Rodd Wagner's Blog

What’s wrong with calling employees a company’s greatest asset? How is reciprocity at the heart of the contract between employers and employees? What are the 12 aspects most important to unleashing employee performance? And what is the future of happiness on the job?

I recently joined eX Podcast host Stephan Vincent to talk about these topics. Stephan and I met when we both spoke last fall at the eX Summit in the Twin Cities. The conversation continued during a group dinner that evening and continued further during our interview, which is now available here: http://expodcast.com/ep-30-the-12-rules-of-employee-engagement/

Our conversation was wide-ranging, from companies getting the engagement they deserve to the symbolism of Maine lobster. Among the cool aspects of Stephan’s podcast is that he takes the tools and perspectives traditionally used for keeping customers connected and imagines them deployed for the benefit of employees. In these days when too many leaders blame the employees if they’re not sufficiently “engaged,” an “employee experience” view is fresh air.

I recommend you not only catch this latest episode, but subscribe to the whole podcast.

We all know – or knew – one of these people. We can’t prove the job killed him or her, but there were all the signs. While we can never say precisely that a given person’s job contributed to his or her stroke or heart attack, it is indisputable that long or stressful jobs contribute to many people’s strokes and heart attacks. Smart employees recognize their mortality and set limits. Smart leaders make sure their employees leave work on time. It’s the topic of my latest Forbes column.

Who owns the notes you take at work? The issue might be less trivial than you think, bearing on your work-life balance, what your company buys and doesn’t buy with your paycheck, and whether they have claim for any thinking you do about their line of business. And for the 43% of U.S. workers who are either neutral or negative on their jobs allowing them to balance priorities at work and in their personal lives, forcing each into its own notebook might get both the sustained attention they deserve. My latest Forbes column considers the issue.

You’ve no doubt heard about the “Marshmallow Test,” the experiment in which children are given one marshmallow and told if they wait 15 minutes without eating it, they will get a second one. The test supposedly says a lot about the kid’s wiring and his or her future prospects.

But does it? A different spin on the experiment broadens the picture and provides the perfect metaphor for how people are now sizing up their employers. It’s the topic of my latest Forbes column.

Happy National Doughnut Day! You’d be healthier if you didn’t eat one, but for deep evolutionary reasons, your brain is wired to make you eat it anyway. There’s a lesson in that.

In my latest Forbes column, I look at the simplest example of behavioral economics and discuss briefly the implications for leading. The lesson for leaders and front-line managers is to build their employee value propositions around, not against, human nature.

A bit of a personal note on my latest Forbes column, if I might. I worked briefly for IBM on a loading dock. As a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, I covered way too many (one is too many) workplace fatalities. One of my best friends from childhood died six summers ago in a logging accident. There are few things in the field of employee research about which I feel more passionately than worker safety. This is why I wrote today’s column on the current evidence connecting morale with those sometimes split-second realizations and decisions that save a life. More than usual, I hope the piece proves useful.

There are a lot of Chicken Littles running around the employee engagement field these days. But the attitudinal sky is not falling. The latest BI WORLDWIDE study finds most people like their jobs and reciprocate what their employers do for them with good work. A little myth-busting and an explanation of real patterns is the subject of my latest Forbes column.

I recently had the privilege of kicking around ideas with Kelly Leonard on his WGN broadcast “Getting to Yes, And . . .” We talked about what makes an employer cool, what happens if fear is unleashed inside a company, and why people have Stone Age reactions to modern challenges.

If your commute is 36 minutes and 21 seconds, this one’s for you. The podcast can be found here.

Minnesota high school hockey culture is, at times, brutal. What’s euphemistically called “chirping” is variously rude, scatological, misogynistic, thin-skinned, and profane. The f-word is inserted by some on the ice and in tweets as adjective, verb, and noun. Insulting the other teams’ skill, appearance, girlfriends, economic status, masculinity, or parentage is de rigueur. Yet one can’t judge these 16-to-18-year-olds too harshly; there’s a lot of that snottiness going around from people old enough to know better.

So it was a pleasant surprise to witness what happened after the state championship game last weekend. The story is my latest column for Forbes.

The women of Hidden Figures wrote reports for NASA, but got no credit. Barbara Feinman Todd wrote 75 percent of It Takes a Village for Hillary Clinton, but got no credit. The names of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman mysteriously vanished from their 1999 bestseller, First Break All the Rules. Why do we countenance the deception of “alternative authorship?” It’s the topic of my latest column for Forbes.