with
David Zinger and Denise Bissonnette

Work From The Inside Out

Employee engagement involves our mental, emotional, and practical connection to work and our organizations. It is the key to recruitment, retention, satisfaction, and productivity. It is important to organizations and vital to individuals.

How powerfully do you engage in your work? How powerfully do the other people in your workplace engage? For individual well-being and organizational productivity we must cultivate and sustain high levels of authentic engagement.

You are invited to attend this dynamic and intensive one day workshop to discover and examine the potential lying within each individual to transform everyday employment to wholehearted and meaningful engagement in the workplace. Based around eight powerful best practices of “intentional employee engagement”, participants of this workshop will be equipped with a fresh perspective, a clarified vision, practical tools, and an intelligent plan to transform their everyday experience at work into gold. 

Contact us to learn how to bring The New Alchemy to your Workplace, Association, or Organization! Email Us!

Target Audience

This workshop will benefit participants who desire to ignite or deepen their engagement in their current workplace as well as that of their co-workers and/or employees. The content and suggestions provided are relevant and timely for employees in any position, workplace, or industry! 
 

Return to Top

Facilitators

Denise Bissonnette, M.A. Author, trainer, and keynote speaker on issues of livelihood and employee development. Denise's M.A. is in Multicultural Education from the University of San Francisco. For more information on Denise's work, please visit www.diversityworld.com.
 

David Zinger, M.Ed. Speaker and educator with a background in employee assistance and 20 years and teaching at the University of Manitoba. Visit David’s website to learn more about him and his work on employee engagement and strength based leadership: www.davidzinger.com.
 

Return to Top

Agenda

Return to Top

Eight Intentional Practices of Employee Engagement
 
Description and Benefits

1. Start with purposeful intent – the magic of “WHY”.

   We know that once we’re ensconced in the daily trials and tribulations of a job, we can lose sight of what motivated us to be there in the first place, and dismiss the many ways in which employment actually “works” on our behalf. Looking beyond the traditional benefits of employment like pay and other forms of remuneration, and engaging in questions of legacy, contribution, purpose, and calling, the world of employment takes on deeper meaning and value.

   In discussion of this first practice, employees will identify their primary work motivators and examine how they can maintain and more fully satisfy these basic needs in and outside of the workplace. With these personal and professional ends in mind, when the going gets tough, they can use their deepest intentions, and the dreams and desires they are rooted in, to inform their daily journey. Remembering “why” they are committed to doing what we are doing, even the most mundane tasks can be infused with meaning.
    

2. Celebrate your gifts, leverage your strengths.

   In order to work from of a place of deep engagement and enthusiasm, we need to know that we are utilizing our finest qualities and attributes, employing our unique talents and skills, and celebrating the many gifts we have to bring to the table. Nothing can discourage and dishearten us more than feeling devalued and underappreciated. Employee engagement at its best assumes that each employee is, in fact, engaging their best!

   In this second practice, employees will gain a deeper appreciation of what constitutes their own “personal genius”, assessing their strengths and gifts, and considering the extent to which they are living and leveraging those gifts in and outside the workplace.
    

3. Harness the power of focus, performance and feedback!

   Intentional employee engagement assumes that we can answer questions like: Where am I going? How do I get there? How will I know if I am making progress? How will I know if I am lost? How do I get back on course when I have strayed? How will I know when I have arrived?

   The answers to these questions requires that we first harness the power of intentional focus, clarifying what it is we want to achieve and where we are headed, and then charting our way, step by step, from where we are now to where we are going. Proceeding with an intelligent plan, we stay alive and attentive to the feedback we receive from our day to day performance, using it a “correctional guidance system”.

   This third practice will give employees an opportunity to clarify where they are going, and to reexamine the way they are currently using their time and energy. By turning the discussion from “goal-setting” to “priority planning”, and “time management” to “self-management”, employees will engage in worthy questions regarding the use of their time and energy and consider the various forms of feedback that can assist them in the daily discipline of “refocusing”.
    

4. Cultivate key community, in and outside of work!

   Employee engagement thrives in a healthy community of people brought together and sustained by mutual respect, vision and purposefulness. Employee engagement is a natural offshoot of an environment where you find inspired leadership, a highly cooperative spirit among all staff, and group kinship within teams. Unfortunately, this idyllic work environment is hard to find, and no one is guaranteed such ideal working conditions. Still, there is an essential social and inter-relational aspect of employee engagement that can be attended to and maximized in any employment situation.

   The fourth practice invites employees to explore the people-side of their engagement. Numerous ideas will be shared for enhancing relationships and alliances that serve and support their efforts and decreasing the fall-out from relationships that work against them, in and outside the workplace.           
    

5. Commit to Life/Work Balance!

   Full employee engagement cannot be separated from full life engagement, as work is one branch of an employee’s much larger life experience. We know there is a high price to be paid when we live out of balance, but there is an equally high benefit to be enjoyed when we are able to sustain a sense of rhythm and balance in our otherwise busy and complicated lives.

   This fifth practice introduces a simple but profound tool for employees to identify their essential life values, the areas where they are investing their current time and energy, and the difference between the two. By applying the joint powers of intentionality and commitment, employees will be invited to engage more fully in those areas of their lives in need of renewal and/or revitalization.
    

6. Continually revisit the authenticity factor!

   When we are in a place where we can be ourselves, our contributions and experience are enhanced in every way. Adversely, when we are in a role in which we feel obliged to hide who we are, everything suffers. Authenticity is what makes us comfortable in our own skin. It is that quintessential element that allows us to be and express who we are in a role or a relationship without pretense, not having to put on airs for another’s purposes. Employee engagement with or without the benefit of authenticity is the difference between the cracking flames of an aged piece of wood and the slow burn of a Duraflame log. One is a pretty good imitation of the real thing, but we know the difference!

   In the sixth practice employees will rate themselves along several key criteria constituting authenticity in the workplace. By becoming aware of the ways in which they fully inhabit the roles they play and express themselves freely, or fail to do so, employees will consider new choices they can make to more fully engage in their work by daring to be themselves!
    

7. Meet challenges with courage and conviction!

   Clearly it’s important to prepare and ready ourselves for the step by step progression inherent in any worthy endeavor, but it is equally important to anticipate and prepare ourselves for the inevitable backslides, slow-downs, pitfalls, detours, and setbacks along the way!

   The seventh practice prepares employees to increase their capacity to bring courage and conviction to the challenges they are bound to encounter. Through the use of thought-provoking questions, employees will have an opportunity to alter their attitude and perspective about current real-life challenges, learning to view them as stepping stones rather than roadblocks.
    

8. Seize opportunities to engage, each and every day!

   Intentional Employee Engagement is not a passive state; it is a dynamic process in which we must be proactively involved. It assumes that we are committed to our own evolution and growth. It requires us to be alive to possibilities and attuned to opportunities that arise in and outside the workplace to continually enrich and enliven our engagement.

   The eighth practice helps employees to expand their horizons about their possibilities and to seize new opportunities to live in concert with their purpose and values, use and grow their gifts, and to change and bend with grace as they experience inevitable life/work transitions.

 Return to Top
 

For additional information, please contact David Zinger & Associates
(204) 254-2130 dzinger@shaw.ca
 

© Diversity World, 1999 - 2008
info@diversityworld.com Tel: 204-487-0307