Like many of the crazies here at Fistful of Talent, I have opted into Twitter madness.  So now I micro-blog to tell the world how I am feeling and what I am doing on a given day.   Lucky you…

What I’ve already found is that Twitter’s a pretty good place to look for brief affirmations that what you believe is true.  Case in point, the topic of employee engagement.  I found the following post, while randomly trolling the list of people our Fistful team is following on Twitter:

"Re-engineering my job is exciting. Having to keep doing the soul-killing parts of the job because they’re mandatory, not so much. 02:54 PM April 24, 2008 from iTweet "

Why is that significant to me?  Simple.  It underscores how difficult it is to engage employees in today’s workplace.  The author of that tweet told me a couple of things:

1.  I believe, based on the profile, the author is a member of Gen Y.  Not important, but good background to have. 

2.  It seems like she has some autonomy where she works, because she feels like she has the latitude to re-engineer her job.  That’s a plus for the employer in question, and should retain her longer than she would otherwise be compelled to stick around…

3.  The mandatory parts of her job are soul-crushing, but she understands she can’t get rid of them completely.  Seems like most jobs in that regard.

So how do you turn this employee into a fully engaged machine?  I think the company is already moving in that direction by allowing her to look at her job and figure out better ways to get the work done.  It seems like that would give her a lot of latitude to chase the things she enjoys, which is great.

The big part for me is the soul-crushing part.  What’s the best way to encourage the person in question to figure out better ways to be more efficient in those areas?   If you don’t coach and explore that with your team, it seems like this is where engagement can get derailed.

Twitter’s like looking at the matrix.  You see the code trolling down the screen – then suddenly you see something that connects you to a thought… 

Kris Dunn

Kris Dunn is a Partner and CHRO at Kinetix, a national RPO firm for growth companies headquartered in Atlanta. He’s also the founder Fistful of Talent (founded in 2008) and The HR Capitalist (2007) – and has written over 70 feature columns at Workforce Management magazine. Prior to his investment at Kinetix, Kris served in HR leadership roles at DAXKO, Charter and Cingular. In his spare time, KD hits the road as a speaker and gives the world what it needs – pop culture references linked to Human Capital street smarts.

www.hrcapitalist.com/