The Walden 2.010 Project: Daily Employee Engagement – Week 1

Personal Work Engagement with Applications to Employee Engagement – Week 1

From personal responsibility to elephant toe nail clippings.


This is the summary of the first week of a year long project examining personal employee engagement. To see the original project plan, intention and tools, click here.

There are 6 measures for the project:

The first 5 variable were rated on a scale of 1 to 10 each day with 1 being a very low score and 10 being maximum engagement. The last variable, overall engagement, is expressed as a percentage.

1. Energy Invested in work.
2. Results.
3. Signature Strengths.
4. Interactions, Connections, and Relationships.
5. Daily Energy Return on Investment of Energy.
6. Overall Engagement for the Week.

Week 1 Scores:

Category	Score/10
1. Energy In	6.0
2. Results	5.2
3. Strengths	5.0
4. Relationships	5.6
5. Energy Out	5.8
Overall Engagement	55.20%

Assessment

Disappointment. Overall the week was disappointing. I hoped to start off with a bang and barely got out of the starting gate. I had a very bad cold that drained away my energy and it was hard to get on track. The good news is there is lots of room for improvement in the next 51 weeks. I have learned quite a bit engaging in this project.

4 General Conclusions for  Employee Engagement

Physical health is a fundamental key to engagement. Engagement depends on our physical well-being (with a cold my engagement was quite low last week). Obviously there are many connections between health and engagement. How well do employees and organizations invest in employees physical health with the knowledge that this contributes to employee engagement?

Strength myopia. It was a challenge for me to remember my 10 signature strengths let alone use them everyday and use them in the service of others. If we believe in a strength based pathway to employee engagement workplaces I (we) will need to be quite deliberate on how this is achieved. Based on the powerful change book, The Influencer, I will implement more structural sources of influence to leverage strengths.

A question to ponder. How large is the individual factor in employee engagement. If I worked for a large company and these were my engagement scores who would “they blame?” I don’t believe there is any gain in blaming anyone but I did realize how much responsibility I have for my own engagement in work while recognizing my situation may be quite unique. The question for individual employees: How much responsibility do you take for your own engagement?

Elephant toe nail clipping. When we use scales or surveys to measure engagement how do employees determine the exact number? I was challenged to give my 5 daily scales a number between 1 and 10 just based on how much fluctuation there was every day on each of the 5 variables. This makes we wonder about both the validity and reliability of survey measure that try to capture engagement for an entire year.  It seems like taking the toe nail clippings from an elephant and thinking you’ve got yourself the whole elephant.