virtual employee engagement

Employee Engagement: Learn to Boost Engagement with Progress and Setback Conversations

September 18, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

If you are a virtual or mobile manager we need your help:

Do you manage 10 or more mobile or virtual staff?
Do you want to improve employee engagement?
Do you know how to engage by focusing on progress and setbacks?
Are you willing to be experimental in your approach to management?
Do you want to make a contribution to the science of engagement?
Do you want free coaching to improve engagement?

David Zinger and Fuze are looking for a Virtual Manager to engage in “THE ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENT.”

THE ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENT is a 6 week initiative consisting of once a week online progress/setback conversations with half of your virtual reports. Our hypothesis is that regular online manager-generated and employee-focused conversations involving progress will increase employee engagement and other key results. By participating you will learn new engagement skills and approaches for a mobile workforce to achieve results and build relationships.

Ideally you manage 8 or more virtual employees. They will be randomly assigned to the conversation group or the control group. We will assess engagement before and after the experiment along with gathering anecdotal comments and any other relevant metrics.

We’re looking for managers who want to make a difference in their culture by applying new ways of engaging your staff. You have the opportunity to contribute to both the design and delivery of this experiment. We want your input combined with your critical thinking on this approach to engagement.

You will be coached by David Zinger, a global expert on Employee Engagement, on how to construct and hold engaging online conversations about progress and setbacks.

Your online management success will be dependent upon your willingness to ask a few good questions, listen closely to your reports’ responses, care deeply about employee voice, and do what you can to enhance progress and lessen setbacks. We want your thoughts, experiences, and input.

We trust you are excited about making a contribution to the science of organizations, management, and engagement. You are open to post experiment dialogue about the experience.

Your total time commitment to this would be about 10 hours spread over 6 to 8 weeks, in the fall of 2014.

Contact: David Zinger: david@davidzinger.com if you would like to learn more or if you are interested in volunteering to be an engaging manager.

12 Tips for Virtual Employee Engagement

August 26, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Don’t Be So Remote It was a pleasure to write this blog post for Fuze, an excellent platform for mobile work, on 12 tips for virtual employee engagement. Here is one of my opening paragraphs and one of the 12 tips. I encourage you to go to the full article to learn more.

I believe the key question for managers of remote workers and distributed teams are to ensure the team and workers feel a part of the organization and work rather than feeling apart from the organization. We want our virtual workers and teams to be a part of something greater while also playing their part in achieving results and being engaged with the various facets of work. Mobile managers must prevent mobile employees becoming detached from their team, distant from their organization, disengaged from their work, and disappointed in their managers.

Tip 2: Go bad. According to volumes of research reviewed by psychologist, Roy Baumeister bad is twice as strong as good. We must not shirk away from bad news, setbacks, or bad behavior. It is vital that managers mitigate against the disengagement and demoralization of setbacks. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in The Progress Principle demonstrated that setbacks were the single biggest cause of lack of motivation and engagement for knowledge workers and the most common source of those setbacks were during collaborative work. Progress, the single biggest source of engagement for knowledge workers was most frequently experienced during collaboration. Don’t shy away from working with bad news, setbacks, or bad behavior.

It has been a terrific to work with Fuze as one of the knowledge partners on the employee engagement network.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who is doing more of his work virtually and focusing more on helping others foster, enhance, and increase virtual employee engagement. This post was written in Winnipeg in late August and posted while David is in Singapore to work on employee engagement and read by you as you work and reside any place in the world. The picture was taken while David was flying between Regina and Saskatoon Saskatchewan to conduct sessions on employee engagement.

Excellent and Eclectic Guidance on Employee Engagement and Virtual Teams

August 19, 2014 by David Zinger 2 Comments

How to Successfully Manage Virtual Teams

Nearly 40% of global knowledge workers are now considered “anywhere, anytime” workers and an increasing number of us work in different locations than our managers and teams. Managing people and teams you rarely see in person is a reality, yet very few of us are given tactics and tools to be successful.

In conjunction with Fuze, I invited a panel of experts to discuss how managers can foster better employee engagement and performance among remote staff. No boring slides or sales pitches — just unscripted conversation and practical strategies you can start applying right away. I loved being able to watch the four people talking rather than watching an endless array of data slides flashing by on my screen. The sound quality was excellent.

The guests were:

Wayne Turmel, Author, Meet Like You Mean It

Yael Zofi, Author, A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams

Claire Ucovich, Head of People and Culture, Fuze

There is so much offered through this dialogue, here are just a few highlights from the one hour free flowing discussion on mobile management:

witness how we, as a four person round table, manage and move through our own technical difficulties as we begin
we will have technical glitches in our work, they are inevitable, what is key is how we respond to, and manage, these glitches
technology tools are necessary for the job yet only 10% of employees are trained in how to use those tools
two thirds of people claim online meeting time is wasted
80% of people only use 20% of the features of collaboration tools
learn how work is changing and staying the same
hash-tags are great tools for remote workers
how do we foster the human connection in our mobile efforts
learn about the 3 conflicts in mobile management
have a people plan, a communication plan, and a risk management plan
ensure your fuse technology with the human connection while getting deliverables out the door.
hear about some specific examples of companies who are making good use of mobile tools
understand why and how we need to move from agents of change to agents of connection

I hosted this dialogue and I have watched the recording twice, it is packed with perspectives, practices, examples, and ideas you can use. This is well worth the 55 minutes it takes to watch and you can always break it up by watching it over a week with five 11-minute periods. Watch now to improve your mobile management and employee engagement.

Webinar Managing Virtual Teams from Fuze on Vimeo.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who lives in Winnipeg Canada and works throughout the world.

Employee Engagement Roundtable Discussion for Mobile Managers

August 4, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Join Us August 13 10AM PT

Monday is the 180th birthday of John Venn, the originator of the Venn diagram. As a small tribute to his simple yet powerful diagram structure I have made a venn diagram for an upcoming free webinar/roundtable on employee engagement and mobile management that will be held next week. This is not your typical webinar with a bunch of slides and a sales pitch. This is a one hour dialogue, sponsored by Fuze and hosted on Fuze, to help virtual, remote, and mobile managers foster and enhance employee engagement.

I am so excited to be joined in the dialogue with Wayne Turmel the author of Meet Like You Mean It; Yael Zofi the author of A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams, and Claire Ucovich, the head of People and Culture at Fuze.

Our one hour roundtable dialogue will be unscripted and unrehearsed as we look at how mobile managers can be better at fostering employee engagement with out staff.

To read some terrific tips about mobile management visit my latest post at the Fuze site: http://blog.fuze.com/the-engaging-dozen-12-ways-to-improve-remote-employee-engagement/. You will find a link to register for the round table near the bottom of the post or you can click here to register directly. I look forward to you joining with us on August 13th at 10AM PDT.

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and specialist who has written 3 books on work and engagement while also founding and hosting the 6400 member Employee Engagement Network. Fuze is a knowledge partner with the Employee Engagement Network committed to supporting and enhancing employee engagement for all.

Mobile Employee Engagement: Meet Like You Mean It

May 29, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Create Engaging Mobile Meetings

(Reading time = 1 minute 51 seconds)

Wayne Turmel is a master of mobile meetings and his 100 page book imparts his wisdom to you to help you ensure mobile meeting success. I appreciate his concrete tips and actions and how by applying what he offers you will create a more engaging mobile experience. He offers a guide to increasing your comfort, confidence, and competence in creating painless and productive virtual meetings. I especially enjoyed reading the book as this type of book can often be a dry affair but Wayne spices it up with humor and a conversational tone that is inviting and engaging. He offers specific tips and includes checklists and templates to put the ideas to use right away.

Here are a few tidbits that stood out for me as I read his book:

virtual meetings suck
managers spend 50% of their time in meetings
About 66% of participants say webmeetings are a waste of time yet in the United States, people spend 66 million person-hours per year engaged with these meetings
75% of people who use presentation tools have no training before beginning
set up everyone as a speaker or panelist for your meeting, loosen your control and set the stage for collaboration
Let everyone write on the whiteboard
Get photos of people when they are introduced
use mostly uploaded files
get participants engaged with polls and other tools
transform passive participants into active attendees

This book should be in the library of anyone holding virtual meetings and I believe the practices Wayne outline will offer a wonderful boost to mobile employee engagement. I am conducting some experiments with Fuze on a manager’s influence on mobile employee engagement and will be following a number of the fine recommendations that Wayne made to improve the design and delivery of these experimental manipulations in engagement.

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who is quite interested in mobile employee engagement and what we can do to improve engagement for people who spend all or part of their day being connected virtually.