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You are here: Home / Archives for Dubai

Employee Engagement From Singapore to Sri Lanka and Doha to Dubai

April 28, 2017 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Reflections on Employee Engagement in Singapore

marina-bay-sands-singapore-night

I am returning to Asia next week to conduct an employee engagement session in Bangkok. Last year I was fortunate to conduct sessions in Singapore, Istanbul, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur to very small groups and I was able to learn so much from the participants.

I believe around the globe we are more similar in what we are doing with work, management, leadership and engagement than different. We are joined in making work better for our organizations, others, and ourselves.

Yes, we do need to produce results but what is most memorable for me is the short engaging relationships we have with one another.

Below is a wonderful picture of people from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia during a recent course.

singapore-participants

To everyone I have taught from Istanbul to Doha and Egypt, and Dubai to Singapore and Sri Lanka, please know that I have been enriched and inspired by your interest and focus on engagement.

Let’s keep our focus on the definition of employee engagement: good work done well with others every day.

Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement educator, consultant, and coach.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: Bangkok, Dubai, Employee Engagement, Kuala Lumpur, people, Singapore, Sri Lanka, work engagement

A Personal Employee Engagement Watershed: Stop Putting Lipstick on Camels

April 26, 2017 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Whoever said “it’s nothing personal” was not talking about work.

Iguazu Falls in Argentina (February 2017) by David Zinger

This post is personal. I apologize in advance for not offering you levers, drivers, or 11 action items to boost engagement. I took the pictures in the post, I am not inserting stock photography of people jumping with joy at work – perhaps stock photography should be only used for livestock not to represent real people at work.

I hope sharing a personal experience encourages you to reflect upon your own personal experiences with work.

At the end of this post, I will outline new directions and implications of what I learned for my future contributions to work, management, leadership, and employee engagement .

I experienced an employee engagement watershed day on November 3, 2016. A watershed is an event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or state of affairs.

On November 3rd, I was conducting a 2-day workshop on Employee Engagement in Troubling Times in Dubai with 3 people from Egypt. On the second day their phones starting vibrating and ringing around morning coffee break bringing them distressing economic news. During our second day together, the Egyptian currency was devalued 40%. Interest rates were raised 3% and subsidies were removed from basic goods. They were still doing the same work but within the course of just a few hours it was worth less, by about 50%.

Later that day, after I had returned to my hotel room in Dubai , my wife called me from Winnipeg, Canada, half way around the world from Dubai. Susan told me that she had been walked out of her leadership position without cause at a health care facility.  I am not saying this because Susan is my wife, I am saying this because it is true: Susan is one of the most engaged people I know. She has extremely high levels of work engagement yet her years of work and contribution, irrespective of her engagement, was taken from her in a few minutes in a vacuous meeting room.

That day felt devastating and demoralizing. External events can literally make work worth less or make you feel worthless in relationship to your work. I felt a sense of violation against the hard work people were doing. Perhaps because I was in Dubai it triggered the belief that my work in employee engagement was equivalent to putting lipstick on camels. 

Regardless of how much lipstick you apply, it is still a camel!

It was over 5 months ago that I felt washed away and carried downstream away from my work on employee engagement over the past 10 years.

During this interval, I had the good fortune in February to visit the powerful and mighty  Iguazu Falls in Argentina. Iguazu Falls personifies a real watershed. I saw and felt the power of rushing water. My wife, son, and I took a boat that went through some of the falls. We were drenched and the pressure of the water left us feeling that we had experience a liquid sandblast.  Yet, the next day we walked to an isolated falls where you could relax under the water and be rejuvenated and refreshed through the power of falling water.

I intend to transform the November 3rd watershed day away from being sandblasted by organizations and towards being refreshed by the stream of possibilities that lie, often dormant, in our work and engagement.

Not only do I feel differently, I want it to change how I work, and what I work on.

It is time for me to put the lipstick tube down and face up to all that is involved in engagement at work. I intend to be stronger and more personal in my writing, expressions, and work on engagement. You can see some of the early developments of this in my recent posts on LinkedIn and my regular contributions on the Halogen TalentSpace blog:

  • My posts on LinkedIn have become more personal and more down to earth. See some of my popular recent posts here. I especially invite you to read my post: Engaged Employees Are Wanted But Not Always Welcomed.
  • My posts on Halogen are embracing more personal stories — see them here. Read my current post: The Great Engagement Robbery: How Others Influence Engagement.

Watch for a stronger more personal focus on my keynotes, coaching, consulting, workshops, and online courses during the next eight months in 2017.

In addition, a major project during 2017 is researching and interviewing people for my fifth book on engagement and work. The working title is Wisdom at Work. I am interviewing 100 people who have retired to draw out their stories, perspectives, and wisdom on how to work. I chose retired people as they offer a full perspective on work and career and they are removed from day-to-day work and organizational politics. I believe they will feel freer to open up about work and engagement. I have only interviewed 12 of my 100 people but I have learned so much already, including:

  • Often the most personal is the most universal.
  • It is harder to define work than you might think.
  • Recognition from peers and clients trumps recognition from organizations and bosses.
  • You don’t have to like all of your work but if you don’t like 80% of your work you need to make changes.
  • You can create your own psychological safety at work…

Don’t forget, work is personal.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert and educator who won’t be buying any lipstick for camels in the near future.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger, David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker, Dubai, Egypt employee engagement, Employee Engagement, fired, Iguzau Falls, lipstick on a camel, personal engagement, watershed, Winnipeg, Wisdom at Work, work engagement, working wisdom

See For Yourself: Be Experimental with Employee Engagement in 2015

December 30, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Experiment with Employee Engagement in 2015

Reading time: 2 minutes and 18 seconds

Recognition BW

I encourage you to make 2015 a year of experimentation for employee engagement. Help your leaders, managers, and employees become more scientific in their adoption and work with engaging approaches.

Let’s move from the dated and proverbial best case to test case. Develop testable hypotheses about what can make a difference in improving engagement for an individual, a team, a department, or even the organization. Run short experiments to test out your ideas and either fail fast or scale quickly.

I am reading Karen Maezen Miller little book on zen (hand wash cold: care instructions for an ordinary life) and I appreciate her pithy summation of the Buddha’s teaching as: See for yourself. Don’t get me wrong here, I am not asking you to become a Buddhist, I am asking you to start seeing for yourself as opposed to waiting for directives from a consulting company.

In the December 2014 Harvard Business Review magazine Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi wrote an article on The Discipline of Business Experimentation. Thomke and Manzi wrote about experimentation on a larger and more innovative scale for organizations but much of what they wrote would apply to small scale experiments in employee engagement:

In an ideal experiment the tester separates an independent variable (the presumed cause) from a dependent variable (the observed effect) while holding all other potential causes constant, and then manipulates the former to study changes in the latter. The manipulation, followed by careful observation and analysis, yields insight into the relationships between cause and effect, which ideally can be applied to and tested in other settings.

Here is a page from my Employee Engagement Masterclass to help you “see for yourself” and experiment with employee engagement. This is part of a workbook that was used in masterclasses on employee engagement in Singapore and Dubai in 2014:

Employee Engagement Mastercall Experimental Page

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert devoted to helping organizations and individuals become more experimental with employee engagement in 2015.

 

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: Canada, controlled studies in engagement, David Zinger employee engagement speaker and expert, Dubai, employee engagement experiment, employee engagement masterclass, employee engagement workshop, experimental employee engagement, HBR, scientific approaches to employee engagement, see for yourself, Singapore

David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

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