Employee Engagement & Productivity

Google’s 20 per cent time, Best Buy’s ROWE and Blue Shirt Initiatives, and Twitter’s Hack Week all fall into what Dan Pink (author of A Whole New Mind and Drive) calls “non-commissioned work.” Other progressive companies are catching on to the benefits of such “self-directed experimentation” – ranging from enhanced employee motivation and engagement to the creation of innovative products and processes.

Are you?

Perhaps you’re not sure what these kinds of projects might look like. So here’s a suggestion for you.

Why not encourage your employees to become authors? Of full-length nonfiction books, shorter ebooks, “manifestos”, or articles. Engage me to design a “goldilocks” initiative within your organization, “the kind [of tasks] that are neither too easy nor too hard, that deliver a delicious sense of flow,” to give your people one of the greatest gifts of all: an opportunity to insource and express their greatness.

Not convinced that this really works? Then read a few of these quotes by some of the employee contributors to Beryl Companies’ CEO Paul Spiegelman’s latest book, Smile Guide.

“We are not doing this to sell books, get famous, or make money; we wrote these words because we love this company and the people that make it great every day.” ~ Aubri Levens, Director of Executive Wrangling (aka Paul Spiegelman’s executive assistant).

How might your culture, employee engagement and innovation improve if you supported your employees to let their voice be heard?

Every project is different, depending on the size of your organization, the goal you have in mind, and your employees’ input to the overall design of the initiative. So please don’t ask me for some cookie-cutter spec, because that’s not how I work. Structured flexibility is my mantra, meaning I have a proven 7-step process that not only helps aspiring authors develop great nonfiction books, but provokes the systems thinking, better decision making, and other higher-level thinking skills that every organization needs more of in the current competitive environment.

Agreed?

So let’s talk. Do it now. Contact me today and let’s focus on the only potential competitive advantage you really have: the mental capacities and creative insights of your people.