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Consulting Expertise

The Q12®: The World's Leading Employee Engagement Survey

Gallup's engagement survey helps leaders drive clarity and high performance, even when the workplace evolves. When disruption leads to disengagement, burnout and turnover, the Q12 identifies and reinforces the core conditions that high-performing teams need to thrive.

Business Outcomes of Engagement

The Results of Using the Q12 Engagement Questions to Lead Teams

Gallup has studied over 3.3 million workers across 100,000+ teams to understand the effects of engagement on essential business metrics.

This research has examined teams in the top quartile of engagement, comparing their results to those in the bottom quartile. Gallup finds that highly engaged teams consistently outperform their peers in key business outcomes.

What highly engaged employees achieve more of:

10% higher customer loyalty/engagement

14% higher productivity (production records and evaluations)

18% higher productivity (sales)

23% higher profitability

70% higher wellbeing (net thriving employees)

22% higher organizational citizenship (participation)

What highly engaged employees achieve less of:

78% less absenteeism

21% less turnover for high-turnover organizations

51% less turnover for low-turnover organizations

28% less shrinkage (theft)

63% fewer safety incidents (accidents)

32% fewer quality defects

*The above figures are median percent differences across companies in Gallup's database. High-turnover organizations are those with more than 40% annualized turnover. Low-turnover organizations are those with 40% or lower annualized turnover.

The 12 Elements of Great Management

What Are the Gallup Q12 Questions?

The Q12 employee engagement survey is highly predictive of team performance and a tool used to guide managers and leaders to more effectively coach their employees.

The survey measures four levels of employee needs, from basic clarity to personal growth. When these needs are met in sequence, they create a workplace where individuals and teams can thrive.

Each level builds on the last, creating a road map for managers to motivate and develop their teams.

Pyramid with Growth in at the top followed by Teamwork, Individual Contribution and Basic Needs at the base.
  1. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.
  2. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
  3. I have a best friend at work.
  4. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
  5. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
  6. At work, my opinions seem to count.
  7. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
  8. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
  9. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
  10. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
  11. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
  12. I know what is expected of me at work.
  13. How satisfied are you with your company as a place to work?
Flexibility and Customization

One Survey. Countless Ways to Customize It.

No two organizations face the same pressures, which is why we offer flexible options to tailor your engagement survey to your industry, your people and how your organization operates.

Flexible Questions

Surveys can be customized and still produce valid, benchmark-aligned engagement measurement, anchored by a core set of high-impact items.

Extensive Item Library

Choose from 350+ scientifically validated survey items to tailor surveys to your organization's needs, with custom items also available outside of benchmarking.

Client-Specific Language

Replace generic terms like "company" or "organization" with your organization's actual name throughout the survey.

Alternative Wording Options

Adjust employee survey language to match how employees refer to their organization, leaders and coworkers.

Benchmark-Compatible Customization

Adjust item wording or include legacy client items while maintaining Gallup benchmarking, as long as wording stays comparable.

Your Full Employee Experience

Expanding Beyond Engagement

Engagement is only one part of the employee experience. An employee experience survey can also measure topics like culture, wellbeing and leadership, helping you focus on what matters most to your strategic priorities. More than 350 research-backed questions are available, each benchmarked for use in census and pulse surveys.

  • Accountability
  • Agility
  • Burnout
  • Business Direction
  • Career Advancement
  • Change Management
  • Coaching
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Company Advocacy
  • Creativity
  • Culture of Performance
  • Customer Centricity
  • Customer Service
  • Employee Retention
  • Empowerment
  • ESG
  • Exit/Departure
  • Expectations, Priorities and Goals
  • Healthcare
  • Innovation
  • Leadership
  • Manager/Supervisor Effectiveness
  • Mission/Vision/Values
  • Nursing
  • Onboarding
  • Patient Safety
  • Pay and Compensation
  • Performance Evaluation and Appraisal
  • Performance Feedback
  • Physician Engagement
  • Safety
  • Strengths-Based Culture
  • Sustainability
  • Systems and Procedures
  • Teamwork
  • Trust
  • Wellbeing
  • Work/Life Balance
The Platform

Where Your Engagement Data Live

Gallup Access is employee engagement software that brings your Q12 survey to life. Deploy your survey and watch results populate in real time, benchmarked against Gallup's global database, so you always know where you stand. Managers get direct access to their team's data, along with guided action planning that turns results into practical next steps they can put into practice right away.

Insights in Gallup Access are scientifically validated, so the guidance your managers see is grounded in what predicts performance.

Using Gallup Engagement Survey Data

Reporting You Can Customize and Apply Immediately

Sample of survey data broken up by department and scores color coded by value range.

Gallup gives you the power to tailor how you view and analyze your survey data. For instance:

  • Compare results to industry, competitor and top-quartile benchmarks.
  • Segment by role, region, team and more.
  • Equip managers with the data to guide real-world decisions.
Going Beyond The Survey

We Help You Turn Your Data Into Performance

Overview of score trend and results

Gallup helps clients connect engagement to the actions that drive outcomes like productivity and profitability.

We equip you with:

  • benchmark data from Gallup's proprietary employee engagement questions, comparing your results to top-performing organizations in your industry
  • platform-driven guidance based on your survey results and decades of research on the most successful teams
  • expert consultation to design and implement a high-impact engagement strategy
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Getting Started

Find the Solution That Fits Your Needs

Not sure which option makes sense for your organization? Start here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. For starters, you can include the four additional questions that were created as part of the Q12+:

  • At work, I am treated with respect.
  • My organization cares about my overall wellbeing.
  • I have received meaningful feedback in the last week.
  • My organization always delivers on the promise we make to customers.

You can also ask additional questions from a bank of more than 150 other tested and validated questions. With a subscription to Gallup Access, you can create custom questions to ask in pulse surveys.

Gallup recommends that organizations invest in employee engagement surveys because they directly link to better business outcomes, including higher productivity, profitability and customer loyalty and lower turnover.

Tools like Gallup's Q12 survey help leaders measure what matters most: clear expectations, recognition, development and purpose. These insights enable targeted action, improve team performance and strengthen workplace culture, even in times of disruption.

Gallup's Q12 survey is the industry standard for measuring employee engagement, backed by decades of research and used by leading organizations worldwide. These employee engagement survey questions are scientifically validated to reveal the core conditions employees need to succeed: clear expectations, the right resources, meaningful recognition, development opportunities and a strong sense of purpose.

The Q12 turns abstract concepts like engagement into measurable data that leaders can act on and has been proven to link directly to performance, retention and profitability.

Administer surveys through Gallup Access, our online workplace platform.

It is best practice to make engagement a core part of a broader employee experience strategy, conducting an initial survey to create your benchmarks and then surveying every six months to ensure you are making progress toward your goals.

Gallup recommends that organizations drive higher participation in an employee feedback survey by fostering trust before the survey, setting clear expectations and showing that feedback leads to action. Leaders should actively endorse the survey process and explain its purpose, emphasizing how results will be used to improve the workplace.

Ensuring anonymity is critical to gathering honest input, and managers must be trained to discuss results with their teams. When employees see that their voices lead to real change, surveys become a trusted part of the organization's culture.

Yes. Gallup's employee engagement survey is available as a one-time option for organizations with fewer than 100 employees. Visit our store to get started.

If you have 100 employees or more, talk to a Gallup consultant to explore your engagement needs.

A traditional employee opinion survey often focuses on how employees feel about their job. Gallup's Q12 employee engagement survey measures something more specific: the workplace conditions — clear expectations, the right resources, recognition, development, purpose — that Gallup's research has shown to predict performance, not just satisfaction. Two things make it unique. First, the Gallup Q12 survey questions are proprietary, so no other provider can offer the exact Q12 items. Second, decades of data across millions of employee responses give Gallup a benchmark comparison built on a scale that other survey tools can't offer.

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