Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four of this blog series.

Thank you, again, for strolling through the preceding installments leading to these suggestions. Playing the numbers below is an engagement no-brainer, better odds than the lotto. The first five are general suggestions, necessary components for a cultural harvest that inspires and motivates others to succeed:

1. Assess current methodologies, and, if absent, create mechanisms to employ peer to peer and formal means of recognition. At my workplace, for instance, as part of a process improvement team, and now standing committee, we established peer to peer nominated awards: an informal bi-weekly award for esprit de corps (presented by the nominator) and a quarterly performance-driven award (presented by our department head). For each presentation, everyone gathers around.

2. Commit to more robust internal communication, such as: a) quarterly newsletters, b) annual/semi-annual general meeting (this can be electronic), and c) continuously connecting values and mission to work product.

3. Reinforce solution-centered, not problem-centered, expectations, including a) continual assessment and improvement of formal and informal communication mechanisms specific to decision-making and transmitting new information, and b) building and encouraging greater employee participation in decision-making.

4. Endeavor to know your employees and how you ascertain and assure an individual’s growth. Examine your core competency design for leadership: Are coaching, development, and succession (not to be confused with most senior crony) plans in place and in practice?

5. Support curricular development and facilitate/encourage senior executives, managers, and supervisors to incorporate meaningful communication, recognition, and demonstrated interest (work and personal) in employees.

While executives in the organization have a particularly vested interest, engagement is everyone’s business. Complainers need to bring options and change themselves rather than constantly harping about what’s wrong; otherwise, it’s entirely appropriate to stop listening to the harpies and focus on what’s really important.

Specifically:

1. Publicly share successes and wins. It’s not the pin, the watch, or the gift card that counts—it’s the story! Why am I, the person being recognized, important to the company? While each section should have its own means of recognizing specific mileposts, recognition should be public. Even better, on significant anniversaries, invite family.

2. Emotional intelligence (EI) should be a core competency for managers, supervisors, and leaders. (EI is notably a stronger indicator of overall success than tenure, technical ability, or personal ambition.)

3. Writing teachers know this: Writing “good job” on a paper is meaningless. Be specific with praise when providing formative feedback.

4. Remember, activities aren’t engagement. Most work groups have perennial activities that we incorporate into our year, but we should always look out to refresh and invite other ideas. Most importantly, being social is vastly and distinctly different from specific, purposeful recognition. Participation in activities might be one of those periodic measurements to provide a metric of climate change, but assessing and adjusting variables affecting engagement should be continual.

Finally, an authentic intent is necessary to know and grow another individual or improve the workplace. We’ve become accustomed to accepting the “I’m too busy” engagement strategy as status quo. Does getting out of the lobotomizing habit of emailing rather than actually walking into someone’s office make a difference? Substantially, yes. Our vision of expectations and enactment of vision should be higher. Mindful that everyone has a share of responsibility in a recovery from the apocalypse (the zombies too), the drive must evolve intrinsically within each person and collectively in each office. At the core of it, as succinctly stated by George A. Romero, “My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”