employee engagement coaching

Find Your True Vanilla

Vanilla Ice Cream

I think employee engagement is simple. Please notice that I did not say that employee engagement is easy. We seem to keep expanding employee engagement with hundreds of survey questions and more approaches than you see in a desperate single’s bar on a Friday night. If you are not successful with employee engagement your approach might be part of the cause for a the lack of success.

In my ideal world employee engagement is good work done well with others every day. We don’t have a million statistics and accompanying pie charts — pies should be for eating not representing employee engagement levels. We work with the verb of engage and place the passive noun of engagement into the deep freeze of inertia-laden words.

We are each responsible for our own engagement while being fully cognizant of how what we do impacts other people’s engagement.

We can transform disengagement into engagement in about 12 seconds when we immerse ourselves in the work in front of us and connect to the people around us.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the 10,000 flavors of engagement but it you are stuck and not producing the engagement you would like to see, abandon all the flavors, find your true vanilla, and work with that every day. And if you are successful you can add some sprinkles or branch out into other flavors.

David Zinger employee engagement speaker, consultant, and coach.

If you are a virtual or mobile manager we need your help:

Do you manage 10 or more mobile or virtual staff?
Do you want to improve employee engagement?
Do you know how to engage by focusing on progress and setbacks?
Are you willing to be experimental in your approach to management?
Do you want to make a contribution to the science of engagement?
Do you want free coaching to improve engagement?

David Zinger and Fuze are looking for a Virtual Manager to engage in “THE ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENT.”

THE ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENT is a 6 week initiative consisting of once a week online progress/setback conversations with half of your virtual reports. Our hypothesis is that regular online manager-generated and employee-focused conversations involving progress will increase employee engagement and other key results. By participating you will learn new engagement skills and approaches for a mobile workforce to achieve results and build relationships.

Ideally you manage 8 or more virtual employees. They will be randomly assigned to the conversation group or the control group. We will assess engagement before and after the experiment along with gathering anecdotal comments and any other relevant metrics.

We’re looking for managers who want to make a difference in their culture by applying new ways of engaging your staff. You have the opportunity to contribute to both the design and delivery of this experiment. We want your input combined with your critical thinking on this approach to engagement.

You will be coached by David Zinger, a global expert on Employee Engagement, on how to construct and hold engaging online conversations about progress and setbacks.

Your online management success will be dependent upon your willingness to ask a few good questions, listen closely to your reports’ responses, care deeply about employee voice, and do what you can to enhance progress and lessen setbacks. We want your thoughts, experiences, and input.

We trust you are excited about making a contribution to the science of organizations, management, and engagement. You are open to post experiment dialogue about the experience.

Your total time commitment to this would be about 10 hours spread over 6 to 8 weeks, in the fall of 2014.

Contact: David Zinger: david@davidzinger.com if you would like to learn more or if you are interested in volunteering to be an engaging manager.

Employee Engagement Flavors: Find Your True Vanilla

Employee Engagement: Learn to Boost Engagement with Progress and Setback Conversations