The researchers measured job engagement through 18 questions organized by physical engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. According to the article abstract, they found that “engagement, conceptualized as the investment of an individual’s complete self to a role, provides a more comprehensive explanation of relationships with performance relative to well-known concepts that reflect narrower aspects of the individual’s self.” The researchers were able to evaluate the impact of other factors including job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation on performance and behavior; they concluded these factors did not predict performance and behavior while engagement did.

According to Simmons, the researchers identified three antecedents of engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations. In other words, hire people who share and support your organization’s mission and values and who are self-sufficient and confident, and then provide development opportunities that align with your organizational values and your employees’ developmental needs.

In “Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement,” I wrote about a Gallup report that came to similar conclusions. Gallup defined a fully-engaged employee as emotionally attached to the unit and rationally loyal and found that “organizations that employ performance optimization management principles have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.”

In “Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line,” I pointed to two specific cases where employee engagement had a direct correlation with financial results:

• Best Buy sees a $100,000 annual increase in sales at any location where employee engagement rises 2%.

• JC Penny had 67% of its employee engaged in 2005 and 80% engaged in 2009. Its earnings per share growth over the last five years is five times the industry average.

The key to getting similar results at your organization is to: (1) figure out how to measure employee engagement as the researchers quoted above have done; (2) use your measurement tool to assess engagement; (3) identify opportunities to improve performance; and, (4) close the gap.

To read more about employee engagement, click on these articles:

• What Drives You?
• Paying Disengaged Employees
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging
• Valuing Employees – and HR

Click here to view the embedded video.

It turns out that study after study has shown that money works if you want people to perform simple, rudimentary tasks, but if you want them to do something more complex, you need the three elements of true motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

To learn more, watch the video — and then join me in reading the book.

Godin’s post, Goodbye to the office, asks why people go to their office, plant, or factory. As he notes, “If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘The Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.”

I’m not so sure about that. True, we’ve already seen a trend toward more telecommuting, but the office mentality is so ingrained that it will take a few organizations revolutionizing the way we work—and making it fun, desirable, and profitable—to really get this ball rolling, and I don’t think that’s going to be widespread in ten years.

Having said that, the organizations that abandon the office concept in favor of something more efficient and relevant to today’s world will carve out an immediate competitive advantage. Young workers in particular will be attracted to the idea. They are already used to a more flexible environment with their phones and their friending and their connecting with friends through their phones. If they want to get together, they figure it out on the fly and it seems to work. There’s no reason meetings couldn’t be organized the same way. People worry about the social aspect of an office but, as Godin writes, “You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.”

In fact, those revolutionizing the office concept will likely be brilliant young entrepreneurs who start innovative companies with no regard for the office concept. A few are already doing it. Once that approach gains traction, once it gains critical mass, the office will, indeed, become an antique.

Now if we could only revolutionize that other antiquated system, K-12 education!

To read more about work systems, click on these articles:

• Is Your Job Ideal for You?
• This Year’s Best Employer
• What Matters Now
• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• The 3 Factors That Motivate Employees

According to Gallup’s research, there are universal elements of well-being that differentiate thriving from struggling. They have grouped them in five categories:

• Career Well-Being: How you occupy your time or how much you like what you do every day.
• Social Well-Being: Having strong relationships and love in your life.
• Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life.
• Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done.
• Community Well-Being: A sense of engagement with your community.

According to the book’s authors, when these factors are fully realized, people thrive.

An article on the Gallup Management Journal (click here) explains why this matters. Most of us believe that happy and healthy people get sick less often than miserable people. According to Gallup’s data, workers with the lowest well-being scores cost their companies $28,800 a year in lost productivity from sick days. In contrast, workers with the highest well-being scores cost their companies just $840 dollars.

That’s an astounding discrepancy! The data suggest that it is worth an organization’s time and money to improve their workforce well-being. That means paying attention to all five elements.

• Career Well-Being: Engage your employees. Gallup found a strong correlation between employee engagement and well-being.
• Social Well-Being: Gallup’s research shows that people need six hours of social time every day. That doesn’t mean six hours hanging around the water cooler, but it does suggest that teams, mentoring, training, and other social interactions improve well-being.
• Financial Well-Being: Financial security is integral to well-being.
• Physical Well-Being: The number of organizations that are implementing programs to improve the wellness of their employees indicates that this element has become mainstream.
• Community Well-Being: More and more people, most notably younger workers, want to feel like the work they do makes a difference not just to their organization’s bottom line, but to society as a whole.

The article concludes that “businesses would be wise to measure and manage” employee well-being. That’s a Baldrige perspective.

To read more about workforce well-being, click on these articles:

• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement
• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• The 3 Factors That Motivate Employees

If you had to guess, how many of the people who work at your organization would say that their jobs are ideal for them?

Gallup asked 18,000 U.S. adults this question in January. Survey says: 70% think their jobs are ideal.

While that number is higher than I would have expected, the breakdown of the data provides fewer surprises. For those whose annual household income is less than $12,000, 57% said their jobs were ideal, a pretty high number for minimum wage jobs. At the top end of the scale—those making more than $120,000—77% say they have the ideal job. I guess the remaining 23% are just in it for the money.

Business owners topped the list of people who think their jobs are ideal (87%) with farming/forestry/fishing a close second. The bottom five are manager/executive at 68%; sales/retail at 64%; manufacturing/production and clerical/office at 61%; and service at 60%. In other words, pretty much anyone who works in a cubicle, manages people who work in cubicles, or stands for hours on a retail sales floor or a production line, which sounds like most of the workforce.

The older you are, the more likely you think your job is ideal. Seventy-eight percent of people 50-65 years old said so while only 52% of workers age 18 to 29 years agreed.

Education is a mixed bag. Those who had done postgraduate work ranked highest (77%), while those who completed some college were lowest at 63%—a full seven percent lower than those who had less than a high school diploma. Any theories on why that’s the case?

Click on “Seven in 10 U.S. Workers Say Their Jobs Are Ideal” (Jenny Marlar, Gallup, March 1, 2010) to see all of the data.

To read more about employee satisfaction and engagement, click on these articles:

• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement
• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line

The group surveyed 240 organizations and differentiated best-in-class (BIC) performers from those in the middle and the laggards. They found that:

• The BIC performers saw a 13% decrease in key talent turnover in the past 12 months compared to a 13% increase for the laggards.
• The BIC performers have at least one “ready and willing” successor for 53% of their key positions compared to just 15% for the laggards.
• The BIC performers have workforce plans in place in 90% of their divisions compared to 13% for the laggards.

The group concluded that BIC performers share common characteristics:

• Involvement of senior leaders with workforce planning initiatives
• Ability to define and screen against competencies required for future business success
• Tools to integrate employee data with financial, customer, and other data to create a comprehensive view of the workforce.

If you integrate the Baldrige model, you will improve your performance in each of these areas by improving your performance on these related Baldrige Criteria questions:

• How do senior leaders participate in organizational learning, succession planning, and in the development of future organizational leaders?

• How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?

• How do you relate your workforce engagement assessment findings to key business results to identify opportunities for improvement in both workforce engagement and business results?

You don’t need a report to tell you that effective, systematic responses to these questions will make you best-in-class in workforce planning.

You can view the Aberdeen Group’s report by clicking here. (You have to sign up to see it.)

To read more about workforce planning and engagement, click on these articles:

• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Succession Planning at P&G
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Climbing the Corporate Lattice
• Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging

• A 300-acre campus near Raleigh, North Carolina for 4,200 employees
• Average tenure for employees of ten years with annual turnover at 2%
• Typical work week is 35 hours with many employees setting their own schedules
• No sick day policy: If an employee is sick, he or she decides whether to stay home (the average taken annually is two days)
• A healthcare center with a staff of 56 including four physicians—and services are free to employees (last year 90% of employees and their families made 40,000 visits)
• An on-site 66,000-square-foot recreation and fitness center with gym, weight room, billiards hall, sauna, hair salon, manicurist, Olympic-size pool, and massage
• On-site workday sports leagues
• Two subsidized daycare centers for 600 children
• Dry cleaning, car detailing, a book exchange, a meditation garden, an in-season tax-prep vendor, and an orthotics store
• Three subsidized cafeterias (and they provide takeout for family dinners)
• Off-campus SAS family nights
• Two paid artists-in-residence
• Free M&Ms—22.5 tons a year or 11 pounds per employee

CEO Jim Goodnight explains the SAS approach this way: “My chief assets drive out the gate every day. My job is to make sure they come back.” (“SAS: A new no. 1 best employer,” David A. Kaplan, January 22, 2010)

SAS is the world’s largest privately-held software business with revenues of $2.3 billion. It has been on Fortune’s list of Best Companies to Work For for 13 straight years.

Companies make the list based on the results of the Great Place to Work Institute’s Trust Index survey sent to a random sample of employees (two-thirds of the company’s score comes from this) and the company’s responses to the Institute’s Culture Audit (one-third). You can see the complete list by clicking here.

To read more about employee satisfaction and engagement, click on these articles:

• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Best and Worst for Employees
• The Well-Being of Those You Keep
• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• Valuing Employees—and HR
• The 3 Factors That Motivate Employees