Employee Engagement

The Gallup Organization has been able to show strong correlations between employee engagement and business results.  What is employee engagement, why should you care, how is it measured, and what can you do about it?

An engaged employee is loyal and productive.  The more engaged employees you have, the better your business results are likely to be, according to Gallup's research.

In First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman described the research that led to this conclusion.  Gallup conducted focus groups of employees from productive operations, developed extensive surveys based on those focus groups, and then analyzed the surveys for links to business outcomes.  Gallup then tested hundreds of questions, finally settling on twelve that reliably correlate with strong performance in productivity, profitability, employee retention or customer satisfaction.

Gallup administers the twelve questions (they call the set of questions "Q12") to nearly five million people each year.  Here are the questions they ask (posed as statements with which the respondents agree or disagree):

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission/purpose of the company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My co-workers are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
12. In the last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

How do you use these questions?  One way is to engage Gallup Consulting to administer and analyze the survey, and to help you with actions to increase employee engagement.  Another way is to ask the questions yourself and then work with your employees to make things better.  In either case, the real gain comes from deciding together how to improve workplace engagement and then from taking action together.

Don't try to raise the scores on all 12 questions at once.  Start with the lower numbered questions first and only work on a couple at a time.  And don't devise improvement plans alone in your office.  Bring the team together and ask them, "How can we get more clarity on expectations?" or, "What would it take for you to answer "strongly agree" on Question 2?"  Agree on a plan and then make it happen.  Measure again a year or so down the road and then start the planning process all over again.

In my next post I will cover a new book, Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without which sheds more light on question 10 (I have a best friend at work).