Gallup Employee Engagement Event

Yesterday I went to the “Gallup World Class Employee Engagement Seminar” to learn about best practices for employee engagement. You can read my previous post about the Gallup Q12 for a more detailed description of the tool.

I could wax poetic about how an engaged employee will lead to lower turnover, better business unit performance and more engaged clients. But the entire concept was best summed up by an analyst this way;

“Using the Gallup Q12 doesn’t add to the plate of busy managers it eats the lima beans”

In other words, when an employee is engaged many of the minor problems disappear. Engaged employees look for solutions, stay longer and produce more. They are also prerequisites to sustainable business growth.

The bad news is that in a typical organization, only 30% of the employees are fully engaged and roughly 20% are actively disengaged. The remainder of employees fall somewhere in the middle. Not exactly a recipe for success.

The ratio of engaged : actively disengaged employees is predictive, not only of profit/performance, but also of absenteeism, employee turnover, safety incidents, productivity and client satisfaction.

To quantify it, the average company has a ratio of 1.5 engaged employees for every 1 actively disengaged employee. A world class company has a ratio of 8:1.

When client engagement is optimized the company performs 1.7x better. When employee engagement is optimized the company performs 1.7x better. When both employee and customers are optimally engaged the company performs 2.4x better. In fact if a company is in the top 1% of each the multiplier is closer to 5.4x.

Employee and customer engagement are synergistically related rather than just additive.

The seminar itself was short (3 hours) but informative. Unfortunately, within 15minutes of arriving the hosts asked us how many people we employee. I told them 60 and they said that Gallup only dealt with companies of greater than 1,000. That pretty much ended their interest in our small company as the room (roughly 20 others) was made up of representatives from multi-national organizations. In the end, I got the distinct impression the “course” was more of a sales pitch for Gallup services* and we didn’t fit the mold.

Regardless, yesterday’s event took me well out of my managerial comfort zone and I learned several important perils. Employee satisfaction is not employee engagement and engagement is vital to productivity as well as some techniques to measure and drive engagement.

If your company is over 1,000 you may want to look at Gallup’s services. For the rest of us, the books Human Sigma or The Best of the Gallup Management Journal are good starting points for small organizations. Alternatively, there are some managerial courses provided by Gallup that are approximately $4000 pp.

*Part of Gallup’s value system is to share its’ information with leaders. This course was part of that but you could also hear musing from the staff about “teeing us up” for various services. The Gallup Q12 is also copyrighted and cannot be used without payment. It is a catch-22 since they seem to have no interest in supporting a company our size.

Measuring Happiness

"I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs" Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)

Dr. John Helliwell, a world-class economist (and fellow Canadian) was recently interviewed for the Gallup Management Journal about the relationship between trust in the work place and life satisfaction.

"Dr. Helliwell has discovered a number of factors that affect life satisfaction. Work is chief among them, says Dr. Helliwell, and trust in coworkers and management has an enormous effect. That's because trust is essential to both workplace engagement and life satisfaction in general."

Not surprisingly, life satisfaction is related to engagement in the workplace, which in turn is related to trust. Which begs the question, can trust be measured and manipulated? Can it be systematically built with the sole purpose of improving a co-workers happiness?

According to Dr. Helliwell, "economists have talked about utility; they haven't known how to measure happiness, so they've ended up using income as a substitute." Instead, employee engagement and measures of trust are a more direct and reliable method to measure happiness.

Applying those measures, Dr. Helliwell was able to find correlations between paperwork, negativity and unionization and low trust environments. He also believes when people do things together for other people (such as pro bono work) it builds satisfaction.

I'll take it a step further. I think Jack Welch knew what he was talking about when he stressed the importance of candor by management. A great leader will identify a noble goal then be open and honest with people about whether that goal is being achieved.

In terms of clinic wait times, that means focusing on the patient rather than the provider. Health care providers will go to extraordinary lengths for those in need. On the other hand, nothing will demoralize them more than selfishness or egotistical behavior on the part of their co-workers. Every clinic should take a hard look at themselves and ask exactly what is your purpose? Altruistic work is not hard to find in health care and according to Dr. Helliwell, it may be the key to employee happiness.

Employee Engagement

There is no dismissing the effect of positive feedback on employees both in the performance of a business and happiness of its' workers. Yet, of all the challenges I face in managing a practice, engaging our employees is my single greatest personal challenge. Our office has worked to provide a decent benefit package, cost-of-living increases, yearly reviews and pay raises a pleasant work environment. That is the good part; now the bad.

I recently, dove into a book by Gallup (The Best of the Gallup Management Journal 2001-2007) and read an article called Feedback for Real. Please take the time to read the article (or look at the Q12) before going on.

I consider myself a decent surgeon and a good person, but after reading that article I realize I am a crappy manager. The essence of the article, is that Gallup has proved that employee engagement is not derived by work type, reimbursement or work intensity. Rather, Gallup has found 12 elements that predict employee engagement which in turn predicts turnover, profitability and efficiency in the workplace. Many of the elements relate to management support, setting expectations and feedback.

This is where I fail personally. Although I can be a good organizer, my fuse is too short, my expectations to high and my feedback to focused on change and negativity. Luckily, I do not think I'm alone since I hear a lot of my colleagues say that human resources is the worst part of managing a clinic. Also, life is all about introspection and change; so there's hope for me yet. Each day, supervisors in a clinic need to work to provide clear direction to employees, reinforce the mission of the clinic, find good in the job that each employee is doing and provide positive feedback. It only takes a minute but it can change the work experience for everyone.

The Gallup Q12 seems like a fantastic tool for change in small clinics. It could open discussion and find paths to not only increase efficiency but employee engagement and satisfaction.

Employee Suggestions

This week I had a bit of surprise. I was giving a tour of our clinic to someone that is making his own clinic green . As I checked our office to find out how green we really are I was told that one of the clinical assistants had been leading the charge to decrease waste in the labs. It suddently dawned on me that our office does not foster an atmosphere to encourage suggestions.



On of the major corporate goals of lean and six sigma is to use the brain power that you have in the business. After looking over other blogs I came across this interview of Owen Berkeley-Hill. In it he compares the number of suggestions per year per employee at Toyota to other companies. Apparently Toyota receives 24 suggestions per year per employee. In our practice with approximately 50 employess that should garner 1200 per year (right now we're not close to that).



For those of you in primary care I'd ask you -- when was the last time you had a formal suggestion from an employee? How many do you get a year? When did you encourage and implement a change based on an employee's suggestion? For the employee's reading this blog -- how many of you could put a suggestion foward and have it acted on in a serious manner?


For those in the dental community this is Dental Assistants week. If you forget how important DA's are to the profession take another read of the Exception Dental Practice Management blog