Blog

Is Your Office Full of Dwights, Jims, or Stanleys?

By Loftwall Info July 9, 2019

Every office has one – the guy or gal who cares more than everyone else. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, that was Dwight Schrute. He remains the definition of an engaged employee. Engaged employees produce better outcomes, solve problems better and faster, and add to the profitability of a company more than any other employee. This is true in good economic times and bad, according to Gallup’s State of the Workplace Study.

But what makes Dwight, Dwight (other than the beets)? Gallup, Steelcase, Haworth, and many commercial design experts would say the environment someone works in has as much to do with an employee’s engagement as anything does. When we were researching our CEU Privacy: Re-Balancing the Office, we leaned on dozens of sources. Perhaps the most robust source material came from Gallup, which published their 150+ page research report on the State of the Global Workplace. 

While researching our CEU, we leaned on dozens of sources to investigate this very question. Perhaps the most robust source material came from Gallup, which published their 150+ page research report on the State of the Global Workplace. 

We’ll spare you the trouble of reading the report in its entirety and share some highlights with you…

  • Every year Gallup, one of the world’s leading performance-management consulting companies, publishes a detailed State of the Global Workplace report.
  • This report attempts to use data and analytics to defined how 155 countries worldwide are best utilizing their human capital.
  • These reports provide invaluable insight to our modern offices as well as the trends that will impact our future designs.
  • Last year’s 220 page report captured this very information.

These data points begin to wield more power when we view them on a micro level, instead of a macro level. Specifically, Gallup combines their survey results with internal metrics to sort employees into one of three categories.

  • Engaged (Dwight Schrute)
  • Not Engaged (Jim Halpert)
  • Actively Disengaged (Stanley Hudson)

The more of a country or a company’s employees are deemed “engaged,” the better that country or company is utilizing their human capital.

When compared with business units in the bottom quartile of engagement, those in the top quartile realize improvements in numerous areas (chart)

  • Customer metrics: +10%
  • Productivity: +17%
  • Sales: + 20%