The Lost Video: Apply 47 Keys to Unlock Employee Engagement

A personal note before the article. I am beginning a 4 week hiatus from writing on LinkedIn as I journey to Rio (a tough life :) with my wife to spend time with our son who lives in Brazil. I believe this is the best video and post I ever made on engagement. I invite you to share or repost this newsletter. See you in March.

Do you know how to unlock the door to full engage with your work and with others? In this post I offer 47 keys that can unlock engagement.

Authentic and powerful personal engagement is only a moment away. How are you going to engage in and with the next moment?

Good work requires more than sheer effort, it requires knowledge and skills. It require an acuity and discernment to the moment and recognizing that each moment invites us to engage with the work in front of us. It means embedding our moments within a bigger story as we string or stack moments together for a momentous career.

Through the power of engagement we get more into our work to get more out of our work.

An engaging plea. I made this 23 minute video to sum up 25,000 hours devoted to work engagement, personal engagement, leadership engagement, and employee engagement. This video was done in one-take from my heart to share with you the future of engagement and what I believe about the power of moments in igniting, enhancing, and building work engagement.

Viewing this video again after it was lost, I realized it is not a manifesto, rather it was (and is) my heartfelt and emotional plea for a greater and deeper experience of engagement for everyone at work.

Lost and Found. The video was created before the pandemic. It was shown once for a small webinar and was lost in my self-created avalanche of content. By chance, I stumbled across it last week, watched it, and believed it is just as relevant, maybe even more relevant, today.

I beseech to watch the video to feel this topic rather than just read about it, but of course, you can also read the 47 key points below.

47 key points from Engage the Moment:

• The secret: We are looking in the wrong place to improve employee engagement.
• Engagement is to be found in the moment and moments are the fundamental building blocks of engagement.
• There is no stress in the present moment.
• When we fully engage, we are also enhancing our wellbeing and lowering our stress.
• Ask yourself this great time management question:?What is the best use of my time right now?
• Drivers and levers are poor fit concepts to explain our personal responsibility for engagement.
• Engagement is always an invitation.
• Work engagement can be defined in 8 simple words:?good work done well with others every day.
• Trying to achieve and proclaim GREAT WORK often isn’t so great.
• The way to experience episodes of rare great work, is to do good work every day.
• Good work can literally make us well.
• We are responsible for engagement while we influence and are accountable for others’ engagement.
• Some of us are more engaged with our smart phones than the tasks and relationships right in front of us.
• Can you treat engagement as well as you treat your smart phone?
• Do you charge both your smart phone and yourself up every night?
• An excellent engagement trigger is after you use your phone to ask yourself:?What can I do right now to improve engagement for myself of someone else in the organization?
• Engagement is not about PowerPoints and survey results it is about actions and interactions. There is no way to engagement, to engage is the way.
• Four focuses for engagement are?ABCD:?Achieve results |?Build?relationships |?Cultivate wellbeing |?Develop career
• Attach your moments and small actions to the bigger story or strategy of your organization.
• Add spice to moments so that you focus on results: keep asking yourself and others “what do you want, what do you really, really want.”
• Engagement is not an extra it is the core of work. It is specific not abstract.
• Prevent iatrogenic disengagement – our attempts to engage employees that instead end up disengaging employees.
• Anonymity can kill engagement yet we rely on anonymous surveys.
• Disengagement should not be a punishable offence it should trigger dialogue, conversation, and connection.
• I see engagement as the diamond in the heart of work and wellbeing

• Engagement is not something we do to people or for people it is something we do with people.
• To get everyone on the same page, practice the Positive Deviancy dictum:?never do anything about me without me.
• Determine your Engagement Zone or E-zone: How long can you stay engaged.
• I fine-tuned my E-zone to eleven minutes and eleven seconds.
• I offer 3 suggestions on how to determine the length and efficacy of your personal E-zone.
• We have 20,000 possible moments every day.
• When will you turn engagement around? How about in the next moment?
• Recognize or support someone else at work right now.
• Study the academic focus on work engagement by Arnold Bakker and others to infuse your work with vigour, absorption, and dedication.
• Learn why snakes and ladders is such a vital metaphor for engagement at work ( Teresa Amabile on progress and setbacks).
• A powerful leadership question to ask in many situations:?What stood out for you?
• Prevent and manage setbacks — can you make a ladder out of snakes?
• Study John Gottman’s insights on relationship moments comprised of bids and turns.
• Bids and turns are very predictive of engagement and relationships.
• Make lots of bids and keep turning towards others.
• Engagement thrives on strong relationships, good friends, and effective connections.
• Jane Dutton demonstrated that high quality connections occurring in the moments of time between people is a huge source of personal and organizational energy.
• There is no secret in engagement. The real requirement is to step up to, and into, the moment of engagement.
• Mindfulness is related and almost synonymous with personal engagement ( ellen langer ).
• Authentic, powerful, personal engagement is only a moment away.What are you going to do in the next moment?
• Keep on asking: what can I do right now to improve engagement for myself or someone else in our organization?

Turn your answers into an action or interaction that contributes to achieving results, building relationships, cultivating career, and developing career.

This video was lost after just one viewing at the start of 2020. Perhaps that loss was not such a bad thing because it feels more timely now. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times:?

Pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.?

Are you ready to walk lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine a better world of engagement. Are you ready to fight for it?

Contact me today at [email protected] so that we can walk lightly together. I offer coaching, consulting, speaking, workshops, and online assistance to help you and the people you work with to get more into their work to get more out of their work. Engage along with me, our best is yet to be.