3 Questions that Determine Whether Employees Choose to Engage

Workplace engagement is a both a responsibility and choice shared by employees and employers: Employees are responsible for their own engagement in that they choose to show up in their jobs ready, willing, and able to do their best work, and Employers are responsible for choosing to foster an engaging workplace where employees are enabled 

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5 Ways Nonprofits Can Effectively Engage Employees and Volunteers

“Mission matters. The people behind the mission also matter, and their passion for the mission can never be taken for granted.”  [from Share of Mind, Share of Heart: Marketing Tools of Engagement for Nonprofits.]                                        This is why engaging 

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How Careful are You with Your Brand?

Your brand is conveyed in everything you do to communicate and deliver your product/service offerings; i.e., what and how people think about your brand is based on the experiences they have with your business. This story illustrates how a business manager formed her impression of a company’s brand when seeking a new payroll processing firm. 

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Keep This in Mind When You’re Planning to Restructure

The Reorganization by David Zinger They moved us, yet we were not moved. They changed us, yet we remained the same. Boxes on pyramidal charts yanked off the shelf like Cheerios from a grocery store. They morphed us into a matrix. Duties reassigned as we searched for our coffee mug that failed to move with us. 

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5 Ways to Simplify Internal Communication

[Note: I’m pleased to feature this guest post from Alison Davis, founder and CEO of Davis & Company, an award-winning employee communication firm. I previously shared another of Alison’s posts, What Employees Want Most from Internal Communications Channels.] Tired of working hard to get employees the information they need only to find they still don’t understand essential concepts and 

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After Onboarding, How to Prevent the Descent into Disengagement

New employees are easy to engage given the fair amount of attention they receive at the outset. They’re likely to be welcomed with open arms and treated to meetings with executives who explain the company’s mission, vision and goals; reinforce their value to the company; and introduce them to their respective departments to meet their managers 

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“Maniacal Operations” and Other Sad but True Tales

When it comes to management and organizational dysfunction, there’s little that surprises me anymore. Asking a colleague about work, I got this description of the company’s new president: “I know all about his first marriage, his second marriage, his grandchildren, etc., but he doesn’t know anything about me. He dominates executive meetings with his talking 

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Engaging Workplace Wisdom — Tips on What Works to Engage Others

While I typically speak about employee/volunteer engagement with people currently active in the workforce, the prospect of being with an audience of retirees was too good to pass up. My recent session for Penn State Lehigh Valley’s SAGE Lecture Series was designed with a dual purpose: 1) share the current state of workplace engagement and 2) tap into 

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Who is Actually Responsible for Workplace Engagement?

Need to create an engaged workplace? While workshops, webinars, and articles abound on the subject, it takes more than just buying into the value and practice of engagement to be effective. It’s also important to understand who is actually responsible for engagement in the workplace. Engagement is a responsibility shared by both employees and employers: Employees are 

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Can You Treat Customers Like Employees and Employees Like Customers?

Curiosity. A hunger to explore what works and what doesn’t. Respectively challenging others’ ideas. These are among the many reasons I enjoy speaking with groups of young adults preparing for leadership roles. I recall one such gathering that involved an open discussion on marketing. We talked about dealing with difficult customers (it’s OK to terminate a 

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