Cube RulesTag: Engagement; | Cube Rules

Employee engagement replaced by passionate emptiness

Scot Herrick — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:00:09 +0000

Here’s the biggest employee engagement downfall in corporate life today: “Don’t take it personally, it’s business.” Like if you lay me off from a job, I’m supposed to think it isn’t personal, just business. Except that when you lay me off, it totally upends my life and completely changes what actions I need to take in order to care for myself and my family.

Business is personal. Business is social. To take away the employee engagement that comes from taking your work personally takes away the satisfaction that comes from the work. When we take away the personal, the engagement that comes from work, we are left with empty actions, treating projects and people as though they are mere objects in a broad playing field. We do the work not because the work is engaging, satisfying and personal, but because it is a paycheck.

There are big implications to objectifying the workplace.

We focus on the personal, not on the policy

When we’re engaged in the work, we focus on what is best for doing our work and advocate for what we think is best for the business. We’re owners, wanting to do the best to support both our customers and ourselves. When we lose the employee engagement, we shrug our shoulders, don’t attempt to make whatever better and just do our job. We look at other people and start attacking them instead of the policy. Or people start attacking us instead of the policy.

We call it office politics and it is even worse as each of us try to stay afloat in a recession, keeping a job to have a job and working to protect ourselves. We put up the shield of non-emotion, discount our passion, and replace personal engagement with simply doing the work.

Everything becomes a game

When everything is “business, not personal,” we start gaming the systems. We tweak our numbers to make them look better, we strategize how to make the outcome the way we want it, rather than figuring out what is best for the department and the business. We care less about the customer as they simply become another factor in winning the game. Good business ethics become corrupt business ethics. Instead of engaging in the work, we engage in the game. Halo never had it so good.

Employee engagement becomes passionate emptiness

When management and the corporate experience drives people to ignore the personal in business, to mute the engagement in the work, people replace their passion with an emptiness that simply does the job. Takes the direction. Tries to figure out how to stay protected in the job. After all, it’s just a paycheck.

That’s if they stay. The great employees, looking for the very best corporate experience, take about two looks at the environment and decide it is time to change. Which, by the way, substantially disengages them from their current job while they look for someplace that will make a difference.

Employee engagement is not easy. Changing a corporate culture is not easy. When you run the “it’s just business, not personal” line, you change the corporate culture. Would you rather manage people who are engaged in the work, or manage people who have a passionate emptiness in what they do?

After all, it’s just business. Not personal.

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10 Job Skills to Improve Your Employee Engagement

Scot Herrick — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:00:43 +0000

photo credit: Oldtasty

The Employee Engagement Network is offering a free e-book called the The Top Tens of Employee Engagement with some really great information on improving employee engagement. I was asked to contribute and did so. Most of the listings of ten items to improve employee engagement are about management or things management can do to improve employee engagement.

But Cube Rules is about what people working in cubes can do to land their next job, improve their work, and have a great career. Since that is the point of view of the site, I wrote what I think are ten skills you need to have in order to engage in your work. Here they are:

1. Work on what excites you

Excitement precedes passion. Whenever possible, work on what excites you and reduce the work of what doesn’t excite you.

2. Learn best practices

Full engagement means you need to know the best theoretical way of doing the work. Only then can you discover if the best practice is right for you.

3. Belong to a professional organization

Like-minded people working in the same area as you build knowledge and contacts.

4. Focus on the work

When you are working, do the work. Do not let distractions remove your focus. The more you focus on the work, the greater the concentration and engagement.

5. Build superior task management practices

Knowing all your commitments in a trusted task management system reduces stress (I subscribe to the GTD Methodology with various tools).

6. Become a “trusted advisor”

When you provide your views of the work and business judgment with your manager, you engage at a higher discussion level than most employees. You will also learn about more opportunities to get your work to what excites you.

7. Network with high performers

High performing people bring higher levels of engagement in their work. Get to the top of your game by talking with these people.

8. Work the edges, not the middle

The edge is where the new stuff is happening in your field. The edge is where the value is for employers. The edge is where you need to be constantly learning to perform effectively.

9. Become the go-to person for your work

If you’re the expert, you will learn even more from the questions people ask of you. Making you even more of an expert.

10. Learn from those with adjacent skills to your skills

Adjacent skills are those that sit next to your skills. For example, if you know finance, learn from those that are experts in the adjacent skill of financial reporting. Learning adjacent skills rounds out your knowledge and leads to engaged thinking.

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You can download the entire free e-book. I’d recommend you do!

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Employee Engagement and Enthusiasm

Scot Herrick — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of management talk about employee engagement. In fact, I belong to a forum on the subject. There is a distinction, I think, in “employee engagement” and “enthusiastic employee engagement.”

Employee engagement is critical to the success of an organization. Employees will usually be more creative, positive, and productive when engaged in their work. Yet management often pays little attention to the engagement levels of their employees.

But there is a big difference between engaged in the work and enthusiastically engaged in the work. Let me share the differences.

When an employee is engaged in the work, there is:

awareness of the tasks
progress against goals
involvement in the creative process for the work
and results.

These attributes really move the work along.

Enthusiasm about the work, however, moves this engagement to the next level. Enthusiastic engagement gives you all of the above – plus the desire to do the work.

Yes, I can be engaged in the work. Enthusiasm means I want to be engaged in the work. And there’s a world of difference between the two.

What makes you engaged in your work?

Scot

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Employee Engagement isn’t Pointless

Scot Herrick — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:30:47 +0000

As a Cubicle Warrior, one of the most critical things to know is Corporate Speak.

What your management actually means when they talk is a great career management tool. And, since I do humor using Corporate Speak, I always appreciate someone else’s great turn of phrase when it comes to making a point about business.

I saw this from David Zinger on Employee Engagement and read the priceless reality:

don’t make your point pointless with an overabundance of PowerPoint slides as you blur into a darkened room dimly lit by glowing BlackBerry screens as participants drift off to bulging email in-boxes.

Wow!

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