Bridging Engagement Gaps: An Essential Resource Guide to Strengthen Workplace Engagement

By Vincent Miholic Ph.D.

Bridging Engagement Gaps amasses an eclectic blend of business research and analysis, philosophy and the arts, as well as practical examples and illustrations to better understand the obstacles we confront and the foundational constructs related to realizing optimal worker engagement.

Whether you are an intern, thirty-year employee, manager, or business owner, you play a critical role in determining personal and organizational success.

Leadership in the workplace begins with basic decency and integrity and has little to do with job titles. Therefore, there must be widespread participation in critical decision-making if your intent is to engage everyone.

This resource guide delivers tools and strategies to drive exploratory and evaluative conversations about driving more engagement in the workplace. Learn how to:

define what engagement means and why its important;
celebrate the success of others to drive engagement;
landscape a culture in which employees flourish; and
champion multiple points of view.

Fully-engaged employees bring passion, purpose, and discretionary energy to their work, but they must feel secure in taking risks and know that their suggestions count. Give them the tools they need to succeed while helping disengaged employees rediscover their passion by Bridging Engagement Gaps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491796894

Vincent Miholic Ph.D.

Dr. Miholic is a frequent blogger for the Association for Talent Development. He welcomes your questions and feedback at [e-mail]

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Copyright © 2016 Vincent Miholic, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9688-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9687-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9689-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016908003

iUniverse rev. date: 10/29/2016

To my dear wife, Michelle,

so engaged, we married;

To our brilliant daughter, Grace,

amazing, amusing, and cherished;

I am very grateful for your

love, humor, and tolerance!

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Work

Chapter 2 - Engagement Redefined

Chapter 3 - Active Values

Chapter 4 - Disengagemet and The Walking Dead

Chapter 5 - Derailed

Chapter 6 - At What Price Engagement?

Chapter 7 - A Taxonomy Of Engagement

Chapter 8 - Everyone Is A Leader

Chapter 9 - Transform Thyself

Chapter 10 - Why Employees Leave: For Bosses Only

Chapter 11 - "How Can I Help?

Chapter References and Tangents

Acknowledgements

The readers below toiled with messy stages of this manuscript. I am very appreciative of their considerable assistance to help me bring order to chaos. My wife, Michelle, a consummate English teacher and much more emotionally intelligent than I, remains my most patient first responder. My brother, Phil, a fantastic fiction writer, provided early, pertinent suggestions. Jeff Binder brought clarity and a discerning engagement perspective. Joseph Long nudged me further in the right direction. Jennifer Bullock’s insights breathed more life into my ideas. I am grateful for their time and labor, and a special shout out to Scott Manguno.

To colleagues with whom I have served or advised on past and present engagement and recognition committees, and their understanding of ever-evolving and arduous work, as well as humor so important to the end results, thank you for the enjoyment brought to the process.

I thank each reader for choosing Bridging Engagement Gaps and forgiving any remaining confusion in my wording!

A special thank you is heartily extended to David Zinger for generosity of spirit and time dedicated to the opening words.

Throughout the book, I refer to leaders whose kindness encourages others to be free to explore, experiment and take chances, discover, be themselves, grow, change, and most of all model love and fun. I have encountered two such leaders in my work career. To Mel and Ned, I remain very grateful for the opportunities and support.

Foreword

by David Zi nger

I founded and host the 7000 member global Employee Engagement Network. I have seen almost every resource on employee engagement created over the past 8 years. Vincent Miholic’s book is a very worthy, valuable, and helpful addition to the resources available on engagement. I applaud his unique and eclectic point of view laced with fresh insights and encouragement for the reader to reflect deeply on core engagement principles.

Bridging Engagement Gaps provides a cogent entry point for someone new to engagement while also offering a fine opportunity with those very familiar with the topic to refresh their thinking and perspective.

Vince offers us his expert guidance on the employee engagement journey as we bridge employee engagement gaps. He builds a multi-faceted bridge to span the disengagement gap so that our organizations and we are more fully engaged.

He avoids a prepackaged tour of guidance through engagement while setting the stage for us to explore both the superhighways of engagement while not neglecting the nooks and crannies of how we lead, manage, and work. After reading his exploration, you will arrive at your work with new insights and a better understanding of engagement.

I appreciated so many of his statements, such as, for engagement to flourish, a disposition to build relationships must be present, accompanied by letting go of the security blanket of indispensability, status, and certainty. The expert must shift his or her priority from self-insurance to assuring on-going development of others, sharing, and creating reliance on many autonomous and fearless collaborators.

Vince also offers his unique voice to the engagement journey fused with extensive research and resources and provides full credit to the myriad of resources on engagement. And, perhaps, only Vince could talk about employee engagement and refer to Kim Kardashian and Mother Teresa in the same paragraph.

So pick up the book, dive right in and engage fully in both reading what Vince writes and taking action back in your workplace to make engagement better for all. He states, Satisfaction is an example of complacency; engagement is an example of artistry. You won’t finish reading this book being complacent, and you will be better equipped with the tools to develop your artistry of engagement.

Enjoy the following pages. Engage along with me– the best is yet to be.

David Zinger

www.davidzinger.com

Founder and Host– The Employee Engagement Network.

Introduction

Anyone who has held a few different jobs and has been in the workforce for decade or longer, can point to exemplary executives or influential colleagues who helped move work from being merely palatable to having more fun. I was fortunate to be influenced by one of my best bosses during my very first job as a hardware clerk during my high school and early college years. This great fortune, at minimum wage but with profit sharing, was a formative experience and remains a high benchmark against which I compare other experiences and bosses. What made it different? In part, what I experienced was being valued and respected, feeling like I was an integral part by being exactly deployed, by being reminded of what was important, and by being given the freedom to take on various responsibilities. I was surprised by being invited to join the owners as they trekked to the central warehouse on a stock run and when they offered unexpected opportunities. I was supported when I made mistakes and coached through errors with compassion and understanding rather than judgment, suspicion, or punishment.

Since that first job, where the priority was always attending to customer questions and needs, moving from unloading trucks and stocking shelves, ringing up sales, tracking inventory, to cutting glass and pipe, each motion encouraged and supported by a great boss, I have pitched gravel under a hot Arizona sun, maintained an apartment complex, painted and renovated houses, drove a panel truck delivering stacks of the morning news at 4:00 a.m., worked as a field representative for a major media research firm, and dedicated more than 25 years to a career in education. Along the way, few other owners or supervisors have lived up to that early formative experience. The difference, I believe, was that my first boss possessed an intuitive gift: an unconditional sense of what was right and a genuine concern for everyone. He understood, too, and never wavered from tapping into the unique and full reserves and promise within each individual.

Bridging Engagement Gaps explores those facets that nourish such a precious gift: realizing that by fully recognizing others, we recognize the untapped giftedness in ourselves. It also sheds light on flaws and failures that diminish us or hold us back from fully utilizing best practices associated with heightened engagement.

While reading an early draft of Bridging Engagement Gaps, my wife, Michelle, asked the tricky question, Who’s the intended audience? Embedded in her question is Who is responsible for uncovering gifts and nourishing talents at work? The answer spans the organizational chart, and, of course, each person must map a course to realize personal horizons. Moreover, individual chapters in the book could have been specifically written for people in the board room or in the trenches, CEOs, or front-line managers and supervisors. In fact, the book is written for a collective us throughout the workforce.

I have made a concerted effort to frame leadership as everyone’s stake in personal and organizational success, from an intern to a 30-year employee, from front line-workers to owners. Leadership, too, extends beyond title and position to basic decency and integrity. This concept of leadership insists upon widespread participation in critical decision-making, selfless motivation, and leading oneself through situations that result in maximum engagement for all.

With one exception: all engagement roads lead to the immediate supervisors whose conscious choices emphatically and empathetically orchestrate how others work together. While each person’s role in an organization will influence degrees of results in responding to engagement needs, formal conductors¹– namely those holding executive positions– possess greater sway in influencing others and shaping culture.

Therefore, the main intent of the book is to suggest principles and actions to help ourselves and each other to be the best we can be, whether in positions where we are still acclimating to new work, where we have obtained mastery, or in more challenging or successive positions. Because of the complexity of organizational contexts and interconnected, interactive roles (or in disengaged environments, feelings of disconnectedness and inactive roles) specific answers are complemented by exploratory questions to help navigate your specific engagement needs.

One of the goals of the book was to condense the most important aspects of engagement found in research, business articles, the arts, popular culture, philosophy, and in every day interactions. Intended as a starting point, each chapter provides tools, questions, and warnings for those who are arguing a case for and currently working at building stronger, longer lasting engagement. I use a variety of metaphors, hopefully not too mixed, pertaining to creating energy, being constructivists, and maintaining workplace clockworks (the cover art? See Leader as Horologist within this book or merely reexamine the nature of creativity and the young hero in Scorsese’s film Hugo) to explore engagement in both abstract, concrete, and human terms. The more detailed engagement resources concentrate on readily accessible methods through associated web articles and sites.

Cultivating engagement is directly tied to learning more about engagement and altering behaviors toward more genuine caring for each other’s success. Thus, Chapters 1 and 2, Work and Engagement Redefined lay a cultural foundation for exploring the meaning of engagement.

In Chapter 3, engagement, in the abstract, could be considered both a value as well as an outcome, but our specific day-to-day, person-to-person actions to improve the workplace are our actual values. Thus, Chapter 3, Active Values asks to consider behaviors and explore how to translate definitions to actual lived values. The core value is what actions result in the demonstration of valuing others.

Chapter 4, Disengagement and The Walking Dead, offers a metaphorical workplace barometer, and specific answers to the easiest part of the engagement puzzle, demonstrating appreciation through no cost/low cost acts of recognition. Offered here are universal engagement practices, employing the practices that work for everyone because they feel right and are intrinsically, morally, and ethically good.

Chapter 5, Derailed, visits variables that interfere with making engagement progress. Foremost, engagement entails complex interactions and requires everyone to draw out the best in each other. And when this does not happen, modeling and mutual respect are sacrificed. As everyone holds a share of responsibility in the engagement dance, modeling and coaching are not the exclusive terrain of someone who holds a managerial title. Everyone, in any position, brings influential attitudes and interactions (positive or negative) to the work product.

Chapter 6, At What Price Engagement? narrows the focus to unraveling the paradox of a significant derailer, misunderstandings about how we attend to workers’ salaries and how we view value. Typing employee engagement ROI into a search engine quickly yields substantial commentary and research, much of which has been combed through and synthesized into the pages that follow, exposing the production, cultural, and monetary costs associated with disengagement² and, by extension, the benefits of engagement. Business articles are replete with scores of statistics exposing the negative effects of being dismissive of employees and hailing the dire state of disengagement in our early 21st century workforce.³

Obviously, companies are adjusting to transient employees and episodic employment trends; this shift to a more mobile workforce may explain part of an embedded reticence to scale up or marshal an engagement advantage. Others, however, stay relevant by blending creativity with pragmatics. Examples of long-term strategies that tend to understand engagement are Starbucks, whose top leaders continue to demonstrate their understanding of engagement ROI, as evidenced by distance education opportunity provided to its U.S. employees or housing allowances to those in China.⁴ Or witness the U. S. military’s 2016 acknowledgment of work-life balance benefits to recruit and retain women in the armed services.

Following that vein, Chapter 7, A Taxonomy of Engagement, the book’s core chapter, expands on the concrete realities of engagement in the context of moral and ethical prerequisites. In evaluating and assessing engagement initiatives, you may find the engagement taxonomy sheds light on unacknowledged or unresolved issues that confound progress. This chapter reaches beyond the paycheck, beyond survival, to refocus on motivators that stimulate workers so that they are encouraged to, invited to, and know how to thrive. Learning more about what autonomy means, and what sharing looks like, peels back an opaque curtain of control and silence.

Threads of all these pieces culminate in Everyone Is a Leader, Chapter 8, which encourages more reflection about the roles we play. In addition to the vision of a pervasive and meaningful workplace education for all, including leadership development for all, the hard science of engagement is unequivocally tied to deficiencies in soft skills development. As all of the literature suggests in making headway with engagement, we have failed most at knowing and appreciating each other.

Given the moral, ethical, and psychological considerations outlined in the taxonomy, Chapter 9, Transform Thyself, returns to personal and leadership considerations: particularly, the values exhibited from our formal leaders at the apex of the organizational hierarchy compounded by a heightened empowerment of everyone’s share in leadership to make a difference.

Because actions modeled by our most immediate managers have a tremendous impact on an initiative’s success, Bridging Engagement Gaps conveys a direct appeal to formal leaders. Executive teams set the tone as well as earmark and deploy the resources to navigate the engagement obstacle course. Thus, top leaders’ commitment must be solid, long-lasting, and able to withstand naysayers, critics, their own shortcomings, and the often difficult journey that accompanies an honest and protracted venture into engagement territory.

Since managers, particularly, contribute to loss to the bottom line when people are not engaged, Chapter 10 is specifically written for For Bosses Only, whose actions can be products of perceived competition and trappings of position. A consequence of unfounded or unproductive paranoia is that talented employees who welcome the right seat on the bus, scratching their heads about how to advance to more challenging work (and higher salary), become bored with or languish in unsatisfying jobs, or leave.

The closing chapter, How Can I Help returns us to thinking about where we are and asks, Where do we begin anew.

To complement the Chapter discussions, a basic library of the book’s key words, articles, and related touchstones are found in the appendixes, some of which I hope are new to you and offer, beyond your current understanding, a trajectory to finding additional ideas, added perspective, and solutions to propel next steps.

An intent of Bridging Engagement Gaps is to fuel a personal understanding of engagement as well as drive discussions and team meetings toward more meaningful and fruitful conclusions.

In the final stages of production, I remembered Mortimer Adler’s essay, How to Mark a Book, in which he insists,

There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. Reading, if it is active, is thinking…, [and] the marked book is usually the thought-through book. And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author.⁵

With Adler’s how in mind, beyond the scores of exploratory questions that are posed throughout, I thought I should invite the reader to actively participate, so I chose to leave the Index incomplete and open-ended to invite you to bridge the gap between writer and reader. Use the empty space to map the page numbers that most touch on your current needs and issues. Over time, as some issues are resolved and others emerge, your marks should change.

Now, if you are a die-hard anti-book-marker, that’s ok, too. Just looking at the most recurrent words listed in the index, I hope, is interesting in and of itself.

Disengagement may well be the longest continuing human capital management issue facing business and industry, education, and public organizations. The debilitating effects of disengagement include unnecessary and costly failures and turnover, conscious and unconscious sabotage, lack of productivity, and declining health and well-being. This book alone cannot solve the idiosyncratic issues any particular workplace may be experiencing, but it does provide core strategies and probes deeper to unearth solutions to those problems.

I am thankful and gratified that this resource has reached your hands! Hearing about your progress and to initiate a conversation with you is perhaps the best measure of the book’s intent. Please connect by sending your thoughts and stories to [e-mail].

Chapter 1

Work

For constructivists, the moral response is a caring response…. The only good opinion is a humanistic one, one that shows an immense respect for the world and the people in it and for those you are going to affect. –Mary Field Belenky, et. al., Women’s Ways of Knowing.

~

In the seminal 1974 oral history Working: People Talk about What They Do