good work — Page 2

Employee Engagement is Not About Great or Amazing Work or Workplaces

April 8, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Have a ball at work by doing good work well with others every day.

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The Ball of Employee Engagement

I have sharpened my focus on engagement in 2014 to: Good work done well with others every day. I believe this is both attainable and sustainable while also being a big challenge. What I too often see is the cheerleaders of engagement trying to lead us on to great and amazing work and workplaces. Seldom do I find a great place to work being great for everyone. And even though I have occasional amazing days at work what is truly amazing to me is that I have hundreds of good days. Don’t get me wrong. I love great and amazing work. It thrills me when I see it or experience it myself. Yet I think that great and amazing work is the occasional byproduct of good work done well with others every day. I would trade 1 great day for 10 good days anytime! I don’t need hype or hyperbole when I work, I just need to know my work is good, that I am well because of it, and I can sustain it day after day.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker, expert, and consultant committed to making engagement both simple and real.

Employee Engagement: This is Good Work

December 9, 2013 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Tom Peter’s recently wrote about good work.

I appreciated Tom Peter’s points:

Good work: Help others grow. Infectious enthusiasm. Always approachable. A ready smile. Keeping promises. Learning. Learning. Learning.

Good work: Most of our conscious life will be at work. Like it or not. Waste your work life and you have wasted your life.

Good work: The quality of the experience of producing the product is as important as the product itself.

I love good work and think we need to rethink all this blathering hype about doing great work. Good is good enough.

As Garrison Keillor states, “Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch.”

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who celebrates good work.

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.

Employee Engagement: Why Good is Good Enough

September 10, 2013 by David Zinger 13 Comments

The Blasphemy of GREAT WORK

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. ~ Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Don’t get me wrong, I think great work is, well…great. I appreciated how my social media buddy and former Slacker Manager blog partner, Phil Gerbyshak, wrote a book on Make it Great. It is inspiring to see companies win Great Places to Work awards. Michael Bungay Stainer, a man whose work I admire and who joined me for a beer and conversation in Toronto, is devoted to helping “people, teams and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work.” Jim Collins in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t offers us a blueprint to move from good to great. As I was writing this I just received a review copy of a new book, Great Days at Work by Suzanne Hazelton. I have only looked at the cover so far but it looks great.

So this all seems great, but…

Call me vanilla, or meat and potatoes if you must, but I am fatiguing on great while getting increasingly enamored with good people doing good work in good organizations.

Good work isn’t nirvana and it isn’t perfect but it seems honest and attainable. To me, it is less about ideal and more about real. It removes a sense of unattainable striving and accepts the difficulties and challenges inherent in completing tasks and working with so many different people. Good work is sustainable while great work is only touched for short periods of time.

Good work is not hype or hyperbole. It is a fusion of gumption, and determination. It is a bit like running into a stiff headwind. You may not be making a great time but you persevere and you finish and you know you “did good.”

Good work embraces both bad and good days but in good work the good days outnumber the bad days by 3 to 1. Maybe Monday should just be taken out of the weekly work mix and be considered as a starter day for the week. I know this is a blasphemy for all the prophets of Make Monday Great but I am a bit of a late Tuesday morning around 10:30 a.m. type of guy. I find it liberating to let myself have one bad day of work each week.

In good work, it is okay to fumble fall and fail. You work to recover the fumble, pick yourself up after the fall, and try not to fail in the same way again. I like the Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

Good work weaves together grit with sh*t yet at the end of the day work doesn’t stink and you know you did a good job.

In good work you can’t wait to see some people and other people just weigh on you.

As you do good work you will find your engagement fluctuates ten times a day but overall averages at a solid 7.5 out of 10.

Good work fulfills a purpose without the necessity of missionary zeal or a corporate song. Good work is not mean — rather, veins of meaning streak through the day offering us a genuine why to work.

When I do good work, I don’t need to reach for the moon. I just need to reach out and help a coworker.

I don’t need to be a frosted flake Tony the Tiger of work going around growling, “GGRRRRREAT!” Kellogg’s once sent Tony to our home for a free breakfast with my children and a bunch of the neighborhood children. It was a warm summer day and they guy wearing the tiger suit kept overheating because the fan in his tiger head was not working. The lesson here: be careful about always being great because you might overheat your brain.

I know good does not sell while great gives us hope, inspiration, and a high standard. But this hope, inspiration, and high standard may be sowing the seeds of discouragement and disengagement.

To slightly modify M. Scott Peck’s beginning line in The Road Less Traveled, work is difficult. I am reminded of a line Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said in response to the psychological movement of many years ago called, I’m OK, You’re OK. She said, “I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that is OK.” I think good work is OK.

At this stage of my career, good is good enough. I don’t need to take Jim Collins’ leap. Good feels human. Good feels attainable. Good feels significant. Good feels real. And that’s good for me. I hope you have a good day at work today.

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