work/life balance

Employee Engagement: Embrace Your Jagged Experience of Work and Wellbeing

August 20, 2015 by David Zinger 1 Comment

The New Balance in Employee Engagement is Jagged and Precarious

I know you have seen them. The stack of smooth stones that offer a visual of calm and tranquility. I confess that I have always been attracted to them and even used them on the cover of my first book, Zengage: How to Get More Into Your Work to Get More Out of Your Work.

Zengage Red

I trust you are also aware of the the increasing abandonment of the term work/life balance. Many say we can’t achieve balance because of how we work today and the influences of technology and the expectation to always be “on.” It is problematic that we would use a balanced and smooth ideal image when jagged and precarious captures more of the lived experience of work, wellbeing and engagement for most of us.

Balance Rock Crayon 2015

Let’s embrace a new balance for work and life in 2016. This balance has rough edges symbolized by the third stone in this stack and balance is fleeting, temporary, and precarious as symbolized by the almost tipping top stone on the top of the stack. I believe 2015 asks us to get more comfortable with things being jagged. We need to find our equanimity in edges and crevices and cracks.

I placed some crayons beside the stones to symbolize our need to work and play with what we’ve got and not dream of everything being smooth. Zen perspectives embrace impermanence and ask us to stop being so smooth and rather to be mindful and accepting of what actually is.

I encourage you to embrace jagged work, such as:

Leaders who are frayed and flawed
Projects without enough time or budget
Fluctuating states of health
Energy that peaks, dips, and twirls
High degrees of uncertainty about future work.
Co-workers who can be just plain difficult

The new balance of life and work as we move towards 2016 is jagged, resilient, real, imperfect, and impermanent.

Learn to live it rather than trying to live up to some ideal.

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and speaker who believes are best work can come when things are not smooth and balanced but rather jagged and precarious.

Employee Engagement and Well Being: Work Life Infusion

October 2, 2014 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Let’s reverse the order and topple the precarious work/life balance with life work infusion.

Work/Life balance has toppled. We failed by putting work first in the equation. Mobile technology has infiltrated home and family time. Balance seemed like an ideal state to achieve yet the blance we sought was never static and often quite precarious.

I am now focusing my efforts on life work infusion. I believe work can make use well. I know that life can infuse energy, meaning, and perspective into work while work can infuse connection, contribution, and results into life. This is just the tip of the life and work infusion iceberg. I am very interested in your infusions:

What does life outside of your work infuse into your work?

What does work infuse into your life outside of work?

David Zinger is a global employee engagement speaker and expert who believes work can make us well.

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

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.