small is the new significant

One Small Step For Work: One Giant Step for Employee Engagement

March 16, 2015 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Get a small win and keep on going

Reading time = one small minute

I have been advocating for the importance of small, simple, strategics, significant and sustainable behavioral actions as a key in employee engagement for the past 5 years. I also think we fail to focus enough on the impact of progress and setbacks on work, workers, and engagement.

Small progress is significant and even small setbacks can disengage. I encourage you to view this short slide presentation from Daniel Goleman in support of Teresa Amabile’s work on progress. I have been very focused on progress and setback’s since my conversation with Teresa Amablile on progress in August 2011.

After viewing the slides, if you want to increase employee engagement: think small, make progress.

Small wins, big results from Daniel Goleman

David Zinger - Employee Engagement Speaker

10 Building Blocks: What is Your Deeper Why of Employee Engagement?

November 26, 2013 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

The why of working.

Here are four stories that influenced my movement into employee engagement:

My father, a railway executive, became cynical and frustrated with his work. It literally drove him to drink and as a child I would listen to his workplace stories of being thwarted and stymied. I was pleased that later in his life he found his way out of this work-related Dante’s Inferno.

Burt, a production technician I worked with hated his job, management, the company and his co-workers. He lived to retire. Nine months after retiring he hated retirement.

Marla the administrative support person in my department felt misery at work that manifested itself as sourness and belligerence. She sucked the energy out of the department and I usually took the back stairs so I would not have to pass by her desk.

The railway gang I worked with did as as little work as possible. The organization and management was perceived as the enemy and most of this gang lived lives of quiet desperation. Our gang was called the perishable gang because we looked after perishable commodities shipped by rail. I believe had I stayed on this gang that I might have been the one to perish from work.

These are four small glimpses at work. It requires no creativity to go beyond these personal stories to identify the negative impact on results, organizations, customers, and families. There is a better way of work and this means engaging fully with our work.

The Why of Engagement: Work is an invitation, accept it. When you get more into your work you will get more out of your work. Good work is a pathway to achieve results, make contributions, build relationships, strengthen organizations, and help others. Good work will make you well.

The How of Engagement: Increasing and enhancing engagement asks us to use small, simple, strong, significant, strategic, and sustainable tools, actions, and practices. We don’t need to do great work or reach for the moon. Rather if we stay grounded in the work in front of us, the injection of a few small steps done daily will be giant steps for our organizations and the people we serve.

The What of Engagement: The Zinger Pyramid of Engagement is a practical and tactical 10-block evidenced based model designed to improve: results, performance, progress, relationships, recognition, moments, strengths, meaning, wellbeing, and energy. I offer keynotes, speeches, classes, workshops, courses, books, writing, consulting, and coaching to help others discover and act upon the 10 building blocks of engagement and good work. Ultimately good work and full engagement involves just a few steps and it is never more than 10 blocks away.

What is your deeper why, how, and what of working and engagement?

David Zinger is global employee engagement speaker from Canada working at getting work working for all of us. If you are ready to work with the building blocks of engagement, to ensure that work is for the benefit of all, contact him today to get things started.

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.