ENGAGE with David Zinger

Employee Engagement Education, Speaking, and Consulting

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Employee Engagement Resides in the White Space of Work

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Engage employees by encouraging them to enter the white space of work

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Enter the White Space of Work  

The white space on a page is the part of the page without print or images. The white space in an organization is the part without specifically designed tasks, performance, and work.

There is tremendous potential, value, and innovation that resides in the white space of work. Learn to engage employees with the white space, edges, and margins of work by asking rather than telling. Believe in your employee’s motivation and ability to determine what needs to be done and how they can go about doing it. Promote autonomy aligned with your strategic imperative.

Invite employees to voice and contribute and to frame and solve organizational challenges. For example, if you have a challenge with poor quality service ask each employee to use 5 minutes this week to assess the poor quality service and to quickly move from rumination about it to taking one small action to improve quality. Encourage employees to share what worked and examine how their actions in the white space of work can be scaled for greater use by all within the organization.

The blank white space in organizations invites voice, participation, innovation, and engagement. Shift your perspective at work and attune to the white space that resides in all tasks and organizations.

David Zinger, from Canada, is an employee engagement speaker and expert.

Employee Engagement Needs to Be Small, Simple, Strong, Significant, Strategic, and Sustainable

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I am personally and professionally moving to a more declarative approach to work and engagement based on small, simple, significant, and sustainable actions. I will leave big programs and initiatives to others. I want engagement now. I think we have undermined the value and sustainability of good people doing good work for good organizations in our search for excellence and constant striving for greatness. My proposal is not a moon shot but I do believe we can reach new heights in engagement with one small step by individuals translating to one giant leap for engagement and organizations.

We need a new equation to recalculate and improve employee engagement:

Strong Employee Engagement = Small Steps + Good Work.

Here are seven of my personal and professional adjustments to demonstrate  the stronger yet small and significant approach to engagement:

  1. A new simplified design of my site: www.davidzinger.com. This will keep being improved over the next six weeks. I encourage you to take a tour and let me know what you think of some of our first steps.
  2. Shorter yet more frequent and powerful blog posts.
  3. Powerful keynotes and courses based on  small, simple, significant and sustainable actions based on the pyramid of employee engagement.
  4. Meaningful coaching for engagement for HR professional and other managers/leaders wanting to improve engagement. I want to strengthen each client while multiplying the strength of one with the power of many in their organizations.
  5. Fundamentally we change engagement with work one person at a time so I will offer coaching for individuals (leaders, managers, employees, or self-employed individuals) wanting to improve their own career and work engagement.
  6. A powerful new course on work engagement fusing the themes of small, simple, strong, significant, and sustainable actions aligned the 10 block pyramid of engagement will be unveiled in February of 2014. After all, full work engagement is less than 10 blocks away. The course can be taken independently through 12 short modules once a week or once a month or it can be delivered as a half day or full day workshop for managers and leaders.  Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.
  7. I will slowly change my language from employee engagement to work engagement as engagement resides in the task, the context, others, and the organization. To me, it is less about being an employee and more about engaging with your work, your organization, with your co-workers, and with customers.

A sincere thank you to John Junson for all the work he has done on my work. We go back to grade nine at Bruce Junior High in Winnipeg and I know that my work would not be what it is without his efforts, influence, and perspective. His weekly cartoons on the employee engagement reminds me that “angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” I also appreciate my “brand” new relationship with Shawn Phelps, she offered fresh eyes, strong suggestions, and a new buzz with engagement and honeybees.

Let’s get small and significant with engagement right now and change work for the better for everyone!

Go ahead and ask yourself: What is one small thing I can do right now to improve my own engagement with work or increase the engagement of another person?

David Zinger Seth Godin Testimonial

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement and work engagement speaker, expert, and coach. David is on Google+