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excerpted from The Power of Thanks by eric Mosley & Derek Irvine, McGraw hill 2015

1Engagement at work is the willingness to give discretionary e� ort to a job. It means voluntarily doing more than the minimum. It is an attitude con� rmed by behavior. An engaged employee is aligned to strategy and committed to delivering on his or her goals as well as the strategic goals of the company. The connection between engagement and higher performance is obvious and is well established in nationwide and global studies.

Engagement at work is rare, however, and that lack of engagement costs hundreds of billions. Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” report from June 2013 reported the baleful e� ect of the nonengaged workforce:

“The vast majority of U.S. workers, 70%, are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ at work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplace and are less likely to be productive. Actively disengaged employees alone cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity, and are more likely than engaged employees to steal from their companies, negatively in� uence their coworkers, miss workdays, and drive customers away.”

In the new book, The Power of Thanks, authors Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine unpack engagement into four component parts: enablement, energy, empowerment and encouragement. They argue that each of these four conditions is necessary to have truly engaged employees.

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1 Enablement is a subjective experience because the employee sees himself in a context. For example: Say I’m an auditor and I want a desktop calculator because I work better that way. I can tap out accurate calculations without having to look at the specialized keyboard. My boss says, “You have a calculator on the computer, just use that.” But that’s not how I work best—I have to tap out the numbers along the top of my large computer keyboard. That might only make a few seconds of di� erence in e� ciency and oc-casional inaccuracy, but it makes a big di� erence in my comfort and sense of e� cacy. Furthermore, the boss has just told me that an inexpensive improvement to my productivity isn’t worthwhile. What does that say about my value?

Enablement

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3We believe empowerment and encouragement are additional factors that nurture and sustain engagement over the long run. Empowerment transfers the power to achieve results from the manager to the employee. Once enabled with the right resourc-es, an employee must be empowered to take responsibility, to make decisions, and to act with those resources. Empower-ment is the foundation of accountability— that is, delivering on commitments. Engaged and productive employees are by de� nition empowered to achieve results.

Empowerment

Energy is also a subjective experience a� ected by work context. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy note that when organizations demand high-er performance from their employees, those workers typically put in more hours at work. Schwartz and McCarthy say this is the wrong focus.

Instead, the authors recommend that companies support a focus on managing each employee’s physical, emotional, and spiritual energy. Their case studies show employees who manage energy well demonstrate signi� cant improvements in performance.

Energy

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3Great job on the project, today!

NEW MEssAGE FROM MANAGER:

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4 Encouragement is another of those human factors that go far in making an engaged workforce. At its simplest, encouragement costs practically nothing—a word, a bit of recognition, a gesture of appreciation or gratitude—yet it literally “gives courage” to an employee to act again, to go beyond the minimum, to break out of the sterile job requirements, to take risks, and to make the extra e� ort that de� nes engagement in the � rst place.

Thanks, appreciation, gratitude, recognition, well-being, and engagement are qualities of a healthy and well-functioning workplace. Every business leader can want the results that derive from these competitive advantages over lesser workplaces, but not every business leader succeeds in creating them.

Encouragement

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Nicewor k!