Future Work
15
min read

Gallup Chief Scientist: Employee Engagement with a Sense of Purpose

Unlock the power of leadership to boost engagement and performance with Tim Reitsma and Gallup's Jim Harter.
Published:
November 28, 2024
Last updated:
December 7, 2024

Also available on:

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Today, I'm joined by Jim Harter, Chief Scientist for Workplace Management and Wellbeing at Gallup. With nearly four decades of experience, Jim shares how leadership is central to driving employee engagement and why taking that first step—no matter how small—is crucial. We also explore how tying engagement metrics to organizational performance can unlock lasting success for your team.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Leadership is Key: Employee engagement starts with strong leadership that promotes clear communication, role clarity, and accountability.
  2. Start with One Actionable Step: Improving engagement doesn’t have to be overwhelming—just start with one small, intentional action to begin the process.
  3. Tie Engagement to Performance: The most successful organizations link engagement metrics directly to performance outcomes like productivity and employee retention.
  4. Trust and Clarity Drive Engagement: Trust is foundational, and employees who have clear expectations are more likely to feel engaged and perform well.
  5. High-Performing Organizations Sustain Engagement: Top organizations maintain high engagement levels by making engagement an ongoing priority, even during challenging times.

Also available on:

Future Work - Listen on Spotify
Future Work - Listen on Apple Podcasts
Future Work - Watch on Youtube
TRANSCRIPT

Tim Reitsma: Jim, please take a moment and introduce yourself to our listeners.

Jim Harter: Great to be with you all. And thanks, Tim, for having me on; I really appreciate that. My name is Jim Harter, and I'm a Chief Scientist for workplace research at Gallup. I've been at the organization for 39 years now.

My job is to work with our team to advance our research in ways that help organizations improve over time, improve their cultures, how they pick the right people for the jobs that they're hiring for, and how they aim their culture at the right kinds of outcomes—the ones that are really going after.

There's quite a bit of data collection that goes into that. We conduct the only true global survey of the working population in the world, a representative sample of the world. We published that once a year and ongoing quarterly surveys here in the U.S. on the state of the workplace.

So a lot of data, a lot of ongoing learning, and we also have thousands of organizations in our database. And so a lot of study of what's actually happening inside organizations in addition to the broader population polls that we conduct.

Tim Reitsma: When I think of employee engagement, Gallup comes to mind right away. You think of surveys; you think of not just the survey but the data behind it.

I think what would be good for our audience for our conversation is just to level set that definition of employee engagement, because I think some people might just think, Oh, I'll just use AI tools to generate a survey, and that's engagement. We'll just measure if people are happy or not.

So from your perspective, what is employee engagement? 

Jim Harter: If you put it in a nutshell, employee engagement is the involvement and enthusiasm people have for their work in their workplace. And there are different ways of getting a good measure of employee engagement.

At Gallup, we've studied this for a long time, or work goes back into the web back decades, actually, but we formulated our tool right now that we call the Q12, and it's 12 elements that managers and employees can actually act on. And so it's a formative measure of engagement, but they're all aimed at involvement and enthusiasm. So if you really get underneath that broad definition, it's really about people knowing their roles.

People do good work. They get recognized for it. People feeling connected to the mission or purpose of the organization, feeling like their opinion actually matters in the organization, that they have a chance to do what they do best. Twelve elements like that, opportunities to develop. We've tended to use a formative measure of engagement that is actionable, and it's been applied in a lot of organizations over the decades.

It's been a tool that we've been able to link to a lot of important outcomes organizations are interested in. So, some of your audience might be familiar with a statistical technique called meta-analysis. It's really a study of a lot of studies. And we've replicated that 11 times now on that tool.

We have hundreds of other questions we ask as well. But really, what you're trying to get at with employee engagement is a high-bar metric that leads to high performance.

As we get into discussion, I guess we can compare different types of measures and which ones don't work too well and that sort of thing. But it's too frequent, I think, for organizations to set a low bar when they measure employee engagement. So you mentioned happiness, and it's certainly a good measure of employee engagement. Predict wellbeing. They lead to people having better lives in addition to being more productive.

But it's not per se happiness. It's more about the essence of involvement. I feel really involved and enthusiastic about my work, and I look forward to coming to work. As much time as we spend during our careers at work, it better be a good experience or it's really going to have a negative effect on our overall lives.

In studying these organizations, Tim, over time, what's inspiring to me is that there are some that really double or even triple the global average on employee engagement because they do some very intentional things to get there.

We can talk about that, too, if you want.

Tim Reitsma: I definitely want to hear some examples and what you're seeing through the data collection. I think what's standing out to me, Jim, is that word “action.” You've used it a couple of times. If we're going to measure something, how are you going to action that as an organization? And I really like how you said it's not just making sure people are "happy.”.

Are people connected? Do people feel like they matter? Do people feel like they're making an impact? Because when we actually have organizations that measure that and act upon that, the reward is measurable. You're going to see higher customer retention. You're going to see higher revenues. You're going to see a higher impact on the economy. 

So I think from your perspective, where are we at now in terms of employee engagements, and are we seeing any trends in the data that you've been collecting? 

Jim Harter: Yeah, it's been very interesting to look at that, and so we measured, as I mentioned earlier, both globally and in different parts of the world, and then here in the U.S. even more frequently, and we're really working hard to expand our global data collection as well.

But when we started measuring engagement globally, that was back in 2009, and it was at 12% engaged, and now it's at 23% engaged. And so if you think about that group that isn't, they're either not engaged, show up to the minimum required, not much else, don't really feel that involved, but more of a passive kind of state or actively disengaged, meaning that they're, they have some very negative emotions associated with their work and workplace, they probably have a manager they don't like too well.

But those two categories, so that 7% that are either not engaged or actively disengaged, your cost and the global economy, about $8 or $9 trillion in lost productivity. So there are some real opportunities there. Then you take it down to the company level; you can see sizable impacts there as well.

So, we've seen improvement globally; it remained flat last year at 23%. In the U.S., we had a decade of growth and engagement. We reached the highest level recorded in our database we've measured in the U.S. since 2000. So we've got a longer-term trend here in the U.S. When we first measured that in the twenties and now, and then it reached a high of 36% on an annual basis. And that was in 2020.

It started really dropping again, though, unfortunately. So a decade of growth, millions more people engaged in their jobs, which was very encouraging. And then COVID hit. Everything changed in terms of how we think about work.

In the latter half of 2021 is when we started to see a decline in employee engagement. It was a high of 36, and now it is, when the year ended last year, at 30. And we're at about 31 on a quarterly basis right now. So it's in that low 30 range now.

By the way, I should also note that the decline started coincided with so-called great resignation, where people started really more of a great reshuffling, where people realized through the pandemic that work can be different than what I've experienced. They looked for other work and found it usually because the market was ripe in terms of finding other work.

Turnover rates were very salient for organizations, but I also want to point out, and this is the optimism in me, that throughout these ups and downs in engagement, the highest engaged organizations, or, let's just say, the organizations with the strongest cultures, have maintained a 70% on average engaged employees.

I'm talking about our Gallup measure, which is a high bar metric. We don't add like some measures you'll see out there; we take a 1 to 5 point scale on questions and add the 4s and 5s together, and they report really high numbers, but nobody in the organization actually believes that it's happening.

You've got to have a high bar metric. And I'm not saying ours is the only one that can reach that goal. There's others out there who probably do that as well. I would just say that we've been able to install ours into organizations and know that it's not just the metric. The metric has to be tied to performance, but it's also got to be, as you mentioned, actionable in a way that organizations can get to that 70% plus.

And so there's some very intentional things organizations do to get there, but it's encouraging to me. Even during tough times with bad economies and the pandemic, the top organizations have maintained high levels of engagement. But if you look at the population in general, the drops have really been in areas like role clarity, particularly for people who are in remote jobs. We've seen some drops and feeling connected to the mission or purpose of the organization, even feeling satisfied overall with the organization.

So, Tim, I guess I get into the elements that go into engagement, which ones have dropped. It's really sending a message to me that people have progressively begun to feel less clear in their roles, and they feel less connected, called detached. I guess more detached from their organization.

Physical distance can sometimes unintentionally lead to mental distance, and I think that's occurred. It doesn't mean it has to be that way. It doesn't mean that flexible work can't be very engaging. It can be. But we've got to have the right management in place to make that work.

Tim Reitsma: I think of that number, 23%. You can look at it through the mind of a pessimist; oh, we're only there. But if you look at it from an optimistic perspective, we have a big opportunity ahead of us, and organizations should be thinking of this. Maybe they're listening right now or an HR person is going, okay, we think we have a handle on where we are and it's low. Just think of what's the opportunity. 

Where's the big driver? If we think of it as, Oh, we have 10 things we need to work on, we'll pick one or just start with one. 

Jim Harter: That's a great observation. Really just making progress on one important key element is important, and you mentioned earlier the impact that having a truly engaged workplace can have on people. It also impacts what else you can do as an organization.

So, if you think, if you get the basics, when I say basics, I'm talking about role clarity; I'm talking about getting people in the right jobs. I'm talking about just recognizing; only 10% of people say they've even been asked how they'd like to be recognized. We need to study with Workhuman on that.

But recognizing people in the way that they want to be recognized when they do good work. It's overlooked all the time. So getting those basics, what that does, Tim, is it leads to trust, and when people first come to work, you might have all kinds of perks available to them, and you might be able to track some people through perks and benefits.

In the end, they're not going to pay as much attention to your well-intended perks and benefits if their job isn't right. If it doesn't meet the expectation they had of their work when they were hired.

It is the foundational fundamentals; getting those right leads to trust. When you have trust, you can do all the other aspirational things. We know there's a mental health crisis right now, right? We know organizations can't impact employees's mental health, but you're going to have a tough time building a culture that reduces the chances of mental health issues.

If you don't have trust, and trust starts with getting work fundamentals right. And that's having good managers who continually have meaningful conversations with people at least once a week and continually think about what each person's role is and how that needs to be redefined based on the challenges the organization is facing. Confused employees are not a good thing for the employee or the organization. So those basics are just so important.

Tim Reitsma: There's so much even to unpack there, and I think we're not going to get to it all in the next bit. 

You touched on the foundation of trust, confusion, and role clarity. If somebody's listened to this if you're looking at your workforce, does everybody know? And I've said this on various shows and episodes now: if you went around to an organization, maybe you're virtual, and you just phone somebody up on your online platform and say, Do you know how your role contributes to the success of the organization?

Just ask that question and see what they answer. If the answer is actually, I don't. You've got an opportunity there, right? But it starts with that trust because somebody might not disclose that unless they have that trust. 

How are you seeing it through the data, through employee engagement? We know to drive that conversation with a manager and train that manager. When we see employee engagement and we see there's an opportunity, where do you advise organizations to start? 

Jim Harter: It really has to start with leadership, and anybody that reads our work knows that we do a lot of research on the manager because we know the manager is such an important conduit for change.

But it starts with the manager at the top, and that's your leadership, and they've got to make employee engagement something much different than just an annual survey; they've got to articulate why having an engaged workforce is important to the organization's objectives and what you're trying to get done. How it's important to the customers, how it's important to the efficiency of the organization, why it's so important to keep your star employees over time.

So you got to start with the strategy. You got to start with leadership, making it a very intentional part of the strategy. Organizations that create change over time also have really clear communication about why they're measuring what they're measuring. They can articulate how it leads to outcomes that they're trying to improve on.

They might authentically want to have a workforce that has high well-being, where people's lives are improved. They can articulate that and show how an engaged workforce is foundational to getting that done. They also have systems in place around managers at all levels so that they not only have a longer-term solution to how they pick the next manager, and it isn't just based on 10 years of being successful as an individual contributor.

It's actually based on some natural ability to manage others. You can put selection systems in place; we work on those ourselves, but scientific-based selection systems are in place so that your next manager has a higher probability of being successful in that role.

Then also, you mentioned training, Tim, but these organizations that do really a good job over time have some curriculum and a journey that managers can go on that includes a real shortcut: a strengths-based culture where each manager and their employees know their strengths, their natural strengths, and they can leverage those strengths to do what they do best on a daily basis and understand their role relative to their team members roles.

So there's some training education that can include peer feedback, some of the basics of engagement, and how it works with performance management. I think too often, and a trend that I've been seeing lately in the data is that managers are progressively less engaged in their jobs and burn out as well.

I think we're not doing a very good job with all the changes in work since the pandemic in streamlining what a manager's true job is so that engagement is not separate from performance management.

Too often, you'll have a manager who will have all these initiatives surrounding them: a wellness program over here, a performance management program over here, an engagement survey that you're supposed to get feedback on over here, and training and development over in a different bucket.

But you can pull those things together and simplify what a manager's role is and really get it down to its bare essence, which essentially is having meaningful conversations with people at least once a week if you really get it down to the bare essence.

So that manager piece. They get right. And then they've got accountability. I think you can't build a great culture without accountability. And what I mean by that is that managers know that they're responsible for engaging their teams. And in addition to all the other performance metrics that they've got in front of them. And it's a serious part of the role.

I think great cultures have high systems of accountability, and I think high performers want high accountability. So those are some of the patterns we see in these organizations that get it right, and you asked me where I would start. I guess those are the four things that start with the first step: leadership and strategy.

Tim Reitsma: I think that's where it's got to start, and then trickles all the way through the organization to that word accountability. It can be a scary word. I know people don't like it. Sometimes I don't like that. It just depends if I'm accountable for doing certain chores around the house.

No, I don't want to do that. But we have to. But it's so important to have that alignment in the organization and people know what they're responsible for and then hold that accountability. And accountability isn't a negative. It's a measure of, Hey, are things on track? Are things, are we exceeding things?

Because if we're not, we need to make some adjustments. So if we look at it through that lens versus that negative side, that negative lens, we will see engagement rise. We will see managers step up their game because it's clear. 

Jim Harter: I agree. Accountability needs to have a developmental lens in it so we can have developmental accountability, where people see how well they're doing and then they see what their future can be instead of it being, like a stick, it's got to be something that the individual invites because it makes their job better. It makes their life better. They can see how they're contributing to the organization.

Tim Reitsma: I want to pivot the conversation just a little bit, and we think of the future of work, FlexOS, specifically this season, as we're looking at it through that lens of the future. We can't predict the future. We have some data that's trending and guiding us.

But from an HR perspective, somebody who's listening to this, maybe in charge of engagement or in charge of the entire workforce, and engagement is part of the piece of their puzzle.

What do you see as a workforce changes? Adapt's AI, we're still in this remote hybrid workplace. What are the trends that you're seeing? And where do we see that we really need to focus on from an employee engagement perspective? 

Jim Harter: I think one thing that we've got to embrace, and I think a lot of organizations are some are still struggling with it, but we have to embrace the things that were learned through this big forced experiment of a pandemic where people that could work remotely suddenly it was thrust upon them.

We learned a lot about autonomy and choice. When's the right time to be together, and we've got to be very intentional. I think the future of work is going to be very intentional conversations about and not ignore the fact that in-person time still matters. If you've got people in locations where you can make that work, but it's got to be planned.

We're seeing that only less than 15% of people tell us that they've talked to their team about when they're going to be together. So, there's some low-hanging fruit there, but I think we've got to embrace the autonomy that people learned. But then at the same time, we've got to really go into the future and be very planful and intentional about when we're remote; when we're not, it doesn't mean some people won't be full-time remote; we already know it's increased a lot for people that are in remote-ready jobs; there's 30% of people.

That's a massive increase from what was before the pandemic that were fully remote, and then you got about half of people in a hybrid kind of situation. But the way that I think we can have that autonomy plus the accountability we talked about and the planfulness really does, and I probably can't say this enough.

It comes down to having managers who are highly skilled to shorten the distance between people. And have the right kind of conversation so that they're building in that autonomy and flexibility at the same time that they're building in some structures so people have some predictability around them. Only 46% of people right now clearly know what's expected of them. That's strongly agreeable on a 1 to 5-point scale.

The future has to start with basics like that. We have to make sure that we've got the right people in the manager role who have those frequent conversations. And the reason I say that is managers are the only ones in position in organizations to really get to know an individual and their work-life situation at the level; a leader can't know that about every employee.

But the work-life situation of each person gives you the capacity to honor that autonomy and at the same time build in some structure and some predictability around the job and the team. Teams work effectively together.

The big learning for me, Tim, was just asking people a simple question. I didn't know what the answer to this would be. In your best possible life, would you like your work and life to be blended, or would you like your work and life to be more separated? And the answer was 50% were, we call them blenders and splitters. The splitters are the ones that like to split work and life. Half the working population likes to split work and life. The other half likes it more blended.

If you don't know those simple things about the people that you're managing, you could easily, and we've seen this in the data, and that doesn't match reality. People feel disrespected, and when teammates don't know that about one another, they can easily offend one another, and both can be productive and engaged. So it isn't there's a perfect answer one way or the other. We just have to know and be aware.

So I think the future of work is that we're never going to be able to remove the human nature part of work. We're going to have all kinds of AI. We're going to have more and more use of, I think people become more and more used to using chatbots that'll be filled with all kinds of great information.

We're building some stuff around strengths, where you have all kinds of topics connected to individual strengths so they know how they could reduce burnout based on their strengths. All AI can help with all of those kinds of learnings and quick information that they don't have to go to their manager for.

So I think AI will increasingly play an important role. But it won't replace the human nature element that I think is going to continue to be very important as we go forward, and that has so much to do with what engages people in their work.

Tim Reitsma: What's coming up for me, Jim, is the intentionality of the role, the intentionality of the work. I think you said 46% only know what's expected of them. So we've got a long way to go, especially if we are looking at this dispersed workforce. I've been reading some predictions for the future of work.

It's going to be less about a 9 to 5, and it's going to be more about some gig work or you need somebody to come in for a specific task. So you hire them for that specific task. And that person might be working for 3 or 4 different organizations doing the same thing. Whatever that looks like, making sure people know what's expected of them, know what the role is, and then caring about the person. I think that's what I'm getting out of that as well: we talked about the mental health crisis. We've talked a little bit about burnout. We've talked about managers not necessarily knowing what is expected of them, which then could learn to burn out as well as getting that clarity. 

But what it comes down to is those, even that by that definition, engaged people in our organizations. And what does that look like for an organization that might look different to different organizations?

Is there an organization—maybe you can't say the name—that is doing it really well? Maybe it's something that you've seen or that you've seen across a few different organizations that they're just really doing it well. 

Jim Harter: It's interesting because we award organizations that we evaluate, not just the measurement, but also we do interviews with them in terms of what they're actually doing behind the scenes to improve engagement.

I think about one, an organization that's really practiced a lot of what we've been talking about here for a long time, Stryker. And they've gone through all kinds of mergers and acquisitions over time, but they've got a core; they know the importance of building the right culture, and that's how you blend cultures together, which is focused on the fundamentals of human nature.

They apply strengths in their workforce, and most of these organizations end up being Gallup. Exceptional Workplace Award winners do those kinds of things, but they are also very practiced in terms of selection. They've been doing it for decades, picking people for the right roles. Just taking jobs so seriously that you're putting science behind how you pick people for the next role, how you are equipping managers with the right tools to engage their workforce, training them effectively so that they know what the central part of their job is.

The interesting thing about the winners of that award is that they're spread across geography and industries. It isn't like one industry kind of thing. And if anybody goes to our website, gallup.com, you can see the full list of the winners over time. And it's something that we do every spring.

It shows that what we're talking about as an ideal state now—no company is ever in a perfect ideal state, right? Every one of these companies has challenges that they are going through and working on, but they can solve those challenges much more efficiently because they've got a predictable culture, not a random culture, that just these things don't just emerge and happen on their own.

So they get to that level where it's predictable. And when people show up to work, they know what the culture is going to be like, and I think in these well-run organizations, you're going to have very different models, even in terms of how they approach remote work. It comes down to the quality of the manager, and how engaged the individuals are inside an organization matters, like four times as much as where they're sitting when they're working.

So not that piece isn't important. It is, but because of the quality of the culture, you can take on a lot of different dynamics in terms of what a culture looks like and the practices you put in place inside that model; it isn't like it's a cookie-cutter kind of thing.

Tim Reitsma: It comes down to the culture, and every workplace culture is different, right? Organizations need to own who they are; the values of one organization might be wildly different than another, but you need to be grounded in that and build out of there. What are the behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable?

What clients are we going to say yes to and no to? What rituals are we going to implement in our organization to drive that engagement to care for our people? It trickles all the way down through your total rewards, retention, you name it. If you see a survey, what's a question that you've seen in surveys that just makes you cringe or shake your head and a question that we should not be asking, or we should avoid at all costs?

Jim Harter: It's a good question. The questions that aren't very good are the ones that are too general; they're not behavioral and specific and actionable. So, I think you can ask questions like, How loyal do people feel to the organization? but you can't really act on that on its own.

Some general satisfaction questions aren't very good. We've got one that's actually pretty good because we ask about extreme satisfaction, and it's not actionable in and of itself, but it tells you a lot about whether people feel connected to the culture of the organization or not.

I guess I would just think about if there's any question on a survey that your managers can't take and do something with an act on; it would be one that there's probably a lot of exam, whether people are satisfied with the parking lot or not, how they feel about the perks and benefits. And I'm not saying those things aren't important, but they're not going to keep people engaged.

So, it's really got to be about the job, and it's got to be behavioral for it to be a good question. We put our questions through quite a bit of rigor in terms of those meta-analyses and are always open to changing things. We did land on that set that has endured over time, mainly because I think they're focused on human nature. I think, in the end, engaging employees is about working on human nature and getting people what they need from a human being standpoint.

These concepts have existed probably for long periods of time before we even started measuring with surveys. Groups or tribes have probably had everybody have to have their own roles. They probably had strengths that complemented one another. They wanted to feel like they're doing something important for the rest of the tribe.

These are concepts that have existed for a long time. We've just figured out some really good ways of measuring them and giving. Managing employees, the right kind of information to create some change.

Tim Reitsma: I think that's where we need to start, not just, I hope somebody's not listening to this and saying, okay, we need to train our managers on how to do a one-on-one. Yeah. You need to do that from a tactical perspective. But how does that actually drive engagement? How is that driving that productivity, that accountability, and connecting everything you're doing to the success metrics of the organization?

I've seen it time and time again: we drop in these little trainings. We need to know how to do one-on-one, how to give feedback, and how to do this. It's great, but what's the lens? What's that foundation that it's being trained through and tied to that engagement? 

So as I wrap up, Jim, this conversation is actually prompting a lot of thoughts for me because I was asked to help design a survey for an organization. And it's just go to Gallup. There's it done. We gotta look at those questions.

Somebody is listening to this going, okay, now that I know my engagement is low. I don't have a big budget. Where do I start? What do I do? How do I ensure I'm measuring the right things? What levers can I pull? What advice would you give someone? 

Jim Harter: It doesn't take a massive budget to understand, so let's say you've already got your own survey that you've developed. Of course, you know the quick answer is we've got a platform with a lot of questions that have already been tested and developed.

So you wouldn't have to do that homework ahead of time. And people can start very cost-effectively just doing that. You don't have to do everything right away, but you've got to have good measurement, and it doesn't take a big budget. If you've got analysts on your staff to look at which questions linked to some important outcomes in your organization, like turnover rates, those are pretty basic kinds of analyses that can be done.

But you gotta have the right measurement to begin with. Otherwise, if you don't have the right measurement, you don't have any grounding on what you're trying to change. And so that's the place to start. But then you can build all kinds of things on top of that measurement over time as you continue to grow.

So you don't have to do everything all at once. I talked a lot about manager training, but the first level of creating change is just listening to employees and getting feedback from them, and we call it, measure it through, and call it the accountability index, but it's basically just asking, Did people get feedback and was it useful?

Was it used to create some change, and that happens. First year, we see some growth. Now, of course, there's a lot you can add on to that, right? But the 1st level is you've got to have the right metric, and you've got to be able to measure it at a level where you can create change, meaning that each manager's team needs to have their own data, right?

That's a simple, overlooked thing in the past. I think a lot of organizations are there now, but you've got to, at a basic level, map the data to the manager-led team, because that's where the variance exists, and that's where you're going to create the change, and that's where you need to get the feedback, which is at a local level.

If you're measuring the right elements, then it will fit right into your business model. So it isn't like a separate feel-good thing. It's actually linked to what you're trying to get done in your business, which includes clear expectations and people having what they need to do to get their work done. And people get recognized for it when they do good work.

People feel like they have chances to develop and progress because if they don't, if they promise something, they don't get it once they join your organization; they're going to be more likely to leave, and you lose a lot of star employees that way. Those are just some elements. I know they are really important to measure.

There are simple ways to start, and then you can build on it over time as you keep progressing. And there's a lot of things you can add in, like strengths are an accelerant because they help people get to know each other more quickly.

There's a concept in academia called interpersonal congruence, and it's really about methods in which you can get to know other people much more quickly. I might fit into some of the inclusion stuff you've worked on in the past, Tim, but we found that strengths are a method to get that interpersonal congruence very quickly.

So people can very quickly get some language from each other that makes sense. And people will learn that person is a lot like me in some ways I didn't know, or they're different. And that difference helps our team because they can do something I can't do. That's a simple add-on, cost-effective that accelerates engagement.

There's easy ways to start, and then you can just build over time as you start seeing some growth. You can keep accelerating that growth.

Tim Reitsma: I see it as just to sum that up: there's an action plan right there, which you just laid out for folks. You'll probably implement a survey, and you'll probably get feedback and go. I don't know what to do with this.

Then you switch it up next time on the survey, or you might not get it right the first time, but you got to start because what I think is exciting is what you're talking about, Jim, is when you actually send off that survey, you have now an action plan and you don't need to do it all now, but you need to start, and from an HR perspective and even a business perspective, how does that then tie into the business strategy? Because all you have to do is hit the Internet and search for disengagement. And when you see if you have a workforce that is disengaged, it's costing you money. And so it's an important thing to focus on now to plan for that future. 

So Jim, I appreciate you coming on. I know people are going to have questions and want to know more. How can people find you, or how can people learn more about the work that you're doing? 

Jim Harter: Our website, gallup.com, has ongoing updates of our research continuously, but I'm also active on LinkedIn. So shoot me an invite. And if you're interested in all. I'll add you to our group, and we post updates there and run on a pretty frequent basis. And we've got a big LinkedIn site at Gallup as well, but I've got an individual one too; if you want to connect there, that'd be great. Yeah, those are two things I'd say right off the bat.

Tim Reitsma: Sounds good And we'll put those links in the show notes so people can track you down if they want to know more and understand employee engagement and the well-being of your team.

Jim, I appreciate you coming on. I know you're a busy person, but taking time just to talk to us here at FlexOS and our audience means a lot because it means that not just us, but you are thinking of the future of work, thinking of the future of employee engagement.

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