Automobile Manufacturer: Employee Engagement and Strengths Management

For the past several years, Gallup has worked with the U.S. sales unit and corporate university of one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of cars in the world. This client employs more than 20,000 U.S. workers involved in the manufacture, research, financing, and sales of cars, light trucks, and sport utility vehicles.

Working in close partnership with Gallup, a sizable business unit developed an integrated, multidimensional intervention strategy to increase per-person productivity. The company used Gallup's Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment to identify associates' talents, construct teams with complementary strengths, and develop team leaders and position them for success. They also used the Q12, Gallup's 12-question measure of employee engagement, to assess the impact of engagement on teamwork and business outcomes.

The Gallup performance management initiative successfully transformed large workgroups into motivated and mutually supportive small teams, increasing overall per-person productivity through improvements in workgroup engagement levels.

Six months after launching the intervention, the business unit's overall Q12 engagement scores had risen from the 15th to the 29th percentile in Gallup's database, and the percentage of associates who said they were "extremely satisfied" with the client as a place to work rose from the 71st to the 82nd percentile. Within a year of the intervention, the client's productivity measure showed a 6% increase in overall per-person productivity.

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