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Toppled: 21 Signs Employee Engagement is Broken

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Questioning Engagement. A participant at a mining conference I presented at in South Africa asked what happens when the Pyramid of Engagement is broken. It was an excellent question that created a small epiphany for me about an inverted pyramid. Here is an upside down picture of the pyramid of engagement. It represents employee engagement falling away or draining out of an organization.  Following the inverted pyramid image is a list of 21 signs that employee engagement is broken for an organization or an invididual.

21 Signs. Here is a list of 21 signs that work is broken and disengagement rules the day:

  • There is a  lack of clarity of results or even a lack of results
  • Too many results are attempted without enough capacity
  • Results are clear but lack any meaning or significance for employees
  • Performance is reduced to a management system rather than the daily lifeblood of work
  • There is a failure to hold engaging conversations when performance fails to meet expectations
  • The connections between performance and results are weak or nonexistent
  • There are too many people and structural barriers to progress
  • Setbacks trump progress by a factor greater than 2 to 1
  • Collaboration tends to result in many setbacks and disengaging interactions
  • Relationships are sacrificed in the name of achieving results
  • Relationships are viewed as mushy unimportant stuff or depersonalized as human capital
  • Individuals and organizations suffer people-myopia, barely noticing each other, and failing to voice recognition for each other
  • Moments for engagement are frittered away as small and insignificant rather than small and significant opportunities for engagement
  • The state of flow is squeezed out by anxiety and boredom
  • Employees are unaware or fail to leverage the power of small, smart, and significant steps
  • Strengths are dismissed as a short assessment tool completed at a half day workshop that gives you your top 5 strengths
  • 80% of attention is focused on weakness, problems, gaps, failures, and inadequacies
  • There is no compelling why to work
  • The return to individuals for work contribution is reduced to an hourly rate or salary
  • The organization and individuals fail to create and find well being within work
  • Mental, emotional, and organizational energy is frittered away and work is experienced as an energy drain not an energy gain.

Flip. Let’s turn the pyramid of employee engagement around to it original position so that we can: achieve results, maximize performance, path progress, build relationships, foster recognition, master moments, leverage strengths, make meaning, enhance well being, and enliven energy.

David Zinger is devoted to helping organizations and individuals fully engage in work to build and sustain successful and meaningful results and relationships. Request his speeches, workshop, or consulting today on the pyramid of employee engagement to engage all of your employees. Mr. Zinger founded and hosts the 4700+ member Employee Engagement Network. Contact David today at zingerdj@gmail.com.

 

9 Benefits and Advantages of the Pyramid of Employee Engagement

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The benefits and advantages of using the pyramid of employee engagement to improve engagement.

The Pyramid of Engagement is a new model for employee engagement. At the end of 2011 and the start of 2012 a new model for employee engagement was developed through 10 years of study in the field and connections with over 4600 people involved in employee engagement. The pyramid of engagement is built on 10 blocks that offer the structure for great engagement. The blocks starting at the top and going down the pyramid from left to right are: achieve results, maximize performance, path progress, build relationships, foster recognition, master moments, leverage strengths, make meaning, enhance well being, and enliven energy.

Here are 9 advantages and benefits of using this unique model of employee engagement.

Simple.  The model can be grasped in seconds and with 10 blocks and bold images it is intuitive for many people. The images and the pyramidal structure make it easy to visualize and easy to recall. Yet, embedded within this simplicity are 10 powerful keys to create, sustain, and enhance employee engagement.

Unique. Each element of the model has a bold image to represent the foundation of that block. There is a target for results, an arrow for progress, a compass for meaning, and a clock for moments. The 10 icons add a strong and compelling visual dimension to the model.

Inspire. The model was inspired by the work of the Egyptian pyramids and John Wooden’s pyramid of success. The pyramids in Egypt demonstrate that the structure will stand the test of time and remain for many years. We all know the pyramids were not built in one day much as this pyramid took time to build based on leading thinkers and practices in employee engagement. John Wooden’s pyramid outlined 15 building blocks for success and was the structure behind Wooden’s phenomenal coaching success with U.C.L.A.’s basketball program and the legacy of his teachings for his players. The Wooden pyramid is still inspiring many players and coaches today.

Flexible. The blocks are placed in a specific order yet the pyramid is open to individuals or organizations moving the blocks around. For example someone may want to put relationships at the top of the pyramid and results at the heart of the pyramid. Someone else may have their own block they would like to switch with one of the blocks in the original pyramid. Although the model is solid, it is not static.

Building blocks.  The pyramid offers the big picture of what can be done for engagement while offering the ability and structure to tackle one block at a time. Many people are overwhelmed by work and perceive engagement as yet another task. With this model you can focus on just one block at a time for a day, a week, a month, or even a year. The blocks of the pyramid remind my of the alphabet building blocks many of us had as children helping us to build familiarity and comfortableness with our letters and language as we manipulated the blocks during play.

Self and other. The pyramid was originally designed for managers to use as a tool to increase engagement with employees who report to them. It quickly became apparent that the model can be used by managers to enhance their own engagement or be offered to employees as a tool to take charge of their engagement. We can only engage others when we are engaged.

Topple the people organizational pyramid. Many organizations are organized around a pyramid. The CEO or President is at the top and people are on levels below the CEO. We should stop putting people into pyramids (remember what they were used for in Egypt) rather this pyramid is based on elements and everyone can work towards results, performance, relationships, etc. We build the blocks of engagement together, not alone and the apex of the pyramid is a place for all.

One, two, three. It is easy to make mini pyramids out of the 10 blocks. I believe when we try to focus on more than 3 items at a time we end up getting confused and diffusing our efforts. For example, you could take the top 3 blocks and focus on results, performance, and progress. You can do an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses and build a mini pyramid to overcome weaknesses or build a mini pyramid to get the absolute most from your engagement strengths.

Evidence based building blocks. The blocks are based on research and evidence based practice. A few examples of the research embedded within the pyramid are studies by by Teresa Amabile from Harvard on progress and setbacks,  research by Jane Dutton from Positive Organizational Scholarship out of the Ross School of business on organizational energy, and research by Gallup on strength based approaches to work.

Around the blocks. In case you missed the 11 part series on the pyramid of engagement here are the previous posts:

David Zinger has built the model of the Employee Engagement Pyramid as an enduring structure and tool to sustain his work on engagement for the next 18 years. David is the founder and host of the 4600 member global Employee Engagement Network. This network is part of David’s labor of  love so that others will more in love with their labors. To request information and book David for a keynote, workshop, or course on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement contact him at zingerdj@gmail.com.

Employee Engagement: 5 Prescriptions for Well Being

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9. Working Well

(Part 10 of an 11 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Enhance Well-being. We need to create wellbeing inside of work. There are things we can do outside of work but how we promote and enhance well-being within work is becoming increasingly important as mobile devices makes work portable and 24/7. We must eliminate toxic workplaces poisoned with a lack of respect or mutuality. We must create a profound wellbeing where people leave work enlivened and enriched rather than depleted and deadened.

Here are 5  prescriptions for well being at work

  1. Enliven the five elements of well being.
  2. Establish PERMAnent well being.
  3. Mind your work
  4. Establish and maintain psychological and social safety
  5. Be a well being heretic

Enliven the five elements of well being. Rath and Harder in Well Being state that well being is a combination of  “our love for what we do each day, the quality of our relationships, the security of our finances, the vibrancy of our physical health, and the pride we take in what we have contributed to our communities. Most importanty, it’s about how these five elements interact” (p. 4).  About 66% of us are doing well with at least one of these elements but only 7% of us are thriving in all five areas. This leaves much room to improve well being at work by working on our career  well being, social well being, financial well being, physical well being, and community well being. By the way, I don’t think we try for the infamous work/life balance with these elements, rather we try and have healthy flow that benefits us and others.

Establish PERMAnent Well Being. Martin Seligman approaches well-being with the caution of a scientist and the optimism of someone who developed the approach of learned optimism. In Flourish, Seligman went beyond happiness work to examine flourishing and offering practical suggestions on instilling well being. His perspective of well being also has a foundation of 5 elements, different than Gallup, and structured around the mnemonic PERMA. PERMA stands for: positive emotions, engagement, relationship, meaning, and achievement. Positive emotions and the pleasant life contribute to our well being and happiness. Engagement creates well being with powerful connections to work, belonging and serving.  Relationships, one of the 10 blocks of the pyramid of engagement, in study after study is found to be one of the most salient contributors to well being.  Meaning, the most recent block we examined in this series on the pyramid of engagement is vital for health.  Achievement has been a more recent insertion in Seligman’s approach to authentic happiness and well being. Seligman examined his own love of playing bridge and realized how much achievement plays a role in well being. Achievement fits well with the top three blocks of the employee engagement pyramid: results, performance, and progress.

Mind your work. Mindfulness can be a powerful yet subtle pathway to well being. Jon Kabat-Zinn defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentaly.” How well do you show up to the moment? We may reduce high levels of stress attached to the past and the future by being where we are. As Stephan Rechtschaffen declared in Time Shifting, “there is no stress in the present moment.”

Mindful leadership.  A recent Harvard Business review blog post by Holly Labarre quoted Pamela Weiss: “If you want to transform an organization it’s not about changing systems and processes so much as it’s about changing the hearts and minds of people. Mindfulness is one of the all-time most brilliant approaches for helping to alleviate human suffering and for bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings.” Mindfulness seems so subtle, almost anemic for well being, but for a world that has gone crazy busy it can keep us well, centered, aware, connected, and present. We often seem to be searching for dramatic data-driven tools when this subtle and powerful tool is always available to us, embedded in us, and always only a moment away.

Watch the talk. I encourage you to mindfully watch this Google talk by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

If the video does not open in this window, click here.

Establish and maintain psychological and social safety. We have focused and improved our work on physical safety at work. We need to keep all employees safe. In addition we need to ensure that our work and workplaces are infused with psychological and social safety. Safety is created through mutual purpose and mutual respect. It means we care about each other and we care about what each other is interested in. This must be genuine and is more than a fuzzy warm feeling. People read a lack of safety in seconds and this thwarts are ability to achieve results, build relationships and be well at work. A lack of safety saps away well being at work and creates ineffective conflicts and confrontations. We seem to have a bigger safety issue than engagement issue at work. It feels unsafe for most workers to be honest, direct, and respectful about engagement. An unintended consequence of the infamous anonymous survey in engagement is that we are telling employees we don’t want to know who they are, thereby making employees invisible. Robust engagement needs a name and a face. Management also justifies anonymous surveys because they don’t believe workers will be honest unless they are anonymous. We need to stop thinking of disengagement as a punishable offence and instead use it as a trigger for meaningful listening and talking about work.

Be a well being heretic.  I believe we have too much fluff and far too many mistaken notions about specific wellness approaches at work. I have believed this for 30 years but just recently has it coalesced together into the  Heretic’s Manifesto of Well Being. I do not write about this frivolously having been an employee assistance counselor for almost 20  years and a university educator in educational and counseling psychology for 25 years.

A wellbeing epiphany and dodging a bullet. Late last year, I was teaching a short course for blue collar workers on overcoming stress and engaged well being. They were a skeptical group who did not want to be there and approached the topic with a high degree of defensiveness and disdain. This was no time for fluffy soft skills yet I wanted to fully contribute to their well being and knew they could benefit from a focus on well being that was real, robust and respectful. I deviated from my plan, connected with the group and realized their rapt attention and interest was bringing out my personal weave of wellness in a way that even I had never fully heard before. When the session was over one of the guys came up at the end. He told me he hated motivational speakers and that he got nothing from them. Before the workshop he borrowed some change from a friend for Tim Horton’s coffee and his friend had a small caliber bullet in his pocket (gives you an idea of the audience).  He picked up the change from his friend plus the bullet saying he may need it as he had to listen to some speaker (me). After everyone else had left at the end of the session, he handed me the bullet, the most creative expression of gratitude I have every received as a speaker, voiced a big thank you, and really did make my day! And this was in…Beasejour, Manitoba! The impromptu and honest rant with the group during that session resulted in the articulation of the following 33 point well being manifesto:

A Heretic’s Manifesto and Guide to Better Well Being at Work:

    1. We must find wellbeing inside of work and not wait until we are outside of work at the end of our day or in retirement.
    2. Hope is a misguided future perspective taking us away from where we can really make a difference, right here – right now.
    3. There is no stress in the present moment so strive to be where you are.
    4. Self-esteem is an evaluative trap that snares you like cheese snares a mouse with the snap of the trap. Accept yourself don’t evaluate yourself.
    5. Life comes before work and work/life balance and any balance is dynamic like a teeter totter.
    6. Well being is only a concept until we engage in well doing.
    7. Ignorance is more important than knowledge in fostering and enhancing well being. We being by not knowing.
    8. People don’t actually hear most interpersonal feedback unless they feel safe and safety is the only way to overcome most of our problems.
    9. Genuine caring trumps professional competence in almost every relationship.
    10. Achieving  happiness is a shallow and insignificant approach to living.
    11. Structure trumps willpower in promoting and fostering well being.
    12. Powerful questions we ask ourself are the ideal WD40 for a brain clogged by an amygdala seizure.
    13. Wellbeing is strong stuff. We must know, live and leverage our strengths in the service of others.
    14. It take energy directed towards well being to get energy and when you are depleted this is a real hindrance to experiencing well being
    15. Relaxation is the anemic aspirin of stress management and can actually cause stress.
    16. What lessens your stress today could be a major contributor of stress tomorrow.
    17. There are no algorithmic certainties of well being only heuristic probabilities of success.
    18. In life and work you are going to fart, fumble, and fall. You are human. It is not about avoiding falling down it is about how you pick yourself back up again. Everyone is screwed up: I am not okay, you are not okay and that is okay.
    19. Placebos are examples of caring made tangible.
    20. Employee wellbeing is not a soft skill just as accounting is not a hard skill.  Wellbeing embraces fluid skills when the fixed parts of our life are in need of repair.
    21. Reality is overrated, living through positive illusion, not delusion,  is powerful and practical.
    22. Wellbeing is more than a personal endeavor it  is a social phenomenon.
    23. Only you are responsible for your own well being but others are accountable for your well being just as you are accountable for their well being.
    24. No one can upset you after 90 seconds.
    25. Compliance is the anemic byproduct of power.
    26. We do not resist change we resist coercion and the gravity of the familiar is what holds us in place.
    27. If life throws you a lemon — duck, determine where it came from, think about what you can do about it and only then contemplate making lemonade.
    28. Positive thinking must be changed into a more authentic constructive thinking. Lots of  bad things do happen and positive thinking may be a disrespectful glossing offer the richness, albeit ruggedness, of human experience.
    29. Bad is at least twice as salient as good in most situations so we must tip the scales of good for good.
    30. Most of what we know really isn’t so.
    31. Wellness tips like this without personal evaluation and experimentation can create a  misguided tyranny of tips leading towards more stress. The Buddha said, “we must be a lamp unto ourselves.”
    32. Contradiction is only troublesome if you are locked into rigid thinking and a fixed mindset.
    33. Take a long shot, Charlie Chaplin once said, “life is a tragedy in close up and a comedy in long shot.” How long does it take you to get a long shot on things?

Read these 5 sources to be well on your way:

    • Tom Rath and Jim Harter, Well Being: The Five Essential Elements.
    • Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being.
    • Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are
    • Stephan Rechtschaffen,  Time Shifting: Creating More time to Enjoy Your Life
    • Polly Labarre, Developing Mindful Leaders, Harvard Business Review Blog, December 2011.

Next post in this series: How to enliven energy for employee engagement.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

8 Powerful Approaches to Create Meaningful Employee Engagement

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7. Make meaning – why work?

(Part 8 of an 11 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Finding direction through meaning

Meaning. For work to sustain and enrich people it must be meaningful. Those who have a why to work can bear almost any how and a sense of meaningful work instills a strong and rich intrinsic motivation. Progress, when it is meaningful, can be one of the best events of our day.

Finding and Defining Meaning. Paul Fairlie recently published an article on meaningful work and engagement in Advances in Developing Human Resources. He listed the common dimensions of meaning: having a purpose or goal, living according to one’s values and goals, autonomy, control, challenge, achievement, competence, mastery, commitment, engagement, generativity or service to others, self-realization, growth and fulfillment. Fairlie conducted research on meaningful work with 574 respondents.  He offered six implications for human resource development practice including deeper discussion and social connections, changing mindsets, and management education on models of human meaning. He concluded that meaninful work was a unique predictor of engagement, “meaningful work characteristics are an overlooked sources of employee motivation and engagement within organizations.”

Here are 8 ways to create meaningful work:

  1. Trump how with why
  2. Build abundant leadership whys
  3. Stretch meaning, shrink money
  4. Get Pink with autonomy, mastery, purpose
  5. Master your Mojo
  6. Reframe your values as promises
  7. Lead on purpose
  8. Double your WAMI at work

Trump how with why. Viktor Frankl concluded that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living and that life never ceases to have meaning. To move this to the workplace, if you have a why to work you can bear almost any how. Not everyone is engaged in meaningful work, but maybe everyone can be.  Part of making this happen is helping organizations, leaders, managers, and employees learn how to co-create meaningful workplaces. Part of making this happen is helping workers to perceive and experience the greater purpose in their work. In the workplace, meaning is co-created between the organization and individual. It is not something we give to another person — meaning must be built through authentic conversations about the why of work.

Build  abundant leadership whys. David and Wendy Ulrich wrote They Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations that Win. The authors frame the book around some down-to-earth and meaningful questions around identity, prupose, motivation, relationships, teams, work culture, contribution, growth, learning, resilience, civility and happiness. They encourage us to ask ourselves:

  • What am I known for?
  • Where am I going?
  • Whom do I travel with?
  • How do I build a positive work environment?
  • What challenges and interest me?
  • How do I respond to disposability and change?
  • What delights me?

The Why of Work is a practical book for leaders who are looking to instill meaning. As the authors  state in their preface: “Leaders are meaning makers: they set direction that others aspire to; they help others participate in doing good work and good works; they communicate ideas and invest in practices that shape how people think, act, and feel. As organizations become an increasing part of the individual’s sense of identity and purpose, leaders play an increasing role in helping people shape the meaning of their lives.”

Stretch meaning, shrink money. Money matters but so does meaning, completion, competition and motivation to instill caring at work. Dan Ariely offered an insightful 4 minute video on work and meaning at Big Think. He outlines how motivation and engagement are created through meaning. I encourage you to watch this video. Here is a short snippet from the transcript:

Sure, we care about money and it’s nice to get paid, but there’s also a whole range of other things that we get–a need for achievement and completion, competition with other people, and a sense of progress and a sense of meaning.  And all of those things really, really matter.  But as we move to a knowledge economy that depends more on people’s good intention and willing, and as the nature of work becomes more amorphic and work kind of interweaves with life in all kinds of interesting ways, as we move more and more to that kind of workplace, I think the relative importance of money is getting smaller and the relative importance of those other things could get… could get much larger…The first lesson is that we need to recognize how important meaning, completion, competition, motivations are in getting people to care and to work hard, and we need to try to encourage those…we need to do things that don’t undercut those human motivations.

Get Pink with autonomy, mastery and purpose. Daniel Pink wrote the popular book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  Meaning and motivation according to the research Pink gathered is created through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Pink stated that purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle.  We need to use profit to reach purpose, lessen the emphasis on self-interest, and help people pursue purpose on their own terms. Pink believe this may not only rejuvenate our businesses and organizations but also remake our world.

Master your Mojo. Marshall Goldsmith offers MOJO to find meaning. Mojo means working with 3 elements:

  1. Identity (Who do you think you are?)
  2. Achievement (What have you done lately?)
  3. Reputation (Who do other people think you are? What do other people think you’ve done lately?) .
The back and forth of mojo. We find professional mojo by what we bring to an activity. This includes motivation, knowledge, ability, confidence, and authenticity. Our personal mojo is developed by what the activity brings to us. This includes happiness, reward, meaning, learning, and gratitude. Watch and listen as Marshall takes 3 minutes to help us get our mojo working:

If the video does not open in this window, click here.

Reframe your values as promises. I appreciated Mike Morrison’s slim book on The Other Side of the Card: Where Your Authentic Leadership Begins. Mike was the Dean of the University of Toyota. He stated that one side of our business card has writing and the other has meaning. The meaning is created on the blank side of the card. The book offers a number of short exercises to fill the white space of our work with meaning. One element of the book that really stood out for me was to reframe values as promises. Values are often nice sounding statements that frozen in a framed wall statement while promises are something we keep. Ensure that your values don’t stagnate on the wall, think of them as promises, and then do all you can to keep the promises you make.

Lead on purpose.  Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have done some great research and writing demonstrating how important minimizing setbacks and maximizing progress is for engaged work. In the January 2012 McKinsey Quarterly they outline how leaders kill meaning at work. This occurs by “dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off projects teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers. The article includes a plea for executives to instill meaning in other and find meaning for themselves at the same time:

 you are in a better position than anyone to identify and articulate the higher purpose of what people do within your organization. Make that purpose real, support its achievement through consistent everyday actions, and you will create the meaning that motivates people toward greatness. Along the way, you may find greater meaining your own work as a leader.

Double your WAMI at  work. Michael F. Stager encourage us to fine our WAMI through a work and meaning inventory. People work for many reasons – some are obvious (I am paid to work), some are not as obvious (work is where my friends are). Research evidence and case studies testify to the reality that understanding how people approach work and what they get from it is vital to learning how to achieve the best possible outcomes for individuals and organizations. Meaningful work is a good predictor of desirable work attitudes like job satisfaction. In addition, meaningful work is a better predictor of absenteeism from work than job satisfaction.  The Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI) assesses three core components of meaningful work: the degree to which people find their work to have significance and purpose, the contribution work makes to finding broader meaning in life, and the desire and means for one’s work to make a positive contribution to the greater good. To download the 10-item WAMI assessment and scoring key click here.

Five meaningful considerations.

  1. Create meaning rather than searching for it. Making meaning is a creative and co-creative process.
  2. Work with meaning while achieving meaningful results.
  3. Actively engage with some of the sources listed here to enhance your own meaning and help others create their meaning.
  4. Have wide eyes about your work so that you can see and experience the greater purpsse in what you do.
  5. Remind yourself that meaning is a process not an event. You don’t simply find meaning one day, you engage in meaningful work every day.

Read these 7 meaningful sources:

    • Paul Fairlie, Meaningful work, employee engagement, and other key employee outcomes: Implication for Human Resource Development. Advances in Developing Human Resouces. December 2011.
    • Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
    • Dave Ullrich and Wendy Ulrich, The Why of Work: how Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win
    • Dan Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
    • Marshall Goldsmith, MOJO: How to get it, how to keep it, how to get it back if you lose it.
    • Mike Morrison, The Other side of the Card: Where Your Authentic leadership Begins.
    • Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, How leaders kill meaning at work. McKinsey Quarterly, January 2012.

Next post in this series: Experience Well Being.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

6 Powerful Moments of Employee Engagement

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5. Master Moments – The healthy and productive path to great micromanagement

(Part 6 of a 10 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Making moments.  Engagement resides in the moment. Learn to master moments from high quality connections to powerful touch points. When we balance challenge and skills we enter the flow zone as we dwell and work within the moment. In addition, focusing our work within the moment alleviates work stress.

6 ways to engage the moment:

  1. Access even 1% of the 20,000 opportunities for engagement.
  2. Be a micro-manager, really!
  3. Reach out and TouchPoint somebody.
  4. Transform IQ into HQI to power up the organization.
  5. Dwell in the moment to banish stress.
  6. Intersect challenge and skill to find flow.

Access even 1% of the 20,000 opportunities for engagement. According to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, we experience approximately 20,000 individual moments in a waking day. Each “moment” lasts a few seconds and each offers an opportunity to engage.  Within a moment we can fuse with our task at hand for full engagement or reach out beyond ourselves to appreciate and recognize others. Even at just 1%  fulfillment we would experience 200 powerful and engaged moments everyday.

Be a micro-manager, really! Generally, being a micromanager is not perceived to be an admirable quality in a manager or a helpful connection to the manager or work for the employee. But what if we manage our moments and focus on our moments of interaction. Small things make a big difference.  Engagement, to be effective, must be reduced to the verb of engage and when we fully engage the moment seemingly miraculous things begin to occur. Instead of the energy sapping interaction of micromanagement based on command and control of trivial details become a manager of the micro moments of work by enhancing connection, input,  interaction, authenticity, and co-creation.

Reach out and TouchPoint somebody. This approach to managing engagement is the Campbell Chicken Soup for the Organization as it originates from the former CEO of Campbell soup, Doug Conant. Doug used TouchPoints to transform Gallup’s dismal engagement scores at Campbell Soup  into some of the best scores Gallup has seen. Doug believes the moment of interruption is the real work of management. Each of the many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone’s day. The point of getting in touch is that each touch point has the opportunity to “establish high performance expectation, to infuse the agenda with great clarity and more energy, and to influence the course of events…TouchPoints take place any time two or more people get together to deal with an issue and get something done” (page 2).   Our interruption interactions are not distractions but rather the real work of management. In the moment of engagement action resides in the  interaction.

Transform IQ into HQI to power up the organization. Jane Dutton believes that there is tremendous power in our connections and interactions and we must guard against corrosive connections that  corrode motivation, loyalty, commitment and engagement. Rather, we must enhance high-quality connections or interactions marked by mutual positive regard, trust, and active engagement on both sides. A cornerstone of high quality connections is respectful engagement characterized by being present to others, affirming them, and communicating and listening in a way that manifests regard and an appreciation of the other person’s worth. Even small acts of respectful engagement infuse a relationship with greater energy. An ongoing stream of high quality interaction by people within an organization may be the single most powerful way to renew and contribute to an organization’s energy to achieve results through strong relationships. It takes some energy to initiate a high quality interaction but usually we find a return of energy through the interaction.

Dwell in the moment to banish stress. If you make where you are going more important than where you are there may be no point in going. Stephan Rechtschaffen stated in Time Shifting:  ”there is no stress in the present moment.” Rechtschaffen advocates time awareness — living fully in the moment.  The practice of timeshifting recognizes that every moment has a particular rhythm to it, and that we have the capacity to expand or contract an individual moment. One way to shift what’s going on in our world is not to try to rush to do more, but to allow ourselves to go deeper into that moment. Our ability to shift gears, to shift our rhythm to meet that moment and be present in it. We waste great chunks of time by thinking about what we’ve just done and what we’ve got to do next, instead of what we’re doing now. Much of our stress comes from regret and dread. Rechtschaffen offers a number of practical tips to improve our moments at work:

  1. Get to meetings early so you can compose yourself before the others arrive.
  2. When the phone rings, let it ring one extra time to “get centered.”
  3. Practice “mindfulness” by doing just one thing at a time, giving it your full attention.
  4. Pause after you finish one task before beginning another. If possible, make it last for several minutes.
  5. While waiting for a fax or an elevator, think about the present instead of succumbing to the rush and anxiety of tasks still waiting.

Intersect challenge and skill to find flow. Work in the moment by working on tasks that balance challenge and skills level. Csíkszentmihályi’s book Flow is over 21 years old yet offers timeless perspective and advice on how we approach a state of great time shifting or  über engagement. He has found that we experience more flow in work than our leisure time and suggests we frequently overlook the richness of the experience engagement at work offers us. Many of the current game developers have studied flow very closely to ensure their games are designed to help players experience flow. We need to do the same in our workplaces. Some of the key characteristics that promote flow at work are:

  1. Clear goals – expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities.
  2. Concentration – a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
  3. Lack of self-consciousness – the merging of action and awareness.
  4. Timelessness – one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
  5. Powerful feedback  – successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed.
  6. Balance of ability and challenge – the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult.
  7. Sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
  8. Intrinsic rewards, so there is an effortlessness of action.
  9. Full aborption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Read these  5 sources to enhance your engagement and put you in the moment:

    • Douglas Conant and Mette Norgaard, TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments.
    • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
    • Edward  Hallowell: Crazybusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD
    • Tom Rath and Donald Clifton, How Full is Your Bucket?
    • Stephan Rechtschaffen, Time Shifting: A Guide to Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life.

Next post in this series: Why employee engagement needs to be strong stuff.

View Moments. I strongly encourage you to watch the wonderful 4 minute brilliant video on moments at the end of this article.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Bonus Video: Moments