Page 13 - Employee Engagement 2018

Q10: I have a best friend at work.

Our overall mean was 3.02 and only 41% of us answering our level of
agreement as a 4 or above, using a five-point scale, where 5 means
strongly agree and 1 means strongly disagree with that statement.

So, we are low in this area – what can we do to improve? Teams can do
little things to build comradery, including holding potlucks, getting to
know about each other’s hobbies, family, going for walks to take a break from work. The more we
develop our work environments as a community, the more we can count on each other, be able to
share feedback in a way our coworkers can hear and positively react to. Simply put, people with
friends at work are happier at work.

Why is it important...
This was the most controversial of the questions Gallup uses based upon the
feedback we heard from participants, and it remains one globally for them. Gallup
itself would have dropped the question if not for one stubborn fact: It predicts
performance. Something about a deep sense of affiliation with the people in
an employee’s team drives her to do positive things for her employer she would
otherwise not do. Early research that identified the 12 Elements revealed a very
different social bond among employees in top performing teams. Subsequent
large-scale, multi-company analyses confirmed the Tenth Element is a scientifically
salient ingredient in obtaining a number of business-relevant outcomes, including
profitability, safety, inventory control, and – most notably – the emotional
connection and loyalty of customers to the organization serving them.

Gallup tested many different ways to ask the question (all the ways we ourselves
suggested) but found “I have a best friend at work” was best able to discriminate
between groups in which friendships are sufficiently supportive and those that have
only surface relationships unable to withstand adversity.