International Manufacturing Firm: Employee Engagement

For the past several years, Gallup has worked with a major manufacturer to measure and improve employee engagement. The client has operations in nearly 50 countries and exports its products to more than 130 nations.

Gallup's performance management program has been instrumental in helping the client reduce lost-time accidents and their associated costs.

In the first year of the global initiative, Q ¹²employee engagement measurement and Business Impact Analysis -- an assessment of the linkages between engagement levels and business outcomes -- revealed:

• Manufacturing plants with high levels of employee engagement also had lower levels of total accident incident rates.

• Plants with low employee engagement had higher levels of incident rates.

Gallup and the client implemented an ongoing manager-training program and provided follow-up engagement measurement with each manager's workgroup.

After three years of Q ¹² measurement, executive consulting, manager training, and manager intervention, Business Impact Analysis showed:

• Locations with substantial improvement in their employee engagement mean scores (+.10 each year) also showed a substantial decline in their accident incident rates. This group of business units improved their safety incident rates, on average, by approximately 65% over the three-year period.

• Other locations with only slight increases in employee engagement showed smaller declines in accident incident rates. These locations experienced a 10% average improvement in incident rates.

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