#E4S — ENGAGE with David Zinger

Employee Engagement Strategy: What’s Your Story?

August 6, 2013 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Why strategy needs to be a story

Shawn Callahan from Anecdote wrote a fine post on the potential for organizational leadership to be disengaged from strategy because they don’t really understand or feel the strategy. If this is true for leaders it is frightening to think about how disconnected or disengaged other employees may be from the strategy of the organization. McKinsey&Company estimated that 65% of employees may be unable to articulate the organization’s strategy and Shawn’s post makes me think this number might be low.

In the age of engage, we must stop having senior leadership retreat to craft strategy. Social media offers great mechanisms for engagement with strategy and Shawn let’s us know how important it is to transform dry strategy statements into living story. Here is a section from Shawn’s post:

The strategy gets developed as an analytical and rational process (and quite rightly so) and the end result is a document. The document gets passed around the executive team for comments. It’s duly read and commented on and at that point those running the strategy process believe everyone understands and is on board with the strategy. But something quite interesting happens when they have to tell the story of the strategy. Firstly, by telling the story of the strategy they feel what the strategy sounds like. And you can literally see executives squirm in their seat with aspects of the strategy as they say it.

The Engage for Success movement has demonstrated that strategic narrative is one of the four enablers of employee engagement. Let’s bring engagement to life with a compelling strategy story because if executive squirm in telling the story how can we expect them to live the story of the organization.

To read Shawn’s full post click on his title: How to get all your executive team on the same page with your strategy.

So, what’s your story and how would I see it lived in the work of all employees?

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

Employee Engagement: Are You Positive?

July 29, 2013 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Employee Engagement Zingers

Shannon Polly conducted and posted an engaging interview with Kim Cameron on virtuous business practices. This is an insightful interview and made me think of the connections between positive organizational scholarship and employee engagement.

Cameron on energy as a key ingredient in employee engagement —

Energizers are trustworthy, they pay attention, they build and foster confidence in others, they are unselfish, and they can solve problems. Others who are not positive energizers are: selfish, self-aggrandizing, not mindful, and only see obstacles.

Cameron on evidence for positive practices —

There is a lot of compelling evidence across industries, continents, and sectors that positive and virtuous practices pay off. Organizations make more money, are more productive, achieve higher quality, produce higher customer satisfaction, and create higher employee engagement. Moreover, evidence suggests that these relationships are causal. When virtuous practices improve, organizational outcomes improve as well.

Dr. Cameron argues that we engage with positive and virtuous practices because they are the right thing to do and if “you express gratitude only in order to get a payoff, then it is a manipulation rather than true gratitude.”

Here are two questions to think about a positive approach to employee engagement:

How do you help employees and the organization engage in positive psychology practices such as strengths, energy, and gratitude?
Do you hire for positive energy and individual wellbeing?

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

Employee Engagement’s Rosetta Stone

November 29, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

London – Employee Engagement – The Rosetta Stone

As I looked at the Rosetta stone in the British Museum today I began to think of our collective work at unlocking the code for employee engagement. There has certainly been lots of contributions and my own 10 block Pyramid of Employee Engagement is an attempt but I think we have a long way to go.

I love this picture that I took of the Rosetta stone in the British Museum today. The stone had a shadow portrait reflection of myself taking a picture of the stone and it will be an inspiration for more clarity and deeper work on employee engagement in 2013.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert who uses the pyramid of employee engagement as a practical and tactical 10 step approach to fostering more engagement. He has been in London all week to further his knowledge and connection with engagement and to present his own work in progress on engagement.

Get the Employee Engagement Picture: Engage for Success Go Live Event (#E4S)

November 27, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Well done all involved in the Monday Engage For Success Event

It was a pleasure to attend the Engage for Success event in London yesterday and see how the UK is leading the way in employee engagement!

I look forward to my event on Wednesday on engagement, strengths, innovation, and excellence in conjunction with Strengths Partnership. If you are in London and available I encourage you to attend. To learn more, click here.

Employee Engagement: Lessons from London Drunks and Disruptive Voices (#E4S)

November 26, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement and Employee Voice

I am in London today for the Engage for Success event this afternoon. My wife and I are staying in central London on Charing Cross Road. It is a brilliant location in the heart of the theatre district but it is also a very busy area. After long sleep deprived travel I was jolted out of sleep last night by the loud drunken voices of people leaving the pubs and bars in the area.

While I was trying to return to sleep I thought about how disruptive those voices where but how they also caused me to wake up and I began to think about possible disruptive voices within an organization and how if they are embraced rather than stifled or ignored they may help an organization to wake up. Of course I must admit, I have employee engagement on my mind a lot.

Engage for Success has identified one of the four key enablers of employee engagement as employee voice: There is employee voice throughout the organisations, for reinforcing and challenging views, between functions and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.

Clayton Christensen gained notoriety for his work on disruptive innovations. Christensen’s research explains why organizations have such trouble countering or embracing disruptive innovations that are on the horizon. His theory is that organizations customarily develop mind-sets and processes that revolve around doing what they already know. Once that pattern becomes established, managers have great difficulty justifying to others or even themselves the need to make any changes.

My engagement thought as I was trying to fall back to sleep was that what Christensen has identified in the field of innovation also applies to employee engagement and disruptive voice. We need to welcome and even embrace the disruptive voices within the organization. What seems at times as a frustrating annoyance may be the impetus to a new way or working, engaging, or organizing. We should not be wearing earplugs when it comes to hearing what all employees have to say.

Here are some ways to welcome disruptive voice:

Have employees develop the questions you ask on engagement surveys. I have always liked the line if you want to get everyone on the same page, give them the opportunity to write on that page. Also, never ask a question on a survey unless you are ready, willing, and able to share all responses and act on those responses. Make the results of all surveys including all employee anecdotes (good or bad) available to all employees as soon as possible upon completion of the survey. Do not have an external consultancy and senior management go through a process of sanitizing or justifying the results.
Cease using any form of anonymous feedback within the organization. Make it safe to be disruptive but require people to own their disruptive voice rather than taking shots at someone else under the veil of anonymity. Disengagement should never be a punishable offence rather it should be a trigger to a conversation.
Live the positive deviancy dictum for work with employees: Never do anything about me without me. One way is to ensure there is ample room and opportunity for employees to be able to voice their perceptions, experiences, and thoughts.
After all organizational change, ensure employees have the opportunity to voice the impact of that change, especially what they feel they are losing because of the change. Stop trying to sell the change or get buy in, rather create conversation to engage with the change. As William Bridges so aptly stated, change begins with the end and the biggest failure of organizations in managing change is the failure to determine who is losing what because of the change.
Don’t allow senior executives to go away on an isolated retreat to develop strategy — use the various internal social media tools and crowdsourcing to have all employees, the people closest to the work and customers, offer their contributions. McKinsey has performed some research that found that 25% of employee in healthy organizations cannot articulate the organization’s strategy and that up to 65% of employees in unhealthy organizations cannot articulate the organizations’s strategy. Stop making organizational strategy a leadership decree and start making it a living conversation involving all employees.
Make use of an internal social platform and keep any censorship limited to disrespectful or spam-like messages. Develop guidelines to request that disruptive voice is paired with respectful communication

If you are looking for more tips on developing the voice of employees Engage for Success has created a list of 20 helpful tips. To download the pdf, click here.

Wake up to the disruptive voices in your organization.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement who is in London for the Engage for Success event. He will also be doing a workshop on engagement, strengths, innovation, and excellence on Wednesday. For more information or to register for that workshop, click here.

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