Tag: employee engagement

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Engagement

Thoughtful Quotes for the Workplace

Here is more employee engagement advice, and it comes from an unusual source.

I’m getting ready to retire my 2009 pocket calendar for the year; it’s the kind that features quotes each week.

Paging through it I found the following quotes that are applicable to employee engagement:

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”  George S. Patton

“Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too.”  Robert Half

“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.”  Albert Einstein

“Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down.” Jimmy Durante.

“We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” Hegel

 

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing

A Gift to Improve Employee Engagement

This holiday, give the gift of employee engagement … and it’s free!  Employee Engagement Advice Book is a new e-book written by members of the Employee Engagement Network (EEN) and compiled by network host David Zinger.  EEN members (including me) share advice – limited to one sentence each – on how an organization can improve employee engagement.

The book contains over 200 contributions from people who are passionate about employee engagement, including several featured in this blog: Terry Seamon (see his advice on page 6); Kevin Burns (page 9); Paul Hebert (page 28); and Richard Parkes Cordock (page 35). (My contribution is also on page 35.)

Recurrent themes include communication (especially listening), valuing employees, empowering them, recognizing their efforts, and leadership involvement. It’s worth scrolling through to find the quotes that resonate with you. Pass it along and share it among your colleagues … to inspire them and/or reinforce their employee engagement efforts.

Happy Giving!

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing Training & Development

Zappos Culture Book: Best Ever Business Reading


Zappos.com’s 2009 Culture Book is here (!) and I’m thrilled to add it to my business library – next to the previous edition that I got on my visit to Zappos last year.

The book is written by Zappos employees who share what the company culture means to them. It’s a beautifully designed and produced book, supplemented with color photos and captions that capture the true spirit of Zappos. The book includes Zappos core values, a brief time line of the company’s 10 year history, and, most important, what the people who live the Zappos culture have to say about it.

Regardless of where they work in the company (customer loyalty center, merchandising, finance, technology & project management, Kentucky warehouse, marketing, etc.), Zappos employees share how valued they feel as members of the Zappos family … how they engage in “serious fun” … how they’re empowered to do and be their best … how they live the company’s values … and how truly happy they are to work at Zappos everyday. (Would your employees say the same? Honestly, I don’t know that many companies whose employees love their workplace.)

Zappos Culture Book should be mandatory reading in every undergraduate business class, MBA, and leadership program.

Read this book to your kids at night, and I swear they’ll tell people “When I grow up, I want to work at Zappos!” This is no fairy tale – Zappos is for real.

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Engagement Marketing

Memo to Senior Management: Take Care of Your People

Memo1

I found this great quote from Dr. Judith M. Bardwick:

“When people are perceived as a cost and not a resource, when they are treated as a liability and not an asset, when no one seems to know or care that they are there, they don’t work well, and they don’t stay.”

Who are these ‘people?’

They’re your employees … your contractors, vendors, and consultants … your partners … and ultimately your brand advocates or – depending on how you treated them – your brand adversaries.

Categories
Engagement

Breaking Up (with Clients) is Hard to Do

Self-employed consultants can’t risk becoming disengaged from their client work, especially if they want to maintain their professional brand; i.e., reputation and credibility.

They can, however, voluntarily leave a client. While this is a viable option, it’s not easily made.

Consider this situation that a colleague described to me.

“I quit my long term client – even in this terrible market. Doing projects with them was ruining my health and after seven years of various engagements, the last one was just too much to tolerate and I left. They have become a horrible entity – not paying bills, imposing a terrible climate of fear and austerity on their people, making consultants and contractors beg for seriously eroded wages …

Its employees have also felt this pain, exist in an environment of fear and anger, and are nowhere near the can-do proud enthusiastic workforce I was introduced to when I first started consulting with this client. The company imposed extreme austerity measures on its workforce … while sitting on huge reserve assets and bragging to Wall Street about how they could weather this recession just fine.

I am proud of myself for quitting. I’ve had other small projects over the last several years, mostly  at this client. But now I need to learn to do something else …”

In my own 20+ years experience as a consultant, I know how difficult it is to walk away from a client, especially in such a tight market. (To those of you considering the ‘glamour’ of going solo, keep in mind: everyday you’re self-employed, you wake up unemployed!) So I’m proud of my friend for having the courage to leave and preserve her mental & physical health, despite the economic uncertainty.

Fellow consultants who care to share: what did it take for you to voluntarily leave a client?

 

Categories
Engagement

“The Power of Federal Employee Engagement” – Not Just for Feds

Even the U.S. government is focused on employee engagement these days. A study by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board explored the link between employee engagement and outcomes, and the results confirm “employee engagement has a strong, positive impact on organizational outcomes in the Federal sector.”

The study found six drivers of Federal employee engagement:

  • Pride in one’s work and workplace
  • Satisfaction with leadership
  • The opportunity to perform well at work
  • A positive work environment
  • Satisfaction with received recognition
  • Prospects for future personal and professional growth.

The federal government competes in the same labor market as the private sector and is similarly challenged to improve outcomes within budget constraints. Despite differences in the public vs. private workplace, ALL managers can learn from the insights and recommendations found in this study.

You can find the special report The Power of Federal Employee Engagement. [Source: the Employee Engagement Network]

Categories
Engagement

Employee Engagement Today (and Tomorrow)

I was recently asked to speak to a management group. When told the topic was “How to Engage Employee’s in Today’s Economy,” I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. It’s a popular subject these days, but seriously, how is engaging people now any different than engaging them in good times?

I’m not talking about HR-focused firms looking for new ways to better engage their employees. What gets me are those companies for whom employee engagement is a totally new concept. You know the ones where “our people are our greatest asset” is mere rhetoric (by the company) and wishful thinking (by the employees).

These companies are primarily interested in learning about engagement because they’re looking for a quick fix. But when it comes to effectively engaging employees – by means of a workplace that fosters open communications, trust, respect, and leadership – there is no instant remedy. As they’ll learn when the economy improves and their employee turnover rate soars.

Ever the optimist, however, I figure better late than never … maybe this time they’ll learn.

Categories
Engagement

New Study Confirms Employee Engagement’s Positive Impact

The latest in employee engagement research continues to confirm its bottom line benefits through improvements in customer satisfaction/loyalty and employee retention.

The Aberdeen Group studied more than 300 organizations with engagement initiatives to benchmark best-in-class performance. A complimentary copy of Aberdeen’s report, Beyond Satisfaction: Engaging Employees to Retain Customers, is available through Oct. 2, 2009.

Categories
Engagement

Employee Engagement Gets a Big Boost from the UK: The MacLeod Review

I’m back from my brief blog break and wanted to share these links to a major new employee engagement report recently released by the UK.

Amazing: a major government commissions an independent report on employee engagement’s impact on business practice, and then it provides open access to the information! The official report is titled Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke.

Here are two great sources that summarize this important new report:

(Thanks, guys!)

Categories
Engagement

Re-energize Employees and Organizations

As a follow up to my recent series Re-Charging Employee Morale, here’s an approach that helps employees re-energize themselves and their organizations.

 

“To effectively re-energize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated-and able-to bring more of themselves to work everyday. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.”

The excerpt is from the article:  Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy of The Energy Project, a consulting firm focused on building “sustainable high performance cultures by teaching people to manage their energy rather than their time” — the latter being a finite resource. Their approach helps employees better understand and better manage four energy sources:

  • physical – involving nutrition, fitness, and sleep/rest
  • emotional – the ability to cultivate positive emotions
  • mental – being mindful and maintaining focus, including dealing with multiple distractions
  • “human spirit” – a clear sense of purpose and meaning in one’s work and life.

Check out The Energy Project’s blog: Changing the Way the World Works to learn more.

Judging by their client list, The Energy Project has helped many organizations and their employees. If it’s unlikely that your company will find itself on that list, don’t wait … start by exploring how you can better manage your energy.