Employee engagement has been a hot topic lately as companies look to fire up the troops and generate a positive attitude and positive results. With so many blog entries, tweets and articles popping up about employee engagement, one can’t help but ask, is this simply the latest fad? And how do I get some employee engagement in my organization? 

There’s no question about it, employee engagement is no here today, gone tomorrow fad. The Gallup Organization has shown employee engagement to be a key to success. Engaged workforces make more money, save more money, are more innovative and more productive than lesser engaged workforces. Need an example? 

• Best Buy claims than a 2% increase in employee engagement corresponds to, on average, $100,000 annual rise in store sales. 
• Campbell Soup Inc, after a devastating Gallup review, raised employee engagement scores from 62% of managers not actively engaged in their jobs to 68% actively engaged. In turn, investors enjoyed a 30% increase on their Campbell’s stock. 

If you were at SHRM in New Orleans or WorldatWork in Seattle, you may have chuckled with us while watching one of our very funny Cubicle Chronicles videos. The Red Recruiter is a fan and mentioned our videos on his blog, too. We thought that, rather than gloss over the fact that there are many people who don’t do recognition well, we would take the high road and poke fun at them. Might as well turn some negative recognition moments into positive mojo, right? 

The Cubicle Chronicles follow different recognition situations that fail to even remotely motivate or engage the recipient. Sadly, we’ve found that everyone can relate to one of these videos, and any people have experienced recognition done really, really badly at some point during their career. So why not try a different kind of recognition and see where it gets you? 

You don’t have to analyze a study on motivational theory to understand some basic principles.  Namely, people respond positively when they are acknowledged and appreciated for their efforts.  This is not limited to the workplace, but in every aspect of the human condition—from raising children to greeting strangers. 

So if everyone “knows” the importance of frequent, meaningful expressions of gratitude and praise, why don’t we practice it all the time? 

I recently read Randy Pausch’s book, The Last Lecture. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Randy Pausch, it’s no big surprise. Up until fall 2007, Randy was simply a college professor with a young family. It was his actions after he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer that made him known to the world. Even two years later, his name is still, unfortunately, relatively unknown to many. 

As his farewell at Carnegie Mellon, Randy delivered a last lecture which was video taped and later posted on You Tube. His lecture, appropriately titled “Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams,” has been viewed over 10 million times on YouTube and was later made into a book. 

At the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Annual Conference in New Orleans, we met lots of new friends. One of them was Michael Long, aka the Red Recruiter. Michael was so smitten by our positive mojo and sassy shirts, that he recently wrote a blog post about us. Read it on his blog, www.redrecruiting.com.