Emotional employee engagement – Gallup Engagement Index

For more than 13 years Gallup has been publishing the annual so-called Gallup Engagement Index on emotional employee engagement. Gallup was able to demonstrate that the productivity of a company can be increased verifiably and significantly by implementing corresponding measures. According to the market research institute the economic costs of 'inner resignation' amount to between 98.5 and 118.4 billion Euros per year. Consequently it is all the more important to look at the new results in detail.

End of March 2014 it was that time of year again: the results of the representative survey on emotional engagement in the Federal Republic of Germany were published.

The level of emotional engagement of employees with their company is measured via Gallup's twelve statements on the workplace and the environment. Depending on the degree of agreement on the respective statements it is possible to group the 1,368 randomly selected employees into the different categories "actively disengaged/without emotional engagement", "not engaged/low emotional engagement" and "engaged/high emotional engagement".

For this particular study, emotional engagement is defined as the extent of the employees "simply working to the rule" or displaying a passion for their daily work. The motivation and the commitment of the employees is described by means of the twelve statements on the workplace and environment and captures to what extent essential expectations and needs are met at the workplace.

According to the Gallup study a company with about 2,000 employees, for example, can reduce the costs of fluctuation by 421,000 Euros per year, if it manages to lower the share of actively disengaged employees by just 5 percentage points (from 17 to 12%) and to increase the share of engaged employees by five percentage points (from 16 to 21%). For 30,000 employees this adds up to 6.3 million Euros per year.

86% of employees with a 'high emotional engagement' with their company agreed to the statement that they enjoyed their work during the last week. In contrast, just 10% of the employees of the category "actively disengaged" agreed to the same statement.

Whilst 58% of 'actively disengaged' employees answered yes to the question: "During the last 30 days, did you feel exhausted from the stress at work?", only 29% of 'engaged' employees agreed to this statement.

A disconcerting development becomes apparent when looking at these results over the course of time. Whilst in 2012 70% of all interviewees in the former Western German states answered the forestanding question in the negative, this number decreased to 66% in 2013. According to the Gallup study health promotion programmes offered by companies are only taken up by some of the employees. 57% of the companies of the interviewees were offering health promotion programmes when the survey was conducted. With only 40% of employees confirming their use of these offers, this number is certainly increasable.

Interesting is also the rather poor rating for the superiors of 'actively disengaged' employees. If the interviewee was able to lay off his/her current superior, 41% of all 'actively disengaged' employees would do so. Of 'engaged' employees only 2% gave a corresponding answer. 45% of 'actively disengaged' interviewees stated to have thought about leaving the company due to their superior in the last 12 months ('engaged' employees: 5%).

According to the Gallup study 2012 measures to strengthen employee engagement have to be linked directly to the superior. The executive has to be aware of the effect his or her leadership style has on the employees. For that it is advisable to conduct a survey on a work group level, because this is also where potential improvement measures should be implemented. According to the publishers of the study, executives are rarely pure natural talents. Most superiors require regular feedback on the effectiveness of their leadership and their own abilities. For identifying and demonstrating potential for improvement a comparison of the own team survey results with further internal and external data is advisable.

The entire study and relevant background information is available here.

Have a great start into the week!

Best regards, the Köchling-VfU team