Employee Engagement: 21 Employee Engagement Intentions for the next 15 years

David Zinger at 60

Today, September 24th, 2014, I turned 60. This is a time when friends and colleagues are retired, turning their thoughts towards retirement, or focused on the end of work. Yet, I intend to work for 15 more years. I love my work. I want to make a contribution to work for others. I want to see employee engagement evolve into something richer and more robust. Of course, I know, this is dependent upon the health of myself and my family.

For quite a few years I have used the line, “engage along with me, the best is yet to be.” I shamelessly riffed that line from Robert Browning:

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made…

It appears to me that engage along with me and grow old along with me are now fusing inside myself and coalescing for my best is yet to be for engagement. My intentions are to contribute to engagement in more than 21 ways over the next 15 years:

1. To make employee engagement simple, small, strategic, and significant.
2. To move more to actions and behaviors versus emotions and attitudes.
3. To reduce the noun of engagement into the verb of engage.
4. To reduce engagement to 8 words: good work done well with others every day.
5. To reduce the hype and superlatives of great work to the grit and gumption of good daily work.
6. To have us think more of the hourly and moment-to-moment fluctuations of engagement rather than bi-annual measures.
7. To give employee engagement both a name and a face and remove or reduce anonymity in measurement.
8. To contribute to the development of mobile and daily engagement measures that result in real time metrics for both the individual and the organization.
9. To replace work/life balance with life-work infusion.
10. To help more workers around the world realize that work can make them well, really!
11. To ensure that engagement is approached to improve both results and relationships.
12. To change the term employee engagement into work engagement.
13. To have engagement integrated so closely into how we work that we will see a disappearance of special or extra engagement programs and initiatives.
14. To help all understand that they own their own engagement while being accountable to everyone else for their influence on other’s engagement.
15. To help leaders, managers, and supervisors to be personally more engaged and socially more engaging.
16. To help managers and leaders fully engage their virtual and mobile work forces.
17. To continue to travel around the globe offering the best in engagement and learning from the best in engagement.
18. To ensure I personally practice what I preach.
19. To transform the social elements of the Employee Engagement Network into an authentic badge and certified learning resource.
20. To develop robust and open source certification for employee engagement.
21. To fuse work and play into a richer personal experience of engagement. After all, employee engagement is an experience to be lived not a problem to be solved.