Note: A few months ago, a college ministry approached me for help. It wanted to inspire its people to pray more. This post is based on the advice I gave.

Let’s say you’re the director of prayer for a college ministry.

One of your goals is to motivate your people to pray more. But this isn’t easy. Everyone seems to be as busy as ever. They have endless choices for spending their time. And “praying more” doesn’t seem to be a pressing concern. To be...

As I shared in "Giving Employees A Home," only “6 in 10 U.S. employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work,” which drives disengagement in the American workforce (Gallup). Since clear expectations are critical for employees, our company has established a unique role and outcome statement for each position.

Everyone from the CEO to the newest employee can access each other’s role and outcome statements. Doing this was a big effort between employees...

I stepped into a Human Resources role at EnergyCAP, Inc. (ECI) in 2016. Since then, I’ve been interested in the subject of employee engagement. I’d read the statistics from Gallup that said only 33% of the American workforce was engaged, which meant 67% were in some way disengaged.

I wondered how our workplace would stack up to the rest of the country, so as a company we took Gallup’s Q12 engagement survey. The Q12 survey contains 12 questions, which Gallup has perfected...

Last week I taught a leadership workshop to Human Resources (HR) professionals on keys for boosting employee engagement. There were various organizations represented from landscaping to higher education to temp agencies to transportation, but despite their differences, one thing was the same—they all wanted to increase employee engagement.

Why would they want to do that? Because according to Glassdoor, organizations with engagement programs report 26% greater year-after-year revenue...

Regardless of the type of work you do, you’re expecting some things from your workplace. They may not be top of mind, but they’re there, further down, lingering deep. Or they may be top of mind, like a checklist running through your head. Either way, your expectations will find their way out and into your work, relationships, and attitude.

It would be nice to know what employees are expecting. That’s where Gallup comes in. As I shared in “The Epidemic of the...

What does it cost your organization to replace an employee? According to the Society for Human Resource Management, replacing an employee can cost 6 to 9 months of the employee's salary. The numbers can go up depending on the specific role.

For this reason, last year EnergyCAP, Inc. introduced a ten-step hiring process for open jobs. Since implementing the new process, we've seen zero percent turnover by employees. With this said, no hiring process is perfect. Even the best organizations...

We’ve written previously about employee engagement within the workplace. This reader wonders if the same principles apply to congregations: “What you’ve written about engagement...does it also apply to church members? What does engagement look like in a church?” That’s an excellent question and as a leader in a new church, a question that personally interests me.

I like to turn to Gallup for engagement questions because they’ve researched and reported on...

It has been a long-held belief that the main reason people leave their jobs is because of their managers. But a report by IBM’s Smarter Workforce Institute, which looks at data from 22,000 employees, says otherwise.

In discussing the new study, Talent Management and HR asks, “So why has this concept of employees leaving managers become so wildly accepted and popular amongst HR leaders and pros? You won’t like this answer: We [HR leaders and pros] liked using this reason for...

This is a very special time of year for our family. Tomorrow we celebrate our son Asher’s eighth birthday. But that’s not why it’s so special. We adopted Asher from the Philippines when he was four—four years ago—which means on this birthday, Asher will have lived with us longer than he has lived with anyone else.

Asher was the second child we adopted. Rex, who’s ten, came from the Philippines a few years before. And before that, my wife Colette and I had...

The Gallup Organization published its 2017 State of the American Workplace report. Gathering data from more than 195,000 employees and 31 million survey respondents, the report looks at the American workforce. It’s critical reading because it contains critical information about your life.

Did you catch that? I said it contains critical information about your life. But it’s just a work report, you say.

In his book, Work Rules!, Google’s Laszlo Bock writes, “You spend...