Employee Engagement Chronicle #8

David Zinger is a leading expert on employee engagement.

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle beings with a key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• What is the bonus to having employee engagement part of management’s bonus factors?
• Recognize and leverage the power of story to achieve higher levels of engagement.
• Employee engagement is not a management fad, it is worth the time and effort.
• Let employees know how they are doing and how they fit in.

Non-financial measures have growing influence on executive pay was a recent article at Management Issues. Tom Gosling offers some encouragement and warning in the article. This will put employee engagement into focus yet, incorporating non-financial targets into bonus plans isn’t necessarily guaranteed to deliver the type of benefits that might be imagined. If a target is set, managers will often find a way of meeting it in a way that was not envisaged and with unintended – and often negative – consequences.. Once these measures start being linked to pay, there is always the risk that they are met in ways that are detrimental to the business as a whole.

Work-Life Balance and Full Engagementoutline a free profile on energy and engagement. Jim Loehr has done fantastic work on sports psychology then moving to full engagement. He has now fully developed the power of story on engagement: We get energy for sustained performance when we manage our energy resources effectively,” says Dr. Jim Loehr, CEO of the Human Performance Institute and coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement. “It’s a process that’s not always intuitive, but it can be done when we take control of the stories we tell ourselves through our private, inner voices.” Dr. Loehr’s new book, The Power of Story, shows the essential relationship between full engagement and the stories we tell ourselves. “Put simply, energy follows our stories,” says Loehr. “We give life to something with every story we tell.” He adds, “The first step for many individuals is to face the truth about their current stories and how those stories affect their energy management habits.”

Mike Hager in Green Bay wrote that engaging employees proves beneficial.  A lot has been written about creating an “employee engagement” culture in the workplace. Is this just another management fad or is there something here of real value to an organization? The answer is yes. It’s worth the time and effort to create a fully engaged organization! The results of at least two recent studies are absolutely dramatic; companies with a highly engaged work force have a significantly stronger bottom-line than those who don’t engage workers.

Ken Cook wrote that effective leaders engage employees in Hartford Business.com. Summarizing some of the work of Dick Adams Ken provided these type of suggestions: Share operational and performance data with employees. If they do not know how they are doing in meeting goals or how the company compares to the competition, how can they help — and improve their own view of themselves as contributing parts of company success? In working towards whatever goals you are trying to accomplish, tell the employees how they fit in. This is critical. The employees are the ones who have to implement any solution, and they will know what works or doesn’t work. Effective leaders encourage and spur commitment on the part of employees.

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.