There have been many studies on the effect that employee engagement has on the financial performance of a company. Actively engaged employees that buy into the mission and vision of a company, as well as the value proposition offered, can have profound effects on productivity, loyalty and sales growth. While there are many employee satisfaction and evaluation tools out there, the one that we utilize to measure employee engagement and direct feedback on performance is the Gallup Q12 survey.
Developed more than a decade ago, the Q12 survey asks questions regarding basic workplace needs, management support, teamwork and professional growth. Each question is rated on a five-point scale, responses are measured in an index and employees are placed into one of three categories:
- Engaged employees work with passion and feel a strong connection to the organization. They work hard to innovate and improve.
- Not-Engaged employees do all the work expected of them but put in no extra effort.
- Actively Disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy, but spread their unhappiness to other staff.
In the U.S., engaged employees account for just 28% of the work force, not-engaged employees make up 54% and actively disengaged comprise 17%.
If you’re like me, these numbers are staggering reminders we have a long way to go to uplift and motivate our team’s participation and performance. As leaders it makes sense to address the issues that boost worker engagement, however, many times we receive feedback from our employees during evaluations, recognize their comments but do very little about it from a position of changing the status quo. This can lead to an even greater sense of frustration with disastrous long-term effects.
The reason we decided to implement this survey was its ability to clearly define actionable items from managers and subordinates to change attitude, conduct, policy and processes for the better. It’s an incredible method to galvanize the team on making a difference to the culture of our agency.
Although there are skeptics out there that have criticized the survey, we’ve based our evaluation and improvement process on input to the following questions:
- 1. I know what is expected of me at work.
- 2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job 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 opinion seems to count.
- 8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
- 9. My associates or fellow employees 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. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.
The results of our responses shed new and refreshing light on what really matters to our team. What we previously viewed as key indicators, actually mattered very little. The focus for us as an agency now is to address the issues that matter and develop a plan of attack that is communicated consistently across the board.
While I won’t divulge what our ratios were between the engaged, not-engaged and actively disengaged categories, I can say with confidence that we are growing the number of engaged employees every day and having fun seeing the production increase!
Tags: work
