David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker Canada

Tomorrow is My Personal E-Day

August 2, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

After 9 months of wandering in the disengagement wilderness, tomorrow will mark a rebirth in my work on engagement. It was a very unsatisfying and challenging “pregnant pause.”

Yet, it is encouraging and energizing to feel that I moved through this thick and gooey wilderness and at T.S. Eliot would declare, “arrive where I started and know the place as if for the first time.

I strongly encourage you to read tomorrow post on 12 Lessons from a Personal Journey Through Burnout.

David Zinger – Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement speaker and expert who works around the world helping individuals and organizations engage in good work done well with others every day.

Employee Engagement Pyramid: 10 Keys to Engaging The Power of One

July 11, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

A singular approach to employee engagement

I am working on the power of one and singularity in my employee engagement practice. I have revisited my pyramid of employee engagement and awoke to another layer of it. This is a phenomenal coaching model to use with my clients who are striving towards full and powerful effectiveness, engagement, and efficiency. It offer a structure for them to follow and a structure for us to dialogue and develop engaging actions.

Results: Work on what the client wants to achieve and for them to articulate the results. Discuss what needs to end and discuss what the end is they have in mind.
Performance: Determine what the client will need to do to achieve results and how they make key performances worthy of their attention.
Progress: Monitor and work towards progress and manage setbacks.
Relationships: Determine key relationships that will be vital for the client.
Recognition: Create self-recognition and fully recognize others.
Moments: Determine a fine level of granularity of what behaviors to build, foster, and advance.
Strengths: Determine and utilize strengths and use those strengths on a daily basis.
Meaning: Focus on the why of work and find the why behind the results for self and others.
Wellbeing: Encourage wellbeing found inside of work.
Energy: Ensure that work is an energy gain and determine how to energize others.

…

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and coach based in Canada.

Is Employee Engagement a Threat or a Thread?

March 25, 2014 by David Zinger 6 Comments

Are we creating iatrogenic disengagement?

(Reading time 1 minute, 20 seconds)

Employee engagement may threaten the established ways of working when we fully engage employees and stop stifling voice, identity, and innovation. I believe the fresher ways of working produce both fear and threat for many leaders and managers. I think conducting anonymous surveys suggest that engagement is seen as a threat in the organization. I have always believed that disengagement should not be a punishable offense but rather a trigger for a conversation about work. How can it trigger a conversation if we don’t know who is saying what? If leaders and managers really don’t know who is saying what and have to rely on a survey to get some aggregate data I think they need to be more engaged with employees.

It seems to me engagement must be threatening if the only way we believe employees will tell us the truth is if we make their responses anonymous – – – yet being anonymous inside an organization is certainly one of the contributors to feeling disengaged from the organization. In medicine this is termed iatrogenesis – the illness is caused by the treatment. I think in many circumstance, our anonymous surveys are causing iatrogenic disengagement.

Engagement can be a thread that sews work, management, and leadership together. It changes how we work as we operate more from invitation, connection, conversation, trust, value-congruence, etc. So let’s take the thread of engagement and use it to stitch together the open wounds of threat in our organizations and work together so work will work for everyone. If we do this, I sincerely believe work can be healing and make us well.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who firmly believe that for work to be sustainable it must make us well.

Employee Engagement is not working even though it is about working

October 29, 2013 by David Zinger 4 Comments

Engage: Go small, be good.

Large scale programs, endless competencies, and 22 drivers of engagement are not the solution to our dis-ease with work and our chronic disengagement. Employees and organizations are weary of being cajoled and counseled to be great. We need to restore the sanity at work, the caring for what we do, and the connection we have with one another as we do good work.

Even with the most optimistic assessments we have seen minimal improvement in employee engagement over the past 10 years. Everybody is talking about employee engagement but what are they really doing about it. Leadership is befuddled when they receive endless results from the 120 item bi-annual survey. Managers, already busy with 15 other priorities, are being tasked with engagement as they go from doing more with less to doing everything with nothing. Survey consultancies construct fancy PowerPoint presentations with fifty recommendations the organization tries to sink their teeth into while employees are wondering, “where’s the beef?”

Seventy to eighty percent of our projects in organizations fail to deliver the results we hoped for. We are taxing our resources, stressing our people, and our engagement initiatives are sowing the seeds of disengagement.

There is a better way to engage : Go Small, Be Good

Here is my current Employee Engagement Equation:

Employee engagement = Small Steps + Good work.

Small is the new significant while good is the new great.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex…It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. ~ E. F. Schumacher

It is counter intuitive but big results in employee engagement will come from being small, simple, strong, sustainable, and significant. Engagement is not an attitude or a survey score it is the small actions and behaviors we exhibit each day at work. The Dalai Lama stated, if you think small is not significant try sleeping in a tent with a mosquito.

Employee engagement must be integrated into the fabric of work rather than heaped on as an extra. Great work and great workplaces are a cute conceptual ideal but I prefer the sustainable heartiness of good work done daily. Most of the rare great performance and great work that I know came from sustained effort over long periods of time. We need to do the best we can, with what we’ve got, wherever we are. As John Wooden, the fantastic UCLA basketball coach said, “don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

Good is not the enemy of great, good is the only pathway there is when great occasionally occurs. Although some believe that our reach should exceed our grasp I think we should have a good grasp of our work and hang on to it everyday. Drop the concept of engagement and embrace the verb of engage.

David Zinger is fully engaged in creating a 12 module course on the tactical and practical actions of employee engagement based on his eclectic pyramid of engagement. This will will be an excellent independent study course, speech, workshop, or training session. If you are interested in learning more about the course that will be ready early in 2014, email David today at david@davidzinger.com.