Employee Engagement: The Sunday Question

I attended a powerful two-day employee engagement session in Berlin on March 13 & 14 sponsored by the Connecting Group (thanks for setting this up Sadie). The speakers and participants were exceptional. It is not my intent to go into great detail with every presentation but I will write a few blog posts about engagement elements that stood out for me.

I was inspired by the engaged and passionate presentation of Ramiro Garces, Vice President Human Resources Latin America at Kimberly-Clark. I believe small is the new significant in employee engagement and Ramiro offered us a fantastic question for employees.

Employees are encouraged to stop for 30 seconds every Sunday to ask themselves:

How do I  feel about going back to work tomorrow?

What a terrific tool to think about the week ahead and create a transitional hinge between Sunday and Monday morning. If the emotions are positive great. If the emotions are negative employees are encouraged to talk with their supervisor or manager or to do something to change it themselves. This is a powerful example of a one question informal survey that really gives an employee a pulse check and changes disengagement from a punishable offence into a trigger for a conversation.

I encourage you to adopt this question and maybe even ask it right now: How do you feel about going back to work tomorrow?

David Zinger is a global student and expert on employee engagement bringing world class lessons in engagement to his clients and audiences. He feels great about going back to work tomorrow!