De’Andre

Thanks for the Welcome! Great to become a part of your tribe!

And to your comments, I can see how the Q12 could certainly be implemented by organizations as the program of the month to appear to onboard with employee engagement. And, I can appreciate your comment about how associates answer the questions so they don’t get into trouble.

As you well know, when you are working in an environment where there are low levels of trust, you are just going to play the game and lay low.

Fortunately, the people I was working with at the time took the process seriously as a method to grow and improve. We held sessions with associates to make sure they understood the questions they were going to be asked and helped them to clearly know whom they would be rating so the results could be as meaningful as possible.

And then, as we both know, if you do nothing with the results and input from the associates, it is worse than not asking them for their opinion at all. So, the follow-through process was a critical piece to the success for us. It created such unique dialogues around topics even if it was to debate the usefulness and true application of some of the questions asked in the Q12.

All-in-all for us, it was a useful tool. I learned a lot from it. I would inject a question from the Q12 into my weekly meetings with my managers to enrich the dialogue instead of our meeting being strictly about the usual information that sometimes comes off as, “What have you done for me lately?”

It is always fun to provoke thought and create meaningful dialogue. Thanks for providing this forum to do just that.

Clare

Thanks for sharing! Hope to see more of your comments.

Bret

While working for the Marriott for 4 years, they utilized the Gallup to measure employee engagement. The questions asked were the Q12 plus several questions specifically customized for the Marriott. The survey was given each Spring and Fall.

I hear what you are saying questioning the direct impact measurement of employee engagement on effectiveness and productivity. The Marriott did keep measurement statistics to show improvements. Unfortunately I do not personally have the stats to share with you.
And like any tool used, if used properly with the right spirit of intent, I believe you can impact performance results.

I developed a debriefing process for our department to gain additional insights from our associates on their responses. This process allowed us to obtain specific input especially in the categories that were considered low. We would then create action plans to work on improving in those areas and communicate the progress monthly to the associates. And, of course, the progress or lack of improvement on the topics was measured again in 6 months.

My theory is by the associates having belief and trusting that their feedback was taken seriously and their feedback caused improvement in their working conditions helped them to feel the management team invested in them by utilizing and acting on the information they shared. They were not only a part of the team, they were an integral part of helping the organization develop and grow from the inside out.

This process also created an environment where the associates could speak the truth about their reality of the situation with their bosses. And the old saying, “People don’t quit jobs, they leave bad bosses” is very true. I enjoyed facilitating these sessions and observing the relationships and lines of communication improve between managers and associates as a result of this engagement survey process. In my opinion when lines of communication are enhanced you have a better opportunity to impact and improve performance.

Thanks for the opportunity to share my observations and opinion.

Clare

I’d encourage you to get the study I reference and take a close look at it.

Thanks!

Bret

With only 245 people in this study I would be careful to recommend that others dump their Q-12 or any other measure they find useful. Even though I am not a huge fan of the Q-12, it was at least created based on responses from millions of people at work and was heavily validated over many years. Gallup has very smart people. They also found early on (Harter et al, 2002) that job satisfaction and engagement were equally capable of predicting organization performance, so I would not jump to any quick conclusions about that from this small firefighter study either.

As for your statement that “This still does not prove that a company that does a better job of engaging its employees will outperform one that does not”….well maybe this study does not, which limits its usefulness significantly, but again, I totally disagree with you that other studies have not proved this, as will Gallup, Prof. Ed Lawler and many others.

David
http://www.moraleatwork.com