Well here’s my quick top 10 list of ideas that may help:

1. Gratitude

Appreciate 3 good things about your life each day

2. No Email Before Noon

Try it – do the most important things first each morning, I guarantee email is not one of them. This tip alone can save you more than an hour each day

3. Yellow Pages Index Exercise

Make a list of 50 things you want to do in life using the yellow pages index for ideas

4. Personal Cashflow

Do your cashflow & get a financial advisor

5. Daily Priorities

Before you go home, make a list of the top 3 most important things you want to achieve the next day

6. Block Out Time Units

Make time, in your diary in advance, to make sure you have time to get important things done in the coming weeks and months

7. Top 5 Fun List

Have a list of your top 5 fun things you just love doing and carry them in your wallet

8. Say No More Often

Say, not now, so you have more time to deliver on commitments you have made

9. Exercise to Energise

Are you getting enough exercise? Sleep? Eating right?

10. Design Your Ideal Week

Have it somewhere you can see it on a regular basis

Why not go through this list again, and just try a couple of these ideas – until they become a habit

Add to the discussion!

Please leave your comments, thoughts and questions below

Employee engagement (EE) increases performance (P), productivity (P) and profitability ($)  in organisations. EE=P+P+$

Engagement utopia would be having 100% of our employees, 100% motivated and engaged 100% of the time.  Sure, unrealistic, but the ideal goal!

Generally speaking, there is a 20:60:20 engagement distribution across the average organisation. For example:

• 20% of employees are ‘toxic’ or actively disengaged.  In fact many organisations would probably be better off if these employees didn’t even turn up at work each day

• 60% of employees are ‘retained’, the complacent coaster, they haven’t yet been given a good enough reason to leave yet

• 20% of employees are ‘actively engaged’, the eager beavers, they love working in the organisation to the point where they’d probably like to buy shares in the company given the opportunity

The Underestimated Soft Skill

Employee engagement and motivation are seen as a soft skill by many people upstairs at the big table, so to make it harder and more tangible (for the bean counters) we have researched the hell out of it. Arhhh… do we all feel better now? NO!

More Research Than Implementation

Many organisations spend the majority of their time and effort (some up to 80%) on employee engagement research, but only 20% on effective engagement strategies.

Organisations are challenged and getting frustrated as many of the engagement solutions they are trying to implement to improve staff retention aren’t getting effective ‘cut through’ and improving employee engagement scores.

So why aren’t many organisations getting the improved engagement results they were hoping for?

It’s a key question …

So, please let us know which future topics are of most interest to you and we will attempt to make them a priority for you in upcoming posts.

More Insightful Issues?

Perhaps we need to uncover the answers to some probing questions such as:

• What REALLY engages individual employees? [Now answered]

• What are the top 6 barriers to effectively engaging employees? [Now answered]

• Who is really responsible for employee engagement? [Now answered]

• Why is the current traditional employee engagement research flawed?

• How do we reverse the whinge entitlement culture and create a self-responsible workforce?

• Is inexperienced leadership killing our cultures’ engagement & motivation?

• What works best – general Organisational Engagement Plans (OEP) or specific Personal Engagement Plans (PEP)?

• How do we make performance reviews engaging and motivational?

• Should we forget exit interviews and just focus on stay interviews?

So please post your comments and thoughts below.

 Are we still trying to solve engagement by doing more of the wrong things?

From our recent ‘Obstacles to Engagement’ Research Study we identified six key challenges to effective employee engagement. You may recognise some of them:

1. Ineffective Solutions

“The engagement initiatives we have put in place aren’t getting the results we had hoped for. In fact the more we give our employees the more it seems to create a whinge entitlement culture”

2. Employee Clarity

“Most employees know what they don’t want; fewer know what really motivates and engages them.  If employees don’t know what motivates them – how am I, as their people leader, going to have any chance?”

3. Skills, Tools & Resources

“Our people leaders/managers aren’t psychologists, counsellors & coaches. They don’t have the confidence, skills or tools to have a meaningful discussion (Stay Interview) with their employees around motivation and engagement”

4. Time Poor

“We pay our people. That should motivate them. Also I’m too busy…engagement isn’t part of my KPI’s … anyway it’s a human resources issue isn’t it?”

5. Inaction

“We are not sure what the ideal engagement solutions are for our organisation. We keep procrastinating and our indecision means we haven’t really committed to any engagement initiatives yet. Yikes – it’s almost time to do our next staff engagement survey!”

6. Buy In

“We haven’t been able to get full support for employee engagement from the most important areas of the business yet”

Source: LifebyDesign.com.au “Obstacles to Engagement” Research Study 2011

Solution = Employee Activated Engagement (EAE)

The solution to all of the above engagement challenges is Employee Activated Engagement (EAE): The self-responsibility approach to engagement. 

More on EAE in future posts. But in the meantime, lets get the conversation going – so please leave a reply and your thoughts below.