, that dialogue between the employee and the manager.[20:24]

David Zinger: Yeah, I think that’s a missing piece, and really we need to get engagement woven into the fabric of work and management as opposed to ever being perceived as something extra that we do, and that certainly could be a step in the right direction. Kevin, you know I want to thank you very much for taking 15-20 minutes of your time to share a little bit of the wonderful book that you did. You’re not the Senior VP of HR Optimization at Avatar, and in regards to HR work that you’re doing, you’ve got Building a Magnetic Culture, a whole bunch of resources. Thanks for taking your time with us today, Kevin. [21:03]

Kevin Sheridan: David, I’ve really admired the work that you’ve done and the network that you’ve created. I always believe in the personal touch and should any of your listeners want to get a discounted version of the book with my personal autograph, they can get it through our website at www.buildingamagneticculture.com, and thank so much for having me. [21:22]

David Zinger: Well, thanks for coming on board, and this recording will be on the Network, it will be in a number of places, there’ll chances to look at it, and I do encourage people to go forward and buy the book. Thank you very much.

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David Zinger is a global expert on employee engagement currently working with a Pyramid of Engagement to help managers be more engaged and engaging.