• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

  • Home
  • Topics
  • Blog
    • About
  • People Artistry
  • Resources
    • Model
    • ENGAGE: The Course
    • People Artistry
    • 10 Principles of Engagement
    • What Others are Saying about David
    • Clients
    • Zengage
    • Books
    • Subscribe today to receive a biweekly zinger (tip) on employee engagement:
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Archives for David Zinger Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker

A review of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

March 31, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

(Reading time: 58 seconds)

Essentialism

I enjoyed Greg McKeown’s new book on Essentialism.  To be effective with the small, simple, significant, and sustainable approach to employee engagement we must focus our efforts and time on the essentials.

McKeown had a lot of fine points including the discernment and the unimportance of practically everything. His four E’s of essentialism encompass: essence, explore, eliminate, and execute. The essentialist start small and gets big results while celebrating small acts of progress. Are you doing that with your employee engagement programs and initiatives?

Here is a quotation from the book on only doing what is essential:

Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.

My quibble with this book on essentialism was the length of about 250 pages. I believe our books on engagement need to be more essential while also being briefer. I encourage you to read the book but only focus on the essential sections!

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who encourages all of us involved in employee engagement to be more essential in how we focus on engagement and how we work.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker, Employee Engagement, Essentialism, Greg McKeown

Download a List of Over 500 Employee Engagement Videos

February 6, 2014 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Over the past 6 years we have been posting videos that relate to employee engagement on the Employee Engagement Network.

Employee Engagement Videos

We now have over 500 curated videos. There are so many ways you can use these videos, including:

  • Kickoff an engagement effort
  • Build your team
  • Stimulate new ideas or practices for engagement
  • Inspire you to create an engaging video
  • Start you day with an engaging video clip
  • As part of a training or education day
  • Circulate to coworkers
  • Recover from a setback at work
  • Education your teenager about work
  • Engage yourself more fully

Click on the cover above or on this line to download a clickable free list of all these great videos.

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement educator and speaker.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker, EEN, Employee Engagement, employee engagement videos

The 6S’s of Employee Engagement Actions

November 12, 2013 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

A Simple Guide to Employee Engagement Actions

Zinger Employee Engagement 6's for Action

I am currently creating a 12 module action-based course on engagement. It will help you with over 40 practical and tactical actions you can enact to increase and improve employee engagement for yourself or others at work. Below is a page on the 6’s of employee engagement actions from Module 1.

The 6 S’s acronym offers simple guidelines to determine, enact, and assess ideal actions to improve engagement as you apply the content and tools of the course.

Small – Small is the new significant. Steer clear of huge programs that are additive and overtax an already overloaded workforce.

Simple – Keep actions simple. We often race to find complex answers to big problems when simple things done daily may be the lever small enough to fully engage the organization.

Strong – Although the action can be small and simple strive to ensure it is powerful and robust.

Significant – The action should be significant, meaningful, and matter.

Strategic – The action should align and contribute to the overall strategy of the organization.

Sustainable – The action should be sustainable over time — accomplished by making the action small, simple, strong, significant, and strategic.

David Zinger Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker

David Zinger is a Canadian and global employee engagement speaker. He is currently creating a powerful 12 module course on employee engagement. If you want to improve engagement where you work by getting involved with the course contact him today at: david@davidzinger.com

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: 6S's of employee engagement, David Zinger Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker, Employee Engagement Course, significant, simple, small, strategic, strong, sustainable

Employee Engagement: Why Good is Good Enough

September 10, 2013 by David Zinger 13 Comments

The Blasphemy of GREAT WORK

Z pen

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.  ~ Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Don’t get me wrong, I think great work is, well…great. I appreciated how my social media buddy and former Slacker Manager blog partner, Phil Gerbyshak, wrote a book on Make it Great. It is inspiring to see companies win Great Places to Work awards. Michael Bungay Stainer, a man whose work I admire and who joined me for a beer and conversation in Toronto, is devoted to helping “people, teams and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work.” Jim Collins in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t offers us a blueprint to move from good to great. As I was writing this I just received a review copy of a new book, Great Days at Work by Suzanne Hazelton. I have only looked at the cover so far but it looks great.

So this all seems great, but…

Call me vanilla, or meat and potatoes if you must, but I am fatiguing on great while getting increasingly enamored with good people doing good work in good organizations.

Good work isn’t nirvana and it isn’t perfect but it seems honest and attainable. To me, it is less about ideal and more about real. It removes a sense of unattainable striving and accepts the difficulties and challenges inherent in completing tasks and working with so many different people.  Good work is sustainable while great work is only touched for short periods of time.

Good work is not hype or hyperbole. It is a fusion of gumption, and determination. It is a bit like running into a stiff headwind. You may not be making a great time but you persevere and you finish and you know you “did good.”

Good work embraces both bad and good days but in good work the good days outnumber the bad days by 3 to 1. Maybe Monday should just be taken out of the weekly work mix and be considered as a starter day for the week. I know this is a blasphemy for all the prophets of Make Monday Great but I am a bit of a late Tuesday morning around 10:30 a.m. type of guy. I find it liberating to let myself have one bad day of work each week.

In good work, it is okay to fumble fall and fail. You work to recover the fumble, pick yourself up after the fall, and try not to fail in the same way again. I like the Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

Good work weaves together grit with sh*t yet at the end of the day work doesn’t stink and you know you did a good job.

In  good work  you can’t wait to see some people and other people just weigh on you.

As you do good work you will find your engagement fluctuates ten times a day but overall averages at a solid 7.5 out of 10.

Good work fulfills a purpose without the necessity of missionary zeal or a corporate song. Good work is not mean — rather, veins of meaning streak through the day offering us a genuine why to work.

When I do good work, I don’t need to reach for the moon. I just need to reach out and help a coworker.

I don’t need to be a frosted flake Tony the Tiger of work going around growling, “GGRRRRREAT!” Kellogg’s once sent Tony to our home for a free breakfast with my children and a bunch of the neighborhood children. It was a warm summer day and they guy wearing the tiger suit kept overheating because the fan in his tiger head was not working. The lesson here: be careful about always being great because you might overheat your brain.

I know good does not sell while great gives us hope, inspiration, and a high standard. But this hope, inspiration, and high standard may be sowing the seeds of discouragement and disengagement.

To slightly modify M. Scott Peck’s beginning line in The Road Less Traveled, work is difficult. I am reminded of a line Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said in response to the psychological movement of many years ago called, I’m OK, You’re OK. She said, “I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that is OK.” I think good work is OK.

At this stage of my career, good is good enough. I don’t need to take Jim Collins’ leap. Good feels human. Good feels attainable. Good feels significant. Good feels real. And that’s good for me. I hope you have a good day at work today.

speaking of experts2

David Zinger is an expert  global employee engagement speaker and consultant who uses the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations create good engagement.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker, Employee Engagement, good work

David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

Copyright © 2021 · Aspire Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in