Gallup 12

Earlier this year Pfizer had all of its employees respond to the "Gallup 12" questions. Actually, the way they were presented to us was not as questions--they had been re-cast as statements and we were supposed to rate how much we agreed with them. Gallup's research had shown a strong link between agreement with them and worker performance/engagement, which, in turn, was linked to business success. The statements were:

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is there someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission/purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the last six months, someone at work talked to me about my progress.
12. In the last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

There were some interesting things that were noted. For example, most people agreed strongly with #9, but not with #4, which would imply that we think our co-workers do well at their jobs but we don't tell them very often.

The leader of our unit of about 18 scientists (my manager) asked us which statements we thought were most important for our group, and #2, #3, and #12, won out. This led to me being appointed as the leader of a committee (composed of 1/3 of our group) that was supposed to examine one of the statements (we got #3--"At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.") and come up with a plan to deal with any issues around this.

The meeting I had with my committee was very interesting. We agreed that what we do best is science and solving science problems. The things that kept us from doing this had mostly to do with (1) increased paperwork requirements in the areas of recording research results in notebooks (believe it or not, although all of our research results reside on computers we still have to paste printouts into an analog notebook--an electronic notebook has been talked about for years but is still in the future, apparently mired in legal issues) , (2) inefficient software (brand new!) that has to be used to process and archive data into the company database, and (3) a goal-setting, personal development, and performance review process (also managed by some new software!) that is time-consuming and does little to guide or motivate. It is interesting how all of these had a common theme of IT and software.

One of the other things we decided that hindered us from doing science was being involved on committees and "focus groups"--the "#3" committee we were a part of being a prime example. For this reason, one of the bullet points on our action plan was to dissolve the committee so we could get back to science and what we do best.

My manager did not let us off the hook so easy.