dialogue — ENGAGE with David Zinger

Employee Engagement Dialogue: Mike Wagner and David Zinger

October 15, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Strange and Strangers: Employee Engagement Dialogue

Snippet from the dialogue: Yeah, what’s happening right now is that we have to learn how to do group creativity, and until we learn how to do that we’re not going to get the innovation and the competitive advantages that we’d like to get from our organization, and we don’t do that very well; we don’t know how to assemble teams, we don’t know how to facilitate creative discovery, we don’t know how to move through that process, and until we get there we’re going to be waiting for the lone genius to somehow emerge and show us the answer, and frankly I just don’t think that’s going to happen in most organizations.

Strange Engagements from David Zinger on Vimeo.

David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger and welcome to Employee Engagement Dialogues. It’s my privilege and honor to have Mike Wagner with us fromIowa here today. I encountered Mike on a You Tube video on strange, and so we’re going to focus today on strange employee engagement and I’m looking forward to our dialogue. Mike, welcome to Employee Engagement Dialogues. There’s a little bio for you up there, but I think which is much better is just in your own words if you can tell us a little bit about your background? [0:36]

Mike Wagner: David, great to be with you today and looking forward to our conversation for sure. My background I might say is checkered; I’m an accidental businessperson. I actually began my public career, my marketplace career actually as a minister and a pastor starting new churches, and so I studied strange things, I guess that’s only fitting – seven years of classical Greek and four years of ancient Hebrew, and I have a master’s in American church history, and so that’s part of my strange journey, and I started churches and I pastured churches for 17 years before I got into the marketplace. [1:15]

David Zinger: And then you fell down the rabbit hole? [1:18]

Mike Wagner: I fell absolutely down the rabbit hole and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. Actually, you know when I left the ministry I found myself at Saturn in the late 90’s, the car company, and it was a great place; I learned a lot about branding, but I also learned about how to challenge a dysfunctional industry if you will, and how hard that is, and what it takes to do that, and what it takes to actually bring people along with you in that mission and vision of reinventing an industry. [1:50]

David Zinger: So, why White Rabbit Group, Mike, why the name? [1:55]

Mike Wagner: The name is actually intended to get you to ask the question why White Rabbit? [2:02]

David Zinger: I fell for it didn’t I? [2:03]

Mike Wagner: Yeah. About 98% of the time before I give a speech or an address or open up a workshop people say before you go any farther, tell us where did White Rabbit come from, and if I’d called it Wagner Consulting no one would have asked, you know? But in part it’s from Alice in Wonderland and the idea that the people that we want to serve as our clients are like Alice at the beginning of the book; reading a book with too many words and kind of bored and unsure of yourself as far as what comes next, and we want to be the white rabbit that takes our clients down the rabbit hole and brings them to a brand new place of excitement, and enthusiasm, but also challenges status quo for them. [2:44]

David Zinger: OK, and that’s a strange environment when you readAlice in Wonderland and a very enthralling environment. Before we get a little more formal with your definition of engagement and branding, what’s engaging you most in your work right now? [2:58]

Mike Wagner: I’m really intrigued right now by how organizations come together. Some work by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, and then most recently literally just happening right now Dave Gray’s book, The Connected Company, are areas of study and research that I’ve really been interested in; challenging hierarchical models, looking at network models in terms of how we create organizations, and I think it does touch on engagement because it’s going to change the dynamic and address some of the challenges of siloing and other things, so that’s where my area of interest is right now and we’re seeing that as a big challenge for a lot of our client companies as well. [3:44]

David Zinger: OK, and when you join the Employee Engagement Network one of the questions I’ve been asking recently is to have people put engagement in their own words. I know there’s already some people argue too many definitions of engagement, but meaning as in people, not words. Can you tell us how you kind of define or look at engagement? [4:03]

Mike Wagner: You know I look at engagement relationally, and the particular relationship I think that drives engagement, at least it has for me as a person is knowing the connection between what I do every day and the way we deliver remarkable customer experience or branded experience to our customers, clients, members, whoever it might be, and seeing the connection between my contribution and how people are enriched, or transformed, or somehow changed for the better. If I can make that connection, I’m engaged. If it’s not something I can make a connection, if I can’t see those dots coming together, then I’m not engaged, and so that’s how I define employee engagement these days. [4:45]

David Zinger: Well, thanks for that, and I’m looking forward to when we weave that together with some of your concepts on strange, because I think that just somehow that video just resonated with me in looking at the workplace, but before we do, and it’s connected nonetheless. One of your areas is in branding and sometimes people see branding as clever slogans or a logo on a cereal box or something like that, but I think you have a much richer view of branding. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about branding or personal branding? [5:17]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, I look at this from a behavioral point of view rather than from a projection of an image. You know, again, we have grown up in an era where brands were about logos and taglines and we were in a broadcast world, but I think our world has shifted to this network marketplace and we like to say that you behave your way to a great brand, you don’t talk your way to a great brand, that branding is not as much a graphic art as a performance art, and it’s something I learned at Saturn where we had to behave our way to a positive brand experience for our clients, and it’s something that is going to touch the entire organization, so it’s not just marketing then; it’s operations, it’s everything, it touches on every element of the work world, and our approach to branding is about performance – it’s the doing, and designing the experience for customers and delivering that experience. That’s what we feel branding is all about in this current world that we’re in. [6:20]

David Zinger: And then also we’re looking at it from an employee or a person working in an organization; it’s we could be tying some of the branding into their performance management if you will? [6:30]

Mike Wagner: Totally. In fact, at Saturn we had a thing called brand critical standards, and literally every employee had brand critical standards, and they could see what they were doing each day as a contribution to hitting certain standards that rolled up into a branded experience for our customers, and so it was actually part of our training, how we were hired, how we were encouraged and trained along the way. You’re right, there’s this connectivity, and I like to see that connectivity. Again, I think that when it’s disconnected then it’s just work; it’s not contributing to something bigger. [7:09]

David Zinger: And that sense of meaning and purpose is certainly one of those drivers or factors of engagement and takes things beyond just work. [7:19]

Mike Wagner: Exactly, exactly, and it’s fun too, because it’s the same kind of fun that people have when they put on a party for someone. When you do a birthday party for someone you like, it’s that same kind of energy of how are we going to make this special, and memorable, and what’s going to happen when they see what we’ve got planned for them? So, there’s a design element, there’s a creativity element in it as well that all employees are participating in. [7:46]

David Zinger: So, it takes that workplace and enriches it. I don’t know if you’ve been over to theUK. Certainly one of the phrases that, you know, as you ride the tubes and look around, you see all the places called mind the gap, and the gap they’re talking about there is the gap between the subway car and the platform or whatever, but I think you brought a whole sense of mindfulness to the gap, to the differences between people. Can we get strange for a while? [8:17]

Mike Wagner: I hope so. I’m glad that you liked that TEDx talk. [8:21]

David Zinger: I don’t like it, I love that TEDx talk. As I said to you before we started, I watched it twice, and given the amount of time I have, I usually don’t have time to do things twice, and got more out of it even the second time. What do you mean by strange? [8:39]

Mike Wagner: Well, strange really is just different than me. So, and most everyone else feels that; they feel somewhat unique, or different, or they have a point of view that is not shared by 100% of the people around them; we’re all strange, and being able to embrace that and have a fresh way to attack that. I suppose in the workplace people talk about it as diversity, but I thought maybe strange would be a more fun way and maybe a fresh way to enter into that conversation, and so that’s why I put together this talk for the TEDx Des Moines presentation. [9:15]

David Zinger: In the talk you quote one of your favorite authors and you say the brain must be shocked into paying attention, and when I hear workplace diversity I go ho-hum; when I see strange, all of the sudden my brain is engaged. [9:29]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, well that’s back to why we called our company White Rabbit – we wanted to shock you into paying attention, and yes Gregory Berns in Iconoclast, a great book, it says that we’ve got to wake people up by doing the unexpected, the non-conventional. We can do conventional things in an unconventional way, and that’s engagement again, so being strange and welcome the stranger into our workplace so that we can do things that we couldn’t do without your strange contribution I think is part of what has intrigued me about how businesses can run and how organizations can succeed. [10:05]

David Zinger: Well, and it seems to me, and you used a word that we’ve living in an echo chamber at times, and I think sometimes for some organizations when I talk to the executive or whatever, their feedback seems to come in an echo chamber, and the best they do at listening to employees at times is to monitor the employee engagement survey, and I think you’re asking them to do something much more than that. [10:30]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, in fact I was wondering, David, why does strange resonate for you as you look at this world of engagement that you are immersed in? Is it because people are kind of homogenous, you know, kind of flat in terms of the differences in many organizations at some point? [10:52]

David Zinger: Well, you know I’ve been a little concerned about how, for lack of a better term, straight-laced many people played in the workplace, so we can’t go beyond that. You know one of my pet peeves if you will, and I’ll try not to stay on this for very long, is I would like to see employee engagement surveys where employees would be safe enough to put their name on it. The disengagement wouldn’t be a punishable offense, it would be a trigger to a conversation, and that I think in some workplaces we don’t have an engagement problem, we have a safety problem, that it’s not safe to be strange, it’s not safe to be different and to let people know what you’re experiencing, but if we can’t start there, how do we move from there? [11:35]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, in fact you’re really harkening back even to some of my work as a pastor, and that is the job of ministry many times is to create a safe place where you can have unsafe conversations, and until that I can’t bring all of me, I can’t bring all of me to the workplace, and so how can I be fully engaged if parts of me have to be left somewhere else and not brought to the workplace? I’m with you on that. In fact, I’ll tell you one of the things that really struck me when I began to speak in the marketplace and have more employee conversations and presentations was people would say your presentation’s different. I would say what’s different about it? They say well, it’s like you’re exited about stuff, and I said aren’t you guys excited about stuff? Well, you know, we don’t express it very much, you know, and that was a surprising thing to me; I thought well, this is exciting, you spend a lot of your life at work, why wouldn’t you allow yourself to be passionate about it, but that was a whole piece of their life that was left somewhere else. [12:40]

David Zinger: Yeah, and you know one of the expressions in our field of employee engagement is, and I don’t care for it much, is get everybody on the bus and I like to think people can drive themselves, but you talk about getting on a bus and seeking out the strange person, and I’m not talking about a bus; I’m talking about the organization, but you have a delightful example on the bus that I think if you listen to carefully it really is seeing the strange people and the employees in our organization and what they have to offer and to give us. I wonder if you can give us the abridged version of Alice Moore’s piano and kind of encourage people to watch the You Tube video after? [13:22]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, Alice Moore, I was riding the bus at one point in my career down to work everyday, and as a bookish fellow I was carrying a book and always reading. I set aside the book, I began to look around at my fellow travelers, and I found what I thought was probably the most different or strange person – this 95-year old woman that would get on the bus every Tuesday and it turns out her name was Alice Moore, and all I did was begin to ask her questions, and she told me her life story, and over a few weeks I got to know her very, very well, and then she surprised me one day and said Mike, I’ve decided to move to San Francisco and live the rest of my days with my twin sister, and I knew about her twin sister and I knew their story, and then she said Mike, I’m going to give you and your family my upright piano, and I began to weep literally, because in getting to know this person that was so different from me and really from a different world… She was giving me the piano that her father, the railroader that worked so hard to buy a piano for his twin daughters, she was going to give that to me, and the only thing that she asked is that when your kids are done with it, pass it on to another family. So, my kids learned to play the piano on Alice Moore’s piano and this is that reaching out to the person different than you and looking for the magical discoveries that come when you do that, and it’s enriching, and why we don’t… David, don’t you find it’s amazing that people can work a few feet from each other and not know each other very well at all? [15:00]

David Zinger: What do you mean? You just email the person. [15:02]

Mike Wagner: I sent them a memo, what are you talking about? [15:06]

David Zinger: You know, we got very intimate – I texted once. [15:09]

Mike Wagner: But yeah, and so I’ll do like retreats and things like that, and people the first thing I’ll do is I’ll have them tell me about a moment in their life when they felt they were the best team experience of their life, and people share amazing stories, and as they share these stories people find out things about each other that they never knew, and I’m saying you’ve worked with each other for 7, 8, 10 years, and you didn’t know this about this person, and they have so much more to bring than just their resume, and their educational certificate, and maybe their expertise in subject matter; there’s bigger things going on and there’s more enrichment that can take place, and more innovation and creativity frankly compared to… [15:54]

David Zinger: Yeah, you talk about, you know, solo authors and publications, and when you bring a group of people together with differences or whatever, and I think what was the factor, about 6x the amount? [16:08]

Mike Wagner: Yes. Yeah, what’s happening right now is that we have to learn how to do group creativity, and until we learn how to do that we’re not going to get the innovation and the competitive advantages that we’d like to get from our organization, and we don’t do that very well; we don’t know how to assemble teams, we don’t know how to facilitate creative discovery, we don’t know how to move through that process, and until we get there we’re going to be waiting for the lone genius to somehow emerge and show us the answer, and frankly I just don’t think that’s going to happen in most organizations. [16:44]

David Zinger: And things are so connected, I mean going back to say, the survey methodology that’s frequently used in organizations, how many organizations go to the employees and ask them what questions should we be asking you, and I thought who would be better qualified to determine some of the questions to ask about engagement than employees themselves, but no we got to a consultant company and pay huge fees to have someone manage this process, and not that data isn’t important or the data isn’t relevant, and that we do want to understand if we’re making progress, but I think we need to really supplement that by minding the gap, by lessening the space in-between. [17:24]

Mike Wagner: I’ll tell you one of the best questions I ever heard came from Peter Block, I’m sure you’ve probably read some of his work. [17:31]

David Zinger: Yes. [17:32]

Mike Wagner: And Block in The Answer to How is Yes has a series of questions that he says he would ask employees, and one that is really stunning is this question: what do you want to create? I recommend all my clients ask every employee they hire, you’re coming to work here, what are you hoping to be able to create while you’re employed at this place? I think that opens up a wonderful conversation. [18:00]

David Zinger: And I think it’s kind of sad that a lot of people don’t even realize that that’s an option for themselves. [18:06]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, true. No, they have gotten to a place where really they have allowed themselves to be just employee and minimizing their contribution, and so it’s time for a revolution, and let’s make it a strange revolution, OK, let’s open the door to a brand new way of collecting employees, gathering them, assembling them, and setting them on fire to do something really meaningful in the world. [18:35]

David Zinger: Well and whenAlice goes down the rabbit hole she has some just incredible experiences, and sees the world in such different ways, and you’ve got to believe when she comes back up she’s transformed for the rest of her life. [18:50]

Mike Wagner: Exactly, and so it’s about making the marketplace not less than transactions, but certainly more than transactions; making it a transformative place, not just a transactional world. [19:03]

David Zinger: And yet with White Rabbit Group, I mean we’re kind of over the map a little bit with some of the strangeness, is one of the focuses you have is really making things simple, objective, and easily communicated so that it becomes at the center of everything you do. [19:18]

Mike Wagner: Yeah, yeah, and one of the things that we do that’s very, very simple is we personify the right customer and the right customer experience, usually giving a name. One of our clients, for example, named their right customer Jack, and so their question is what would Jack want, and it’s personified, it’s simple. Senior leaders say is this something that Jack would want us to do. If it happens to be a woman, it’s Jackie, what would Jackie want us to do? It’s a foreign sale, it’s what would Jacque want us to do, but it’s in that organization it’s simple, it’s objective, it’s easily remembered and communicated, and everyone knows it’s all about Jack here. [20:00]

David Zinger: And to get to Jack we’ve got to work with Jill, and Jill’s the person who’s going to deliver the services, and it seems to me with that branding we need to ask those internal questions around engagement about Jill and who is our Jill, and how does she work, and what does she want. That’s so well said. [20:17]

Mike Wagner: Yeah. Well, you know, so that’s our approach, and once we have an opportunity to serve clients that way, the leaders are really setting up their employees to succeed and that’s our goal. I think the thing that really motivated me deep in my heart is when I began to see how many wonderful people weren’t fully contributing inside an organization because it wasn’t simple and it wasn’t easy to understand, it wasn’t objective, and so a lot of the contribution was being left on the table when it could be brought to the workplace. [20:50]

David Zinger: Well said, very well said. Mike thanks so much for taking 20 minutes of your time to help us look at the world from a little bit of a stranger perspective and to mind that gap. You’re part of the Employee Engagement Network and it’s wonderful to see 5,100 and about 50 people now kind of coming together and looking at work, and how we connect, and how we do things, so thanks for joining us today. [21:16]

Mike Wagner: I’m honored David, and thank you for such a lively conversation; my mind is racing. [21:20]

David Zinger: My pleasure. [21:21]

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert. He founded and host the 5300 member Employee Engagement Network. David is currently using the Pyramid of Employee Engagement with organizations and individuals to increase their levels of engagement.

Employee Engagement Dialogue: Elizabeth Lupfer and David Zinger on the Social Workplace

September 12, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement and the Social Workplace: A Dialogue with Elizabeth Lupfer

This recorded twenty minute dialogue between Elizabeth Lupfer and David Zinger discusses the social nature of work and engagement. Here is a snippet from the recording:

Yes. Let me think about how I want to phrase it for you, but what my big statement would be or my big mission is that it’s really that the relationship between employees and managers has historically, in my opinion, been taken for granted, and what I love about the emergence of social tools is it has really refocused our attention on employee engagement, and how to drive a high performing organization, and but more than that, it’s that having a high performance organization, and having an engaged workforce are actually very complimentary goals, and those are necessary for maximizing business success, and on top of that it’s also realizing that employee engagement is multifaceted.

Employee Engagement Dialogue: The Social Workplace with Elizabeth Lupfer and David Zinger from David Zinger on Vimeo.

David Zinger: My name is David Zinger and welcome to the employee engagement dialogues. I’m speaking and have the honor of speaking with Elizabeth Lumpfer on the social workplace, and Elizabeth you are what I would consider a maven of the social workplace and a prolific curator and writer about the social workplace. On the slides right now there’s a little bit of your formal background, but I’m wondering if you can say a few things about your background and your interest in the social workplace, Elizabeth? [00:30]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Sure, and I want to say thank you; I have never really considered myself a maven, but I suppose it’s kind of grown to be that. I started out always professionally in corporate communications, and employee communications, and recently it’s definitely evolved to include HR communications – learning all facets of what it’s like to really drive the employee experience within my professional work, and it just so happens that my passion personally is how to further engaged employees. So, when social media first started emerging into the market it really was a focus on consumer engagement and marketing from that perspective, and I’ve always wondered how we could take the things that we were learning from driving engagement with consumers, to internalize that within the organization, and that’s pretty much how the social workplace first started, and it’s become a really big opportunity for me ever since. [01:45]

David Zinger: Yeah, and not only an opportunity for you, but a contribution to so many others. What engages you most in your work, Elizabeth? [01:55]

Elizabeth Lupfer: I think I’m one of those people that as soon as I hear about a new platform, if something’s in alpha, I want to be on it, if it’s in beta, I want to be on it. So, it’s really about emerging trends for me, and but it’s not so much about adopting what’s emerging; it’s also making sure that it’s making me personally more productive and streamlining my activity. I’m a web developer at heart and there’s a rule that we have in web development, and it says that if you do something more than three times, then you need to automate that process, and so that’s really what drives me is OK, if I’m someone who needs it to be automated, because I am probably actually one of the most least productive people in the world, because I’m easily distracted by shoes mostly, but… I know. All right, I have ADD when it comes to shoes; I’m like oh my gosh, there’s this new shoe, I need to have it. So, it’s how to make sure that I stay focused, and then also how to keep employees focused as well and not always looking at new shoes like I am. [03:16]

David Zinger: You’re the first person who… I know lots of people who get distracted by shiny objects, but you’re the first person with shoes in that equation. I want to back you up for a moment, and that’s my perspective, and it might not be yours is that you do talk about interesting new tools, and you use them so well – everything from info-graphics from Pinterest, and we’ll touch upon that, but you see the social workplace as something much more than tools; it looks to me like you use those tools to really further advance and connect that social element of work? [03:47]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Yeah, well, because it’s easy to say, you know, create a collaboration site or to integrate Yammer and then say oh, we’re a social company, but the problem is, and I would say for the companies that have quickly adopted social tools, it was a hard lesson, because what happened was you would have an initial push for a collaboration site or for Yammer or Chatter, what great tools by the way, but what you want to drive or build is the sustainability, and the only way that you’re going to do that is if you actually integrate those tools judiciously within your business processes, within HR transactions, with, and what I like to say, and what you’ll often find on my blog is how to enable employees to learn, plan, and do their work and personal lives. [04:53]

David Zinger: So, there’s learning, planning, and doing, but your unique focus is social, and a real strong weave with engagement, hence bringing you into the employee engagement dialogues with that. I have a slide up right now of kind of my passion of trying to collaborate and engage honeybees, and my fascination with those small creatures is 50,000 in a hive and they really learn to work together, and the next slide is the tagline for the social workplace – where community and collaboration mean productivity. I wonder if you can enhance that comment and just say a little bit more about that? [05:34]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Well, sure, and it’s really speaking to… If you want to use your honeybee example, and I really love the dialogue, the back and forth that we had, David. Just for everyone’s frame of reference, when we first started talking about the honeybees I was like oh, isn’t that interesting that the queen bee is the one that, you know, is the driver, but really what it’s, and what you told me, David, was that well, you know, it’s not necessarily about the honeybee; it’s about the bee workers, and that’s exactly right, and when you apply that to the organization, it is all about the employees, it’s about the workers, it’s not about the queen bee. The queen bee drives or is a representation of leadership and strategy, but at the end of the day it’s about the workers, and so when I started talking about collaboration, and community, and how it needs to drive that productivity, it was really speaking to how the collaboration and the community are the tools and the productivity is the results, and that’s how you make sure that you strategically align your initiatives, and your programs, and all those social tools, and shiny new things, and make them business drivers at the same time, because no CEO, I think you know David too, with all your work in engagement, you can’t just say oh, we want to be more collaborative; they need to see results, and the results… So, you really need to determine what that result is, and for me it’s about productivity. [07:24]

David Zinger: So, the social, to use your fascination, is what puts the shoes on the feet of productivity, it’s what makes it operate and run, and many times people tend to see the social somehow as something extra or people are wasting time on that Twitter thing or they’re just kind of gathering around the water cooler or however you want to see it. It really is a huge part of that strategic approach and the way that that strategic approach is achieved. [07:53]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Right, well you know it’s so funny that you bring up that analogy, because about two or three years ago I actually wrote a blog post about my finding new heights in social media and in my high heels, because…. And I actually wrote about it because of my fascination with my shoes and my high heels, because I’m known for wearing my four-inch heels wherever I go, and so I wrote a blog post about finding new heights in social media and in my high heels, and it really was speaking to how I personally reached new heights wearing my shoes, and if you ascend that analogy to social tools, businesses can find new heights as well. [08:42]

David Zinger: What a wonderful weave, Elizabeth, and I mean high heels and yet strategic planning, and thinking, and not seeing it as fluff, but owning your kind of own individuality of that, and I’m very appreciative of that perspective that you bring. [08:59]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Well, it’s funny because most people always ask me, because I’m actually in HR, and my friends they often ask me wow, you’re in HR? Because I am the most… HR has a reputation for being policy and procedure enforcer, so I’m your most unusual HR person out there. [09:24]

David Zinger: And so you really are involved in a fair bit of thought leadership, and as I said before, you’re quite prolific, and we’ll talk about the site where people can go to read what you’re writing and to see a collection of info graphics, but you really are a thought leader in that collaborative element. Have you ever written a manifesto on the social workplace? [09:46]

Elizabeth Lupfer: No, actually I haven’t, and… So, it’s I have thought about it, and really what I would like to do, and I have there’s a few colleagues where we have tossed it around, and tossed it around, and because I think that to write a really compelling manifesto or even a book about the social workplace, I have a contribution to a very specific area, so the employee engagement, the social tools within business processes and HR transactions, that for me to write a really balanced manifesto that I think would be beneficial, and knowledge, and practice for a lot of organizations, I have looked to a couple colleagues that I think can speak to other areas that I think are really important components to an effective social workplace. I just haven’t… You know, you see how my blog, and then my blog, David, I think as you know, is not my fulltime job. [10:59]

David Zinger: No. [10:59]

Elizabeth Lupfer: A lot of people think it is. So, it’s I actually have a fulltime job in addition to the blog, so the question is time I suppose, and coordination with the colleagues that I was mentioning before. [11:16]

David Zinger: Well, and that’s your contribution, I mean in a similar vein with the Employee Engagement Network; that’s not my job, that’s a hobby originally started to get five or six people together and it’s grown a bit beyond that. [11:28]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Exactly. [11:30]

David Zinger: If you were… Elizabeth, if you were to write a manifesto or to start, is there one statement or a couple statements that you think would be vital and important in there? [11:41]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Yes. Let me think about how I want to phrase it for you, but what my big statement would be or my big mission is that it’s really that the relationship between employees and managers has historically, in my opinion, been taken for granted, and what I love about the emergence of social tools is it has really refocused our attention on employee engagement, and how to drive a high performing organization, and but more than that, it’s that having a high performance organization, and having an engaged workforce are actually very complimentary goals, and those are necessary for maximizing business success, and on top of that it’s also realizing that employee engagement is multifaceted. It’s very… My company, I know many other companies, and I’m sure, David, in your research and your consulting you ran into this a lot. I saw where a lot of companies want to benchmark on what employee engagement is and means for other people and other organizations, but the problem is that there is no one magical solution, because the drivers of engagement varies from company to company and you really have to take an assessment of your department, your functional areas, and then your individual employees. A culture at Zappos has completely different drivers of engagement than what the drivers of engagement would be for a company like Verizon, so there’s no comparison. So, you really have to two things, and this is something you actually, David, I think you have more knowledge about than I do is really taking a look at your internal employee engagement index and then the external employee engagement index, so that’s using external benchmarks as well as establishing internal benchmarks. [14:00]

David Zinger: Yeah, I really… [14:01]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Wouldn’t you say? [14:02]

David Zinger: Right, yeah, I really personally hunger for the day when surveys don’t have to be anonymous, that there’s safety to talk about what’s going on, and that we can even go downstream a bit and have employees contribute to the questions that are asked on engagement. Many of the benchmarks and survey tools are disengaging in and of themselves, but going to your… I have a screenshot of your site up, and it’s such an engaging site, Elizabeth. [14:33]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Thank you. [14:34]

David Zinger: You write so many blog posts that are so informative and so helpful to people in the workplace, involved in the social element of the workplace, and people involved in the engagement element of the workplace. Any comments about your site or things that just pop to mind when you think about doing it? [14:55]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Well, since you say I can say whatever pops to my mind, I’m going… Most people don’t know this, but the social workplace… I’ve been blogging for many years actually, and… I shouldn’t say many; it’s probably since about 2005, but the social workplace has been an evolution and it really has been an evolution because of my passion for it. But to speak to what we were talking about before was what personally drives me, and it’s really about the social tools, and in many circumstances shiny new tools, not just shoes, and at the time… I know. At the time, there was a shiny new tool that was coming out, it was called the Blackberry Storm, and I actually, my first version of my blog was all about my love for the Blackberry Storm, and there might be some people that have been following me since the beginning that it was actually called Crackberry Girl. [16:07]

David Zinger: OK. [16:08]

Elizabeth Lupfer: And it was all about my love for my Blackberry Storm, and my very first blog post was called “My Crackberry is My Blankie”, and because it’s true, and so if I were to write a blog post now, it would be “Employee Engagement is My Blankie”, and that’s really what the social workplace is really speaking to. It’s something that I live and breathe, personally and professionally. Again, this is something that I have sometimes people who reach out to me because I haven’t written a blog post for three weeks, and they’re like oh, is everything OK, and I’m like yeah, you know, I’ve just been busy, and I just haven’t had the opportunity, I travel a lot, and I know just like you do too, and so it’s you… I write when something inspires me and so that’s really what it comes down to is it’s just a personal passion of mine. [17:08]

David Zinger: Yeah, it’s a fantastic passion and I appreciate you kind of backtracking to the origins, because there’s certainly lots of bloggers now, but there are lots of people in the social elements of workplace and engagement who are a little reluctant to blog, thinking that they’ve got to be at that magnificent level that you’re at now, and that’s not how it began, but boy it sure has evolved, and on the screen… [17:32]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Absolutely. I think if you go back into my archives you might be able to find some of my original Crackberry Girl blog posts. [17:43]

David Zinger: And extensive archives; I mean when you look at it there’s, you know, a post just about every week, sometimes a couple a week, as you say with that, and talking about tools, you know, a number of people in the business and organizational field have thought oh, Pinterest, that’s just something for pictures or whatever, and you have quite a nice site of info graphics. [18:06]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Yes. Well, you know when it came to Pinterest, and my info graphics I was actually using Flickr for those first, and but my sister-in-law is probably one of the most crafty and creative people with crafts that I know, and she actually, I can’t get her to be on Facebook or LinkedIn or any kind of blog atmosphere or social tool whatsoever, but she jumped all over Pinterest because she’s a very crafty person, and she kept telling me, you know, you really need to take a look at Pinterest. I’m like, and I was like Julie, I’m the least current (inaudible) granola person you know, why would I be interest in Pinterest? And then I actually took a look at it, and I saw a lot of value, and at the time, there was no repository, if you will, on employee engagement graphics or info graphics, and I’m a very visual person, so I love info graphics, and I actually one day when I first created the Pinterest account Googled “employee engagement info graphics,” and just looked for every info graphic I could find that was related to employee engagement and pinned them to my board on Pinterest, and then from there it’s grown into I think… I don’t… You have it up, right, David? [19:40]

David Zinger: Yeah, I do. [19:41]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Yeah, so it’s about mobile technology, it’s about human resources, it’s about general social business, as well as employee engagement. [19:53]

David Zinger: Well, I’m very… [19:55]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Oh, and I also have an homage to my geekiness too. [19:58]

David Zinger: Well, I didn’t see one on shoes, but I really do appreciate the collection, and it really triggered before our conversation this morning; I went and took a number of those and put them on my iPad just because there’s times where I don’t really want to read something, I’ve got five minutes or whatever, and those info graphics are a beautiful visual way to kind of look at that. Sometimes I get overwhelmed on a website when I get to it, but I thought oh, that’s a nice thing to have for a five minute break or whatever just to take a look, and I highly recommend it to all of us involved in the employee engagement field and all of us attuned to the community, and collaboration, and social space of the workplace, because you can often get a lot of really good facts and details if you’re making a presentation, or you’re writing a report, or to give to your employees, so once again thank you for your contributions with that, Elizabeth. [20:55]

Elizabeth Lupfer: You’re welcome, and you should take a look at the one I just pinned yesterday about I can’t get no employee satisfaction. [21:05]

David Zinger: Yeah, with Mick; I saw that one. [21:06]

Elizabeth Lupfer: And then there’s only one that I’ve actually put together myself, and that’s the putting social HR in its place within the employee life cycle. [21:19]

David Zinger: Oh, I like that. [21:21]

Elizabeth Lupfer: So, that’s my only original one that I’ve done personally. [21:26]

David Zinger: And it’s a good one with the follow-up article. I was at your website I think even just this morning kind of reviewing before our conversation and went back to that one, and I think that really helps people understand that although you’re the maven with the tools, and the techniques, and the information, that there is a really strong social element underneath this that’s really authentic and could reside even without the tools, the tools just enhance and bring it forward. [21:54]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Right. [21:55]

David Zinger: Thank you very much, Elizabeth, for taking about 15-20 minutes of your time to talk to us about the social workplace. I highly recommend that people go to www.TheSocialWorkplace.com, go to Pinterest. Thanks for taking time with us today, Elizabeth. [22:13]

Elizabeth Lupfer: You’re welcome, and I’m on Twitter. Twitter@SocialWorkplace is the handle, and then just speaking to what you were saying before about just what would be my mantra? If you take a look at the info graphic that I did just… Hopefully close with keeping this in mind for everybody, if you don’t mind me offering it up, David, is where a social workplace considers employee behavior in order to create a truly collaborative and integrated social experience, and that really for me is the essence of a social workplace. [22:55]

David Zinger: What a great conclusion and it goes even one step further; it produces results for organizations and enhances life for individuals too, doesn’t it? [23:04]

Elizabeth Lupfer: Yes it does, absolutely. [23:06]

David Zinger: Thanks very much Elizabeth, I sure appreciate you taking the time. [23:10]

David Zinger is a global expert on employee engagement. He founded and hosts the 5200 member Employee Engagement Network. Contact David today to request consulting, a speech, or workshop on engagement: david@davidzinger.com.