Tie into employee engagement: Monday Morning Percolator #10

Are you holding employee engagement together with duct tape?

Don’t let engagment die with all the other projects, initiatives, and work screaming for  your attention.  Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, offers 6 powerful principles to give engagement gumption, tenacity, and longevity.

Make your approach simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and use stories. The next 6 Monday Morning Percolators will profile each of these principles applied to employee engagement.

The Heaths offer the acronym SUCCESs to remember the principles. Here is a quick outline of the SUCCESsfull principles you will learn to make employee engagement stick:

1. Simplicity. Strip employee engagement to the core and make sure you focus on the most robust method.
2. Unexpectedness. Capture your employee’s attention…and hold it by making an element of employee engagement unexpected.
3. Concreteness. Make engagement concrete so employees understand it and remember it.
4. Credibility. Make sure employee engagement is credible for all involved.
5. Emotional. Remember that emotions will influence motions so employee engagment must become a positive emotional approach.
6. Stories. Leverage stories to inspire employees to work with full engagement.

The authors practice what they preach with a stickey cover – a picture of duct tape stretched across the book jacket. The duct tape is raised from the cover to feel like real duct tape. You will be tempted to try and pull it off but what you really want to pull off is applying the principles to employee engagement.

Get Engaged:

1. Read an excerpt from the book.
2. Browse the Made to Stick blog.

Next Monday: Employee Engagement Made Simple.

Photo Credit: Duct Tape Neck Tie by http://flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/