guidelines — ENGAGE with David Zinger

Are 2 simple rules powerful enough to guide a year of work and interaction?

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2 Simple Engagement Rules

Simple rules. I have become enamoured with simple rules to guide and govern behavior and actions. It is a bit ironic as I always stated that rules were not engaging but somehow simple rules feels more inviting and not commandment-like at all.

A New Year’s Guide. This post outlines 2 simple rules I am using to guide my work and wellbeing from September 1, 2015 to August 31, 2016. Even at 60 years of age, September 1st. always feels like the first day of the New Year. In my mind and experience, September marks the beginning of the school year in Canada.

Moving on from a 3 word theme. For the past 7 years I have used a 3-word theme to govern the year ahead. I loved the focus and simplicity of it. I was reluctant to give it up but I was looking for a more active approach to the year ahead wedded with specificity. The three word theme was a nice beacon or personal north star while 2-simple rules is a detailed daily road map through work and wellbeing. I am craving a more behavioral action guide for 2015/16. I was planning to write 3 simple rules but in drafting the rules, and my love of small and simple, I decided I only required two rules.

My two daily rules are:

Rule 1: Action – 15

Start and record fifteen 15-minute periods of engaged work or wellbeing sustained with resilient grit.

Rule 2: People Artistry – 5

Draw out the best in others or myself 5 times through connection and expression of appreciation, curiosity, or recognition.

Rule 1 is focused on using short engaged time zones to maximize productivity and well-being. The key moment for me with this simple rule is to just start. I start each period of work or wellbeing by pushing the button on my watch timer already preset for 15 minutes. A second challenge is to sustain engagement for the full 15 minutes. To do this I added resilient grit into the rule. I want to bounce back after inevitable setbacks and I want the grit and gumption to stick with this rule for the year. I know that a big factor in success for me is to keep recording the periods. I don’t need to conduct detailed assessment and analysis but I know that I often become derailed when I stop recording.

Rule 2 is inspired by the new book I wrote with Peter W. Hart on People Artists: Drawing Out the Best in Others at Work. This book will be released in October of 2015. The image on the one page guide at the start of this post is taken from the cover of the book and was painted by Peter Hart. I did not want to just write the book and offer the book to others, I plan to make it a personal daily practice. This rule will bring the concepts and practices of the book to life while also offering a trigger for 5 daily acts of people artistry. Most of those acts will take the form of appreciation, curiosity, or recognition.

Background. Some of the background for this change in approach from a 3-word theme to 2-simple rules came from the literature on Kaizen and a recent book by Donald Sull and Kathleeen M. Eisenhardt on, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World.

Rule your own world of work, wellbeing and engagement. The primary purpose of this post is to encourage you to develop a few simple rules to improve your work and wellbeing. My rules are not your rules. You are welcome to use mine as a starting point or a launching pad to design your own rules. Later this year and in 2016 I will be writing more about behavioral employee engagement and simple rules. You will learn guidance on how to formulate and apply the concepts of simple rules. I encourage you to read Sull and Eisenhardt’s book to develop a deeper understanding of how simple rules have been used in a variety of setting and how you can use simple rules.

Your next action. I encourage you, for now, to think about what rules would help you engage more fully with your work and wellbeing. As you think this through I encourage you to take a few notes and to write down some early drafts of the rules.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who is pairing the behaviors from the pyramid of employee engagement with simple rules to make a difference to engagement in 2016.

This is the most popular blog post on this site. It is read 10 to 20 times every day since it was posted well over two years ago. The post originally appeared on December 1, 2009. At that time, the Employee Engagement Network had 1750 members as opposed to the 4800 members who currently belong to the network. I have re-posted it because of the popularity for the content and the helpful guidance it offers for employee engagement program developers.

Strong guidelines not rules. Here are some of the things I believe will contribute to a good start to implementing an employee engagement program. I want these to be strong statements that are not rules to be followed but guidelines voiced and offered that encourage you to consider them carefully and either adopt them, modify them, or reject them as you develop your own approach. There is no cookie cutter approach to employee engagement and we certainly can’t leave employee engagement in the hands of others.

13 key considerations in starting an employee engagement program:

Engage employees early and often. Ensure employees have a voice in the program. Ask employees what question could be asked for a survey, have them participate in looking at the results, and give them an opportunity to generate strategies and interventions. We won’t get everyone on the same page unless we give everyone a hand in authoring that page.

Read good research. Read the free and informative research on employee engagement. There is lots of good free material out there. One source I highly recommend everyone read is the MacLeod report from the UK. Click here to read 21 highlights from this report and you will also find a link at the end of the article to the full PDF report.

Under-measure and over-deliver. Data can be very helpful to determine success and get baseline engagement but keep it as simple as possible and strive for the fewest questions possible. I recommend more frequent surveys with less questions than lengthy surveys that can be disengaging because they are so long and it takes so long to get feedback to the employees.

Use this as your last question in any survey. Ensure you ask survey recipients what they can do right now to foster their own engagement and enhance the engagement of others. The survey you use should be engaging and ensure that engagement starts right after the survey is completed by asking: What can I do right now to improve engagement for myself or others?

Focus on employee engagement for all. We all must benefit. The employees should benefit from their engagement, the organization should see results, and customers should also experience the benefits of engaged employees. As you plan any program ensure you have declarative clarity on how everyone will benefit.

Say No to something else. Do not make employee engagement another item on an over bulging to do list. What can you say no to so that you ensure you can yes to employee engagement? Employee engagement is not about adding more on – it is about being more connected to the work, others, and organization you are already a part of. These connections need to contribute to meaningful and significant results for both organizations and individuals.

Eliminate consultants, hire coaches. Don’t leave engagement in the hands of external consultants who will always know less about your organization than you do. We too readily put our important work in the hands of experts who may consume dollars that could be better spend on programs rather than advice. Use external sources as coaches to guide you not to take over what will be done and how it will be done.

Employee engagement is not a soft skill. I hate the term soft skills for people skills. It makes it seem mushy and fluffy rather than vital and pivotal. Soft also sounds easy while hard sounds solid and difficult. Rather than soft skills and hard skills I think we need to refer to these two types of skills as fluid skills and fixed skills. We need fixed skills and we need the fluid skills to ensure the fixed skills don’t seize up because people are not engaged.

Put a name and face to engagement. Minimize the amount of anonymous data you collect. How can we expect people to engage when they are anonymous. Put a face and name to engagement and make it safe to engage in authentic and real dialogue. If you think people won’t give you an honest answer about their level of engagement in your organization if they are identified than you have a much bigger problem than engagement. You have very troublesome trust, honesty, authenticity, and safety issues to address.

Spread engagement around. Make everyone responsible for their own engagement and accountable to everyone else in the organization. We don’t need people checking up on us, we need people checking in with us to talk about our fluctuating levels of engagement. Avoid putting engagement in the hands of just HR or Internal Communications. This is a line issue, this is everyone’s issue. Don’t forget, CEO’s and Presidents are employees too.

Community mobilization. Create a community rather than a simple organization. Community needs co-created conversations. I would like to see HR take on a bigger internal community mobilization role by fostering and convening conversations to create and mobilize the latent community potential embedded in every organization. Start by reading Peter Block’s, Community: The Structure of Belonging, and bring people into dialogue.

A pluralism of voices. Perhaps you have different keys or believe some of the keys were wrong or missed. I encourage you to voice your perspective in the comments to the post. We need fewer answers and more dialogue.

Get connected. Join the Employee Engagement Network. We have over 4800 members interested in employee engagement. Join us to ask questions, find information, offer support, and stay current on the latest information in employee engagement. The glue of engagement is contribution and we welcome your contribution.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert using the Pyramid of Employee Engagement to increase employee engagement for organizations and individuals. He can be reached at zingerdj@gmail.com.

Employee Engagement: Engage the Year Ahead with 2-Simple Rules

Employee Engagement Program Guidelines