How Engaged is Your Organization? The City of Southlake Process Improvement Plan

Strong employee engagement is a critical component of high performance management and service delivery. It aligns city goals to become an employer of choice. In addition, there’s a strong business case for enhancing employee engagement in a local government organization.

Last fall, the City of Southlake began planning an employee engagement program. The program is being designed around the Gallup “Q12.” Having spent decades researching this topic Gallup is considered to be a leading expert in the field. Over the last 30 years, Gallup has surveyed more than 25 million employees, from 2.8 million workgroups, in 1,110 organizations from 195 countries and in 70 languages. Their research results have been published in two best-selling books on engagement: First Break All the Rules and 12: The Elements of Great Managing.

Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are involved in and enthusiastic about their work. Their studies indicate that engaged employees are 100% committed to their roles and contribute to their organization in a positive manner. Gallup further states that employees who are engaged are more likely to go above and beyond what their role typically requires. This translates into the amount of discretionary effort an employee is willing to exert into his or her work.

Why is employee engagement important? Engaged employees care more, perform better and stay longer, which impacts the overall success of an organization. In fact, the Gallup study found a strong correlation between high employee engagement and nine key business outcomes including: customer satisfaction, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety, shrinkage or theft, absenteeism, quality, and patient safety. Organizations with very high engagement scores (99th percentile) had four times the success rate than those with very low (1st percentile) engagement scores. They showed 37% less absenteeism, 65% less turnover, 28% less theft, and 48% less safety incidents.

In late October, the City of Southlake received their results of the Q12 survey. The city has started the process of improving employee engagement. The results are helping the city focus on initiatives that will impact performance indicators such as turnover, absenteeism, safety, and productivity, and ultimately become a true high performance organization.

(Article submitted by Ben Thatcher, Assistant City Manager, Southlake. If you have interesting news or helpful topics to share, please submit them to Kim Pendergraft at [email protected]. Please keep the information to fewer than 250 words.)