What Managers Must Know from the Gallup

Employee Engagement Survey

Every year, the Gallup Employee Engagement survey reveals insightful
findings at a scale few can achieve. It helps inform leaders, managers,
and HR departments what’s going on at a meta level across America
when it comes to employee trends in engagement, motivation, and
interests. This year’s report focused in particular on managers and is a
must read for anyone looking to keep their teams motivated and
engaged.

There’s a lot in the 56-page “State of the American Manager”

report and below we break down the biggest takeaways every manager
must know.

What managers must know from

Gallup’s Employee Engagement study,
“The State of the American Manager”
As a manager, you do the best you can to lead your team. Often you’re
teaching yourself as you go and adding skills by trial and error. You
hope the things you do make things better, but you don’t always know
and it’s hard to track the second-order effects.

Luckily, Gallup has access to responses of millions of employees in the

US and beyond who have taken their surveys. This gives them a
perspective and data set that provides insights into the cause and
effect of many of those ideas we all experiment with our trivial sample
size of just a few team members.

Key stats from “The State of the American Manager”

1) Gallup employee engagement stats show neither
employees nor managers are engaged.
 Only 30% of employees are engaged at work.
 Only 35% of managers are engaged at work.
Put 10 people in a room and chances are 7 of them aren’t happy to go
to work in the morning. I’m depressed just thinking about that…

2) …and managers are to blame for the low engagement.

 The manager accounts for at least 70% of the variance in employee
engagement.
 50% of Americans have left a job to “get away from their manager at some
point in their career.”

The old adage holds true: People don’t leave companies, they leave
managers.

This shouldn’t be surprising, though.

As a manager, you decide what someone works on, have the power to
fix problems they’re dealing with (or ignore them), decide how (or if)
their career progresses, and are their main point of contact with
company leadership. Being a manager impacts every aspect of their
team members’s work lives.

3) Gallup employee engagement ties to real measures of

success for your team.

This chart shows how being engaged touches every aspect of being an
employee:
I don’t know any manager that wouldn’t want people to come to work
more often, reduce turnover, have fewer things stolen from the
business, improve quality, and reduce safety issues…all while seeing a
boost in customer satisfaction, productivity, and profit. Sounds great,
right?

This is all fine and shows that there’s both a problem, and plenty of
good reason to do something about it, but what’s more important is
how you can actually improve employee engagement.

How you can improve your company’s employee

engagement
1) Start at the top of your organization and work your
way down.
One of the most fascinating discoveries Gallup shared was
the Cascade Effect, which they define as, “employees’ engagement is
directly influenced by their managers’ engagement — whose
engagement is directly influenced by their managers’ engagement.”
On the surface, this may feel like an obvious realization. Of course the
attitude and engagement of a leader affects those under them. But
think hard about it at your own company. Think about Larry in
engineering who is a tyrant to his team or Susan who looks like she
never wants to be there. Are you really surprised their teams have high
turnover and low morale? Probably not, but do you do anything about
it?

Great company culture comes from setting a good example, and it

starts with you. You can immediately start improving engagement on
your team by being engaged yourself. Remember, a manager
contributes to 70% of a person’s variance in their engagement.

If you have an engagement problem at your company, take a hard look

at what leadership and managers are doing, and ask yourself how you
all could be better leaders.

2) Take the time to build rapport with your direct

reports.
How well do you know your team? Do you know what motivates them?
Do you keep them at arm’s length or do you know what’s most
important to them personally?
It turns out, being an empathetic manager that is willing to get to
know their people beyond work have more engaged teams; as
important, if you really don’t build that rapport and connection,
there’s almost a zero chance anyone on your team is engaged:

Gallup reminds us in their report something that’s easy to forget:

“…employees are people first, and they have an intrinsic need for bonding
that does not automatically turn itself off between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and
5:00 p.m.

The best managers can understand and relate to their team members’
inherently human motivations.”

This is where the power of one on ones come in. A private meeting
between you and your team member is the perfect time to build
rapport and talk through issues and feedback no matter if they’re
related to work or not.

If you don’t currently have a lot of rapport with your team, consider
using some of these one on one questions to spark some relationship-
building conversation, and give an app like Lighthouse a try to help
you to better manage your team.
3) Tap the strengths of your people in their daily work.
Do your team members have the chance to do their best work each
day? Do you leverage everyone’s strengths or randomly assign work?
Do you know what the strengths are for each person on your team?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions then consider these

stats from Gallup:

“Employees who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be
engaged at work.”
“When managers focus on employees’ strengths, 61% of workers are
engaged and only 1% are actively disengaged“
“When employees use their strengths, they are more engaged, perform better
and are less likely to leave their company.”

And when measured against Gallup’s standard engagement scores,

focusing on strengths again stands out:

What’s most fascinating is how weaknesses don’t matter. In fact, not

focusing on them at all seems to have higher engagement than
anything else. Meanwhile, just as stark is just how much strengths
stand out as a driver of engagement; those that get to focus on their
strengths are massively engaged, while those that never get to work on
them are clearly disengaging en masse.
And Gallup is not alone. Ben Horowitz encourages managers to “hire
for strength, not lack of weakness” and Deloitte recently reported on
their own findings on strengths:

“…almost all the variation between high- and lower-performing teams was
explained by a very small group of items. The most powerful one proved to
be “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.”

Business units whose employees chose “strongly agree” for this item were
44% more likely to earn high customer satisfaction scores, 50% more likely
to have low employee turnover, and 38% more likely to be productive.”

With all this evidence, consider taking a break to reflect on your team’s
strengths. Try to find ways to leverage them more often and give each
team member more of a chance to use their strengths every day and
further develop them.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

While following any one of the pieces of advice from our summary or
the many things in the Gallup report will improve your team, it turns
out that the sum of all the recommendations when combined is even
greater:
 Gallup calls this the “Additive
effect” because, “using them together leads to gains that more than
double the effect of using any single strategy on its own.” So while it
is a ton of work to invest in all of these things that lead to success, your
payoff will be even greater as they act as force multipliers on one
another.

Leaders, it’s on you to invest in & develop your

managers.
With all the evidence pointing to disengaged managers not doing
enough to create engaged teams of their own, it’s easy to put all the
blame on them. But the worst indictment in the whole report to me is
this:

“The majority of managers do not believe their developmental needs are

being met. Only four in 10 managers “strongly agree” with the statement,
“This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.” And
just one in three managers strongly agree with the statement, “There is
someone at work who encourages my development.”
If you do not support and develop the managers in your organization,
none of the things that lead to healthy engagement in your workforce
are likely to happen. You have to provide the training, mentoring, and
support, while also creating systems that reward the right actions by
managers.

A real, lasting competitive advantage.

Invest in your people and you may be surprised by the results. This
Gallup report shows there’s much to be gained by improving your
managers and the overall engagement in your organization. It also
shows what a competitive advantage it can be.

If only 30% of employees and 35% of managers are engaged, then any
progress by your company in these areas will make you stand out
against the competition in both your market and the jobs market.

Are you ready to invest in your people?

You can see the entire Gallup study at their site here and if you’re
looking for help for your managers leveraging one on ones to develop
their teams and build rapport, check out Lighthouse.