Measuring Employee Engagement.

 

Employee Engagement 

Employee engagement reflects the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. Employees can become engaged when their basic needs are met, and they have a chance to contribute, a sense of belonging, and opportunities to learn and grow. Gallup categorizes employees as engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged. • Engaged employees are thriving at work. They are highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. They are psychological “owners,” drive performance and innovation, and move the organization forward. • Not engaged employees are quietly quitting. They are psychologically unattached to their work and company. Because their engagement needs are not being fully met, they are putting time but not energy or passion into their work. • Actively disengaged employees are loudly quitting. They aren’t just unhappy at work. They are resentful that their needs are not being met and are acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers potentially undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

 Measuring Employee Engagement 

To determine the percentage of engaged, not engagedand actively disengaged employees, Gallup uses a proprietary formula founded on extensive research about how the engagement elements, as measured by the Gallup Q¹²® , relate to various workplace outcomes. For this reason, employee engagement is a much higher bar than merely satisfaction or metrics that combine “strongly agree” and “agree” responses into a “percent favorable” engagement index. The current standard is to ask each employee to rate the Q¹² statements using six response options, from 5 = strongly agree to 1 = strongly disagree, and the sixth response option — don’t know/does not apply — is unscored. Gallup’s proprietary formula does not require perfect agreement with all Q¹² elements for employees to be classified as engaged. 

Gallup Q¹² Items

 Q01. I know what is expected of me at work. Q02. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right. Q03. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Q04. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work. Q05. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person. Q06. There is someone at work who encourages my development. Q07. At work, my opinions seem to count. Q08. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important. Q09. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work. Q10. I have a best friend at work. Q11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress. Q12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow. 

Life Evaluation

Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index, which is included as part of the standard set of core questions on the Gallup World Poll, measures respondents’ perceptions of where they stand now and in the future. Building on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, Gallup measures life satisfaction by quantifying the difference between the best possible life and the worst possible life using a simple two-part question. Gallup asks respondents to place the status of their current and future lives on a “ladder” scale with steps numbered from zero to 10, where zero indicates the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life. Two-Part Life Evaluation Question Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (0-10) Just your best guess, on which step do you think you will stand in the future, say about five years from now? (0-10) Thriving, Struggling and Suffering Gallup classifies respondents into one of three categories of wellbeing — thriving, struggling or suffering — and determines the percentage of respondents in each category. Individuals who rate their current life at a “7” or higher AND their future life at an “8” or higher are “thriving.” Individuals are “suffering” if they rate their current AND future lives at “4” or below. All other individuals are “struggling.” Thriving: These respondents have positive views of their present life situation (7 or higher rating on best life present) and have positive views of the next five years (8 or higher rating on best life future). They report significantly fewer health problems and less worry, stress, sadness, loneliness, depression and anger. They report more hope, happiness, energy, interest and respect. Struggling: These respondents struggle in their present life situation and have uncertain or negative views about their future. They report more daily stress and worry about money than thriving respondents do. Suffering: These respondents report that their lives are miserable (4 and below rating on best life present) and have negative views of the next five years (4 and below on best life future). They are more likely to report that they lack the basics of food and shelter and more likely to have physical pain and a lot of stress, worry, sadness and anger. They have less access to health insurance and care and more than double the disease burden compared with thriving respondents. 

Daily Negative Emotions

 Gallup annually surveys around the world to determine people’s day-to-day experiences of emotions by asking if they experienced certain feelings during a lot of the previous day. This report focuses on the emotional experiences of employed adults. For details on employees’ daily feelings of stress, worry, anger, loneliness and sadness, as well as other wellbeing-related topics, view the Employee Wellbeing Workplace Indicators webpage. For information on the emotions of all adults globally, please see our most recent Gallup Global emotions report

Job Market

 As leaders seek to attract and retain talent, understanding more about employee perceptions of the job climate and why employees choose to join or leave an organization is critical. Employers can evaluate how these topics relate to their own organizational culture to create strategies for attracting top talent and keeping their star employees from being wooed away. Learn more about Gallup’s research on employee retention and attraction topics, as well as employee perceptions of their current job climate, on the Employee Retention & Attraction Workplace Indicators web page. Age, Gender, Management Level and Work Location Global and regional data are cut by age, gender and management level to provide additional insights into the reported data. Global data are also cut by work location, which is only provided for those employees working full time (30 hours or more per week). 

Gallup’s Global Indicators

 Gallup’s global indicators of workplace performance and societal health track progress on what matters most in workplaces and to societies at large. 

Calculating the Cost of Not Engaged and Actively Disengaged Employees 

Gallup estimates the annual cost of “not engaged” and “actively disengaged” employees in a three-step process. First, Gallup applies a proprietary formula to the Q¹² survey results to calculate the percentage of engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged employees. Assigning employees into these three categories is based on historical data from Gallup’s global employee database — guided by the relationship between a composite of the Q¹² engagement elements and performance outcomes. Gallup and industry experts in academia have published numerous technical studies, including many iterations of meta-analysis, substantiating the relationship between employee engagement and a variety of performance outcomes. These published meta-analytic estimates are combined to estimate the true score correlation of employee engagement and productivity. Next, widely used published statistical guides (standard utility analysis methods) are used to estimate economic value. Standard utility analysis estimates include three general inputs: 1) the predictive relationship between employee engagement and productivity 2) the standard deviation of the economic value of productivity 3) the standard score increase in the independent variable (in this case, the standard score increase in employee engagement if not engaged and actively disengaged workers were to become engaged) The standard deviation of the percent increase in output is conservatively estimated (the standard deviation as a percentage of mean output across moderate job skill levels — less skilled to semi-skilled). Each country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is divided by the total number of workers who work for an organization to yield an estimated per person worth of goods or services per worker. Applying standard utility analysis methods, Gallup researchers calculate the percentage increase in output per worker attributable to not engaged or actively disengaged workers becoming engaged. The percent increase in output is a function of the relationship between engagement and productivity and the assumed increase in standard score units in engagement. This percentage increase in output per worker, applied against the average per person GDP output figure, results in a per person gain which, multiplied by the number of workers, results in the overall estimate. These estimates are calculated for each country where data are available and then summed across countries. Multiple methods of estimating the economic value of lost productivity have resulted in similar figures in the past two decades. These cost estimates do not add together the economic value of separate worker outcomes that are related to the engagement of workers, including safety, turnover, theft and healthcare costs. Individual outcomes such as these have overlapping cost impacts — some are included in GDP and some, such as opportunity costs, are not. Therefore, the cost estimates should be considered conservative.