As everybody knows, 2013 was a year in which I put a strong emphasis on developing the skills of the managers. I am always eager to get people to specialize and to become ever more expert in whatever area they are working. For managers in particular, I want them to be continually invested in adding more tools and frameworks to their toolbox so they can choose the right one to apply for the benefit of their staffs.
You will all remember that I made a final call to fill out the employee engagement survey last month. It has been almost exactly a year since the first specific course for those managers, so now is a great time to take our first look at the results. Let me tell you how they did.
The managers achieved almost one full standard deviation of improvement in employee engagement. Statistical analysis of the survey suggests that it is over 80% likely to be causative rather than the result of chance.
As you can see in the chart, distribution of employee engagement scores per manager shifted to the right. Note how the number of managers scoring 4.1, 4.3 4.5, 4.7, and 4.9 all increased. In fact, we didn’t even have any 4.9’s before. If we ignore the three managers who got too few responses to be meaningful, four out of five managers had staff that feel more engaged.
Overall, we moved from the 51st percentile to the 69th percentile and I expect that the managers will continue to get better throughout the year as they practice and apply what they learned last year.
Thank you, managers, for taking your work seriously and improving. And thanks to everyone in UTS for filling out the survey so we can have the data to tell whether these big bets on how to make UTS better are actually working.
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