Employee Engagement Education, Speaking, and Consulting
3 Powerful Elements in the New Employee Engagement are:
Watch this brief 2 minute video on these 3 elements of the New Employee Engagement.
The New Employee Engagement: Results, Progress, & Energy from David Zinger on Vimeo.
David Zinger is an employee engagement expert, speaker, consultant, and writer.
A post Labour Day lament: Are you experiencing a labour of love?
Are you in labour? Have you been labouring under the wrong impression? We celebrated Labour Day in Canada and Labor Day in the United States on September 5th., the first Monday of September. This was a day to celebrate and honour working people. I appreciate the holiday but believe we should celebrate labour every day.
In Canada, as opposed to America, we spell labour with the “u” in it. It got me thinking about the “u” in labour. Are you in labour? Do you personally engage fully with your work or are you stuck in false labour with the contractions of can’t and won’t?
On one hand, labour is defined as the process of childbirth while it also means to work hard and make great effort. Can you work hard and make strong effort to give birth to your own health and wellbeing experienced through work, not something done after work or outside of work?
I think many of us have a false notion of loving our work. We think it is an effusive emotion and hold onto an unrealistic ideal. At times work is tiring, gritty, and energy depleting but if those times become day after day not only is our work in trouble we are in jeopardy too. I love Erich Fromm’s writing in the Art of Loving. He defines love less as a passive emotion and more as the active manifestation of discipline, concentration, and patience. Do you bring these three lovely attributes to your work?
I encourage you during the year between this labour day and next labour day to take full responsibility for your own engagement. Engagement is not something done “to” you or “for” you it is primarily your connection to your work, the people you work with, and the organization. If you think the organization is responsible for your own engagement it turns you into a potential victim of the organization and work.
Engagement is yours. It can go with you into all the areas of your life. Now don’t get me wrong, there are influences on our engagement, we don’t live in some mythical workplace where everything is a ferry tale. And we don’t work in isolation. We are accountable for the influence we have on others engagement as they are accountable for the influences they have on our engagement.
Lets keep engagement simple – good work done well with others every day. Labour day is not a once a year holiday it is how you work every day. Labour day is less about time off work and more about fully immersing yourself in the time you are working. Concentrate, be disciplined, be patient, be gritty, and there is a good chance you will be labouring in love.
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David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert from Winnipeg Canada who is focused on The New Employee Engagement, This year he has worked on engagement in: Turkey, Malaysia, Canada, United States, UK, Dubai, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia.
The New Employee Engagement: Putting a little light into the darkness of employee engagement.
Lewis Garrad and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote a Harvard Business Review blog on August 16 entitled: The Dark Side of High Employee Engagement. I encourage you to read it and to read the comments that follow the post. I appreciate the critical perspective on engagement.
I believe we should all keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out (this quote seems to have many attributions so we might want to be cautious about citing the source). I encourage you to be critical of the field of engagement and be critical of the criticisms of engagement. I appreciate skeptics but also encourage cynics to be skeptical of their cynicism.
It is very unfortunate that the authors refer to “meta-analytic studies” “correlations” “recent study” “research shows” “Studies” “our own research” “it is true” and “research has found” without citing the actual sources. Just as I am not a fan of anonymous surveys for employee engagement I am not a fan of citing anonymous research – most undergraduate university students would lose a lot of marks for submitting an essay when they fail to be specific about their sources.
I also wish just once the authors would offer their definition of employee engagement or the definition that they are using. There are many definitions of engagement (Engaging for Success Report, 2009). My personal definition of engagement is neither perfect nor definitive but at least is a step towards clarity by defining engagement as: good work done well with others every day.
The provocative nature of the piece is encouraging, the potential threats of engagement are disconcerting, and the conclusion we need to take a more balanced view of employee engagement…and the common understanding of engagement as “happiness” is too simplistic is helpful. But I hope that getting along and getting ahead are not mutually exclusive and that engagement does not push an employee into burnout but may help them leave work with more energy. And to go out on a limb I also believe that work has the potential to contribute to our overall wellbeing. To me engagement is about the ABC‘s: Achieve results, Build relationships, Cultivate wellbeing. We need all 3.
Thanks Lewis and Tomas for writing a post to trigger some critical reflection on engagement as I see it and work with it, and I trust if you write another post you will be more specific with your definitions and sources.
David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert from Winnipeg, Canada.