Life/Work - Issue 40

It's scarcely big news in a full-employment economy, that companies are desperately looking for ways to make themselves more alluring to employees. Nearly every month, I find and write about different initiatives that employers are undertaking to deal with this critical need.

But here's a finding that caught me by surprise: The single most important variable in employee productivity and loyalty turns out to be not pay or perks or benefits or workplace environment. Rather, according to the Gallup Organization, it's the quality of the relationship between employees and their direct supervisors. More specifically, what people want most from their supervisors is the same thing that kids want most from their parents: someone who sets clear and consistent expectations, cares for them, values their unique qualities, and encourages and supports their growth and development. Put another way, the greatest sources of satisfaction in the workplace are internal and emotional.

This may sound soft and squishy, but the Gallup Organization's Marcus Buckingham, 34, and Curt Coffman, 41, have managed to crunch 25 years' worth of interviews with more than 1 million workers into a metric that clearly defines the bottom-line value of eliciting certain feelings from employees in the workplace. Simpler still, they have found that they can make strong predictions about how these employees will perform in their workplaces by asking them the following 12 questions, which they call the "Q12."

• Do I know what is expected of me at work?
• Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
• In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
• At work, do my opinions seem to count?
• Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
• Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
• Do I have a best friend at work?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
• This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

"We had grown tired of not being able to convince executives that treating employees well makes them more productive," explains Buckingham. "We set out to prove that if your Q12 scores go up, you'll lose fewer people, face fewer worker-compensation cases, suffer less shrinkage, and earn higher profits." Sure enough, they got precisely those results.

Employees who answered "Strongly Agree" to the 12 questions were 50% more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 38% more likely to work in more-productive business units, and 56% more likely to work in business units with high customer loyalty.

Buckingham and Coffman gathered this research in a book with the sort of gimmicky title that initially inspires skepticism: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999). But in this case, you can't judge the book by its cover. The authors make a convincing case that the conventional wisdom about what employees want most from their jobs is wrong. "People leave managers, not companies," the authors write.

My initial response to the issues raised by the Q12 was to weigh them against my experiences in my own career as a journalist. As a young reporter for the New York Times, for example, I had a beloved mentor who made me feel valued, cared for, and supported. When he eventually became preoccupied by other concerns and began paying significantly less attention to me, my passion for my work waned.

Before long, I found myself drawn to a job offer from a previous boss who had begun ardently wooing me again. The job was less prestigious than working for the Times, and it didn't involve significantly more money. But it gave me the sense that I would be more valued, and it offered more opportunity to grow. I took the job and stayed in it happily for many years, in large part because of my relationship with my boss.

But how do you prove that these sorts of feelings translate across a company into higher profits and greater retention? One of Gallup's most comprehensive research projects has involved the consumer-electronics specialty retailer Best Buy. Beginning in 1997, employees at 300 Best Buy stores across the country were asked to answer the 12 Gallup questions, using a scale of one to five (with one signifying "Strongly Disagree," and five meaning "Strongly Agree").