Gallup Poll Finds Employee Engagement Nearing All Time Lows.

A recent Gallup Poll survey on employee engagement in the workplace produced some rather disturbing results.

The survey found that the majority of American workers across the board are not engaged in their jobs; more than two thirds of workers or 71%  are not engaged in their current positions. Further 19% of the workforce is “actively disengaged.” These findings are consistent across most demographics, with the exception being those workers aged 65 or older who expressed more job engagement than any other segment. Income and gender had little effect on the statistics; however, workers with high school education or less ranked 6% to 7% higher in terms of engagement than their more educated counterparts.

The complete Gallup Poll results provide more details that paint a pretty grim picture about the state of job satisfaction in the United States.

Transform Employees To Advocates.

By Rob Markey who is co-author, with Fred Reichheld, of the book: The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World, just published by HBR Press. He is a partner in Bain & Company’s New York office and head of the firm’s global Customer Strategy and Marketing practice.

Employee happiness is becoming a hot topic among CEOs and in boardrooms, and it’s about time. The current issue ofHarvard Business Review, which includes a series of articles focused on employee happiness, is just one more sign of the growing recognition that happy, engaged employees are more productive and generate better outcomes for their companies.

But there’s also a risk in all this attention to “happiness.” Happiness for its own sake is not the right outcome to seek. If you want happy employees, you can just pay them more. You can give them more time off. You can give them free lunches by celebrity chefs. Only a few of the things that make employees “happy,” however, result in real, sustained benefit for the company. As Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath note in one of the recent HBR articles, “It’s not aboutcontentment, which connotes a degree of complacency.”

My colleagues and I agree with that. We have been studying the links between employee engagement and customer loyalty for a few years now, and we’ve found that the only route to employee happiness that also benefits shareholders is through a sense of fulfillment resulting from an important job done well. We should aspire not just to make employees “happy,” but to do so by helping them achieve great things. In short, we should earn our employees’ passionate advocacy for the company’s mission and success by helping them earn the passionate advocacy of customers.

That’s an ambitious goal, of course. And it necessarily links employee engagement to customer outcomes, the ultimate source of a company’s success. Most companies’ approaches to employee engagement fail to achieve the right sort of engagement. Here’s some of what’s needed:

1. True ownership by line managers. Most large companies depend on HR to measure and manage employee engagement. HR collects the feedback, analyzes it, and then “cascades” it through the organization, beginning with the CEO and then at progressive levels down to the front line, along with recommendations for improvement. But this keeps control, ownership, and responsibility firmly in the hands of a central team.

Real engagement — passionate advocacy — comes from making customers’ lives richer, and there isn’t much that HR alone can do to help employees achieve that. So Apple stores, JetBlue Airways, and others deliver employee survey results directly to operating managers, who can then sponsor shop-floor change initiatives. Perhaps more important, they feel full ownership of the results and for making progress. At Apple, for instance, employee focus groups identify key themes and issues from the surveys; employee teams then help develop solutions, which they present to store management. By the time the next survey comes around, managers can see whether the solutions have had the desired effects.

2. Simpler measurement. Most companies gauge employee satisfaction through the time-honored annual survey, managed centrally and comprising a huge number of questions. They often result in tremendously detailed reports across a large number of metrics. But many companies are taking a page from the Net Promoter playbook: They survey employees more often, ask just a few simple questions, and simplify the reporting. How likely would you be to recommend this company to a friend as a place to work? How likely would you be to recommend the company’s products or services to a potential customer? What’s the primary reason for your response? These companies allow employees to use their own words to identify opportunities and issues. The feedback can be difficult to hear — employees tend to be tough graders. But it can be much more powerful as a motivation to take action.

3. Direct feedback from customers. The most important step, of course, is providing a steady stream of feedback from customers and then “closing the loop” quickly by sharing it directly with employees in its most raw form. When frontline employees and managers hear directly from customers — when they see how customers scored their experience, when they hear what went right and wrong in the customer’s own words — the effect is dramatic. Applause in the form of positive feedback inspires them to keep up the good work. Criticism often inspires employees to improve their performance on their own or to seek additional coaching so they can do better next time.

And it isn’t just customer-facing personnel who can learn from customer reactions. Logitech, for instance, compiles Net Promoter scores for each of its products and ensures that the engineering teams responsible for each one see and hear what customers think. When one new keyboard got negative reviews, the company was able to identify the problems and quickly bring out an improved model.

Loyal, passionate employees bring a company as much benefit as loyal, passionate customers. They stay longer, work harder, work more creatively, and find ways to go the extra mile. They bring you more great employees. And that spreads even more happiness — happiness for employees, for customers, and for shareholders.

Modern Survey: Employee Engagement Hits New Lows.

Modern Survey‘s recent study of employee engagementlevels in the U.S. workforce has unveiled the somewhat disturbing reality that even while employee engagement is sinking to new lows only 21% of workers report that they are seeking new employment opportunities.

Conducted in September 2011, the most recent iteration of Modern Survey’s bi-annual study found that 70% of employees are now either disengaged or under engaged at their job — a record high number since Modern Survey began tracking these numbers in 2007 before therecession started. Additionally, the number of fully engaged employees has dropped to a record low of just 8%. Compared to one year ago when 15% of the workforce was fully engaged, the most recent data demonstrates a profound deterioration in the number of workers who are fully committed to their work and to their organization.

Shockingly, while 70% of workers are disengaged or under engaged, approximately one fifth of workers reported that they are currently looking for a new job at a different organization — a percentage which is remarkably consistent across nearly all captured demographics, including job level, pay basis (salaried vs. hourly) and company size.

The engagement components which have seen the furthest erosion in the past year include “discretionary effort,” down ten percentage points from 58% favorable in August 2010 to 48% favorable in September 2011, and “belief in the future of the organization,” which has tumbled most severely from 48% favorable in 2010 to just 34% in the most recent study.

Coinciding with the drop in employees’ belief in the future of their organization, the survey items, “I have confidence in the future of my company/organization” and “My company/organization is headed in the right direction,” proved to be the most highly associated with individual respondents’ engagement levels. This finding re-affirms similar results from February 2011 which demonstrated faith in the overall health and direction of the organization has leapt up to become the new top predictor of employee engagement, replacing predictors like recognition/appreciation, personal accomplishment and career development.  Read more of the release here.