Whether you put a lot of stock into the Gallup Q12 or not, it’s undeniable that the Gallup Q12 and the other reputable employee engagement surveys highlight the critical needs of your employees.
For reference, here are the 12 questions that make up the well-researched Gallup Q12 engagement survey:
Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?
As you review those key questions, what stands out? As I reflected on them, I noticed two important things that struck me to the core:
1) How deeply relational most of the questions are. In fact, I would submit to you that questions 4-12 are all require authentic, trusted relationships to foster a positive answer to any of them.
2) How impossible it feels to “operationalize” meeting these 12, critical employee needs consistently and at scale for distributed frontline associates in most businesses.
So what? Do we throw up our hands into the air and give up? Or is there an actual way to meet those employee needs, building the sort of authentic, trusted relationship foundation required?
Great news, friend. There’s a way.
Throughout my research and time spent working with hundreds of frontline organizations over many years, I’ve summarized the content of the Gallup Q12 and other engagement tools into five major themes. We will explore these five themes in coming weeks and months together in future blogs, and if you put them into action to create a more engaged and retained workforce, I believe that you will see incredible results in your organization.
These five themes are visible in the image below, and each theme has four key conversations or “points” to explore with your frontline associates over the course of five weeks.
You might be quick with your math and see that this equals 20 key conversations to have…daunting!
When would you have these conversations?
What questions would you ask?
How long will it take?
What outcomes would you be seeking?
I think you’ll find, as we explore these themes in the forthcoming posts, that it all comes down to empowering your location managers to lead these transformational conversations with your frontline employees within the context of their existing daily team huddles or “pre-service” meetings. As your managers briefly discuss each one of these themes with your associates, you will improve engagement, unlock discretionary effort, build trust, cultivate stronger relationships, and ultimately improve retention and your business results.
And isn’t that what we all want and need in the industry right now?
A while back, I wrote a blog about the importance of ensuring that your associates understand, fully embrace, and support the purpose of your business, and three practical steps you should consider in defining, communicating, and reinforcing that purpose. If you haven’t read that blog yet, do so here. It’s actually the first sub-point of the first theme of “Purpose” that you can explore with your frontline teams.
A key component missing from that post were the questions to ask as you engage your frontline associates in the pursuit of helping them understand your company purpose. So, I wanted to provide you a one-pager (below) to help spur on your great discussions.
To be clear, you don’t need to ask every question here. The point is to unlock authentic, transformational, relationship-building conversation between managers and their teams, and teammates and their peers.
As you reflect on the highly relational elements of the Gallup Q12 and other engagement surveys, you will see the supreme relevance of having this sort of dialogue. It’s not just about the questions or the answers…it’s about the process. Simply having the conversation (and it going “well”) can lead to a positive impact in work environment all by itself.
If you find this valuable and want to learn more, please check back for future blog posts, or, if you want to “fast forward”, reach out to me at joel@unisyn.io and I’ll send you every leadership guide for free in a snazzy to start making great impacts to your frontline team culture right away.
Also, if you’d like to learn how a proven combination of technology enablement and world-class team huddles can transform your service business and provide you key behavioral and employee sentiment insights, I’d love to speak with you and your leadership team about the transformational things Unisyn can do for your organization. Or, if you just want to shoot the breeze and maybe get some more good ideas to set you on your way, I’m happy to do that any time as well.
Good luck out there. I’ll talk to you soon in the next post, which will be all about sharing your own, personal purpose with your associates to build depth and trust with them.
Joel Onyshuk
Co-founder
Unisyn: Your Best Team Everywhere
Unisyn, Inc., the Service Industry solution to unlocking frontline leadership consistency and frontline associate engagement, received the award for "Most Innovative or Forward-Thinking Product/Service" from SHFM. Judges were a panel of operators as well as conference attendees who voted on a number of innovations and solutions, including those promoted by PepsiCo, Coca-Cola North America, Ecolab, Impossible Foods, Keurig Dr. Pepper, Panasonic, Red Bull North America, and many other household names.
Based in Tampa, FL., Unisyn's mission is to "Put your best team everywhere" by empowering your frontline teams to bring your mission to life everywhere and every day. According to Gallup, 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager, and Unisyn is the first and only solution to address this unique, global challenge for Service Industry companies with distributed teams.
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