Employee engagement articles often focus on what a company could/should do to better engage its employees. However, that only considers half of the equation. Employees must take responsibility for their own engagement. As January comes to a close, most people have long forgotten their New Year’s Resolutions. Personally, I skip the resolutions in order to focus on the goals I set for myself. Below, you will learn how to track your engagement and illustrate your own development activities and accomplishments.
Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become. – Jim Rohn
For years, I have used a simple list to proactively manage my career. I keep a list my activities and accomplishments noting the dates of completion and any other relevant information that adds color to the accomplishment. This on-going list serves as a reminder of what was achieved and can be particularly helpful in performance reviews since neither you nor your manager will be able to remember everything that was accomplished.
In 2013, I established a concurrent list to account for everything I do outside of my consulting work. While I could track them together, I chose to keep the career list separate from my outside of work list in order to make career and performance discussions easier. I modified the career spreadsheet to track my activities outside of work. Below is a sample of headings I use along with their dropdowns.
After reviewing the information I collected in 2013, I decided to create an infographic or “a visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data.”1 The result was a means to illustrate my activities outside of consulting: Agent In Engagement 2013: A Year In Review. I found the exercise very enlightening because it allowed me to get an overview of how I spent my time. Reference: Engaging Through the Infographic (2/26/2014)
For 2014, I completed the same exercise and created a new infographic: Agent In Engagement 2014: A Year In Review.
Again, this overview allows me to evaluate whether the time spent was focused on achieving the goals I had set for myself and allows me to better focus on what is needed in 2015. Given the number of activities and accomplishments I recorded, I was forced to prioritize the items to include. For example, I attended over 150 hours of webinars on professional development topics and was not able to include that as a section given the limited space available.
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” ― H. James Harrington, international performance improvement guru.
I encourage you to take responsibility for your own engagement. Track your activities and monitor how they align with your work and personal goals. Then, take it one step further and create an infographic. It is a quick and fun way to represent who you are and what you have accomplished.
What do you think about using an infographic to tell your story? How do you spend your time away from work? Is it intentional or unplanned?
1 “infographic.” OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford, 2014. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
Let’s Engage!
I’m Agent in Engagement Simpson…Gregory F Simpson.
I’m excited about this opportunity to connect with fellow “Agents.” Subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive the latest updates and/or register to comment on posts.
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P.S. First time here? Welcome to the Agent In Engagement site. Thanks for taking the time to stop by! I hope you’ll explore the rest of the site. Let me know what employee engagement topics interest you.
Other recent Agent in Engagement articles by Gregory F Simpson:
- Employee Engagement Briefing for Week of January 19 – 23, 2014
- Employee Engagement Quotes from January 12 – 16, 2015
- Top Employee Engagement Infographics of 2014
- The Favorite Employee Engagement Books I Read In 2014
- Most Viewed Agent In Engagement Posts 2014
- Infographic – The 10 Tenets of Better Engaged Employees
