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You are here: Home / Archives for meaningful work

Employee Engagement: Is Employee Disengagement a Form of Death?

September 23, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Something dies in us when we disengage

RIP Employee Disengagement

I was flying from Winnipeg to Singapore at the end of August to do a one day workshop on employee engagement. I was minding my own business when my brain began to nudge me with a quiet question that began to get louder and louder in consciousness: Is employee disengagement death?

At first it felt like an absurd question to be pondering at 39,000 feet over the Pacific ocean. My immediate answer was no. But the question had me in its grip and would not let go. Before I got to Singapore I had decided that disengagement is indeed a form of death. I believe something dies in us when we disengage.

What dies might be such things as

  • contribution,
  • fair exchange,
  • all the time we spend working,
  • a distant career spark burning out like an old light bulb,
  • a sense of meaning,
  • both care and caring for ourselves and others,
  • working relationships,
  • a spiritual connection that work provides to something greater than ourselves.

Here is a little thought or word replacement experiment I encourage you to try at work.

When talking about employee engagement substitute the word life for engagement, as in employee life or living. When using the phrase employee disengagement change it to employee death or dying. Yes, I know, it sounds too strong but perhaps we need this strong language to stop being complacent or helpless around employee disengagement.

Organizations, leaders, managers, and supervisors all have an obligation towards employee engagement not just for the organization but for the life and wellbeing of each employee. Don’t let employees die on the job because of career suicide, being murdered by meaningless work, or the hundreds of other ways one can die on the job.

So, what do you think? Can we infuse life into work or am I dead wrong on this?

David Zinger – Employee engagement speaker and expert who firmly believes that work can make us well.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: Canadian Employee Engagement Speaker, employee disengagement as death, Employee Engagement, meaningful work, work/life balance

Working with Why: Employee Engagement and Meaning

November 15, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement: Putting Strengths on a Weekly Calendar

The pyramid of employee engagement offers a model of the 10 blocks of employee engagement. Here is a link to a 50 page booklet on the pyramid. There are 10 posts in this series. To learn more with a chance to be interactive on strengths and engagement plan to attend an educational workshop in London on the importance of strengths for employee engagement and a fusion of the pyramid of employee engagement with a strength-based approach to work.

Add strengths to meaning and engagement

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out… Malcolm Gladwell

When you have a why to work you can bear any how. Are we having enough meaningful conversation about the why and purpose of work as employees engage in efforts that have a greater purpose. We don’t find meaning or purpose so much as create our purpose. My strengths of creativity and flexibility are powerful attributes to help me in creating meaning and being flexible in viewing the purpose of my work. For example, the Employee Engagement Network I founded is a labor of love so that other people will love their labor. This is not some sort of mushy soft feeling about work but the gumption, discipline, concentration, and patience required when we really love something.

Dr. Paul Fairlie from York University stated meaning is: “self-actualizing work (work that enables you to realize your full potential, values, and life goals), social impact (having a positive impact on people and things through your work), feelings of personal accomplishment, and believing that your highest career goals can be achieved within your current organization.”

Some common dimensions of meaning include having a purpose or goals, living according to one’s values and goals, autonomy, control, challenge, achievement, competence, mastery, commitment, engagement, generativity or service to others, self-realization, growth, and fulfillment. My experiences with employees is that most of us value our strengths, strive to use our strengths in the service of others, have a greater sense of accomplishment when we use our strengths for specific tasks, and our strengths used on a daily basis contribute to our wellbeing at work.

As we fuse strengths with meaning and apply this to results and progress we create stronger engagement. To me, strengths function as the link between who I am (identity), how I work (strengths), what I offer (contribution), and why I work (meaning). I hope to see you at the London workshop to further our discussion about the pyramid of engagement, strengths, innovation, and excellence.

Educational London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership

Plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00.  I invite you to attend an afternoon workshop sponsored by Strengths Partnership on The Leaders Role in Optimising Strengths and Engagement to Achieve Innovation and Excellence. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

  •  Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event
  •  An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback
  •  A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”
  •  Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels
  •  An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,000 members)

To register click here.

Next Post in the Series: Employee Engagement: Wellbeing

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert. He will be in the UK in late November to support the Go Live event for the UK Employee Engagement Task Force and to co-lead an afternoon on the fusion of employee engagement and strengths for innovation and excellence.

 

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger, Employee Engagement, meaning, meaningful work, significant 7 strengths, strengths, Strengths Partnership, Strengthscope

8 Powerful Approaches to Create Meaningful Employee Engagement

January 24, 2012 by David Zinger 4 Comments

7. Make meaning – why work?

(Part 8 of an 11 part series on how managers can improve employee engagement)

Finding direction through meaning

Meaning. For work to sustain and enrich people it must be meaningful. Those who have a why to work can bear almost any how and a sense of meaningful work instills a strong and rich intrinsic motivation. Progress, when it is meaningful, can be one of the best events of our day.

Finding and Defining Meaning. Paul Fairlie recently published an article on meaningful work and engagement in Advances in Developing Human Resources. He listed the common dimensions of meaning: having a purpose or goal, living according to one’s values and goals, autonomy, control, challenge, achievement, competence, mastery, commitment, engagement, generativity or service to others, self-realization, growth and fulfillment. Fairlie conducted research on meaningful work with 574 respondents.  He offered six implications for human resource development practice including deeper discussion and social connections, changing mindsets, and management education on models of human meaning. He concluded that meaninful work was a unique predictor of engagement, “meaningful work characteristics are an overlooked sources of employee motivation and engagement within organizations.”

Here are 8 ways to create meaningful work:

  1. Trump how with why
  2. Build abundant leadership whys
  3. Stretch meaning, shrink money
  4. Get Pink with autonomy, mastery, purpose
  5. Master your Mojo
  6. Reframe your values as promises
  7. Lead on purpose
  8. Double your WAMI at work

Trump how with why. Viktor Frankl concluded that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living and that life never ceases to have meaning. To move this to the workplace, if you have a why to work you can bear almost any how. Not everyone is engaged in meaningful work, but maybe everyone can be.  Part of making this happen is helping organizations, leaders, managers, and employees learn how to co-create meaningful workplaces. Part of making this happen is helping workers to perceive and experience the greater purpose in their work. In the workplace, meaning is co-created between the organization and individual. It is not something we give to another person — meaning must be built through authentic conversations about the why of work.

Build  abundant leadership whys. David and Wendy Ulrich wrote They Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations that Win. The authors frame the book around some down-to-earth and meaningful questions around identity, prupose, motivation, relationships, teams, work culture, contribution, growth, learning, resilience, civility and happiness. They encourage us to ask ourselves:

  • What am I known for?
  • Where am I going?
  • Whom do I travel with?
  • How do I build a positive work environment?
  • What challenges and interest me?
  • How do I respond to disposability and change?
  • What delights me?

The Why of Work is a practical book for leaders who are looking to instill meaning. As the authors  state in their preface: “Leaders are meaning makers: they set direction that others aspire to; they help others participate in doing good work and good works; they communicate ideas and invest in practices that shape how people think, act, and feel. As organizations become an increasing part of the individual’s sense of identity and purpose, leaders play an increasing role in helping people shape the meaning of their lives.”

Stretch meaning, shrink money. Money matters but so does meaning, completion, competition and motivation to instill caring at work. Dan Ariely offered an insightful 4 minute video on work and meaning at Big Think. He outlines how motivation and engagement are created through meaning. I encourage you to watch this video. Here is a short snippet from the transcript:

Sure, we care about money and it’s nice to get paid, but there’s also a whole range of other things that we get–a need for achievement and completion, competition with other people, and a sense of progress and a sense of meaning.  And all of those things really, really matter.  But as we move to a knowledge economy that depends more on people’s good intention and willing, and as the nature of work becomes more amorphic and work kind of interweaves with life in all kinds of interesting ways, as we move more and more to that kind of workplace, I think the relative importance of money is getting smaller and the relative importance of those other things could get… could get much larger…The first lesson is that we need to recognize how important meaning, completion, competition, motivations are in getting people to care and to work hard, and we need to try to encourage those…we need to do things that don’t undercut those human motivations.

Get Pink with autonomy, mastery and purpose. Daniel Pink wrote the popular book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  Meaning and motivation according to the research Pink gathered is created through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Pink stated that purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle.  We need to use profit to reach purpose, lessen the emphasis on self-interest, and help people pursue purpose on their own terms. Pink believe this may not only rejuvenate our businesses and organizations but also remake our world.

Master your Mojo. Marshall Goldsmith offers MOJO to find meaning. Mojo means working with 3 elements:

  1. Identity (Who do you think you are?)
  2. Achievement (What have you done lately?)
  3. Reputation (Who do other people think you are? What do other people think you’ve done lately?) .
The back and forth of mojo. We find professional mojo by what we bring to an activity. This includes motivation, knowledge, ability, confidence, and authenticity. Our personal mojo is developed by what the activity brings to us. This includes happiness, reward, meaning, learning, and gratitude. Watch and listen as Marshall takes 3 minutes to help us get our mojo working:

If the video does not open in this window, click here.

Reframe your values as promises. I appreciated Mike Morrison’s slim book on The Other Side of the Card: Where Your Authentic Leadership Begins. Mike was the Dean of the University of Toyota. He stated that one side of our business card has writing and the other has meaning. The meaning is created on the blank side of the card. The book offers a number of short exercises to fill the white space of our work with meaning. One element of the book that really stood out for me was to reframe values as promises. Values are often nice sounding statements that frozen in a framed wall statement while promises are something we keep. Ensure that your values don’t stagnate on the wall, think of them as promises, and then do all you can to keep the promises you make.

Lead on purpose.  Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have done some great research and writing demonstrating how important minimizing setbacks and maximizing progress is for engaged work. In the January 2012 McKinsey Quarterly they outline how leaders kill meaning at work. This occurs by “dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off projects teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers. The article includes a plea for executives to instill meaning in other and find meaning for themselves at the same time:

 you are in a better position than anyone to identify and articulate the higher purpose of what people do within your organization. Make that purpose real, support its achievement through consistent everyday actions, and you will create the meaning that motivates people toward greatness. Along the way, you may find greater meaining your own work as a leader.

Double your WAMI at  work. Michael F. Stager encourage us to fine our WAMI through a work and meaning inventory. People work for many reasons – some are obvious (I am paid to work), some are not as obvious (work is where my friends are). Research evidence and case studies testify to the reality that understanding how people approach work and what they get from it is vital to learning how to achieve the best possible outcomes for individuals and organizations. Meaningful work is a good predictor of desirable work attitudes like job satisfaction. In addition, meaningful work is a better predictor of absenteeism from work than job satisfaction.  The Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI) assesses three core components of meaningful work: the degree to which people find their work to have significance and purpose, the contribution work makes to finding broader meaning in life, and the desire and means for one’s work to make a positive contribution to the greater good. To download the 10-item WAMI assessment and scoring key click here.

Five meaningful considerations.

  1. Create meaning rather than searching for it. Making meaning is a creative and co-creative process.
  2. Work with meaning while achieving meaningful results.
  3. Actively engage with some of the sources listed here to enhance your own meaning and help others create their meaning.
  4. Have wide eyes about your work so that you can see and experience the greater purpsse in what you do.
  5. Remind yourself that meaning is a process not an event. You don’t simply find meaning one day, you engage in meaningful work every day.

Read these 7 meaningful sources:

    • Paul Fairlie, Meaningful work, employee engagement, and other key employee outcomes: Implication for Human Resource Development. Advances in Developing Human Resouces. December 2011.
    • Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
    • Dave Ullrich and Wendy Ulrich, The Why of Work: how Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win
    • Dan Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
    • Marshall Goldsmith, MOJO: How to get it, how to keep it, how to get it back if you lose it.
    • Mike Morrison, The Other side of the Card: Where Your Authentic leadership Begins.
    • Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, How leaders kill meaning at work. McKinsey Quarterly, January 2012.

Building the pyramid of employee engagement. Review the 8  previous posts listed below as we build the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement actions for managers:

    • Introduction: The Employee Engagement Pyramid
    • 12 Keys to Achieve Results with Employee Engagement
    • 6 Ways Managers Can Maximize Performance through Employee Engagement
    • 7 Significant Steps to Employee Engagement Progress
    • 4 Ways Managers Can Build Relationship BACKbone into Employee Engagement
    • Don’t Blink: How to Foster Recognition for Employee Engagement
    • 6 Powerful moments of employee engagement
    • How to leverage 5 pathways for strengths based employee engagement.

Next post in this series: Experience Well Being.

David Zinger built the 10 block pyramid of employee engagement to help managers bring the full power of employee engagement to their workplaces. If you would like to arrange to have this course or workshop for your organization or conference contact David today at 204 254 2130 or zingerdj@gmail.com.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement, Meaning, Pyramid of Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger, Employee Engagement, Frankl, leadership, meaning, meaningful work, meaningfulness, mojo, Pink, POEP, Ulrich, wami, work

David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

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