Q12
Twelve questions, asked the same way every time, that turn 'is my team engaged?' from a feeling into a score you can track and argue about specifically.
Twelve questions stack into four levels, basic needs at the base and growth sitting right at the top.
Reach for this when…
- Engagement feels low but nobody can point to what specifically is wrong.
- You want to track a culture change over time, not just take its temperature once.
- Leadership wants a number for the board, but you also want something a team can act on.
How to run it
- Survey the team on the 12 Gallup questions.
- Score each 1 to 5 and calculate team averages.
- Find the lowest-scoring questions.
- Discuss what would move each by half a point.
- Turn that into specific team practices.
- Re-survey later to see if it moved.
A worked example
Situation. Karim Aoun ran a 25-person warehouse and logistics hub for a furniture retailer outside Beirut, Lebanon, where turnover had crept up for two years running.
Applied. The Q12 survey showed every basic-needs question scoring fine but 'at work my opinions seem to count' scoring lowest of the twelve by a wide margin.
Result. He started a 15-minute Friday floor huddle where any worker could flag a process change. Six months later the same question had moved from 2.4 to 3.6, and two people who'd been due to leave stayed.
The catch
A single low score tells you where to look, not what to do about it, and averaging across a team can hide that half of them are fine and half are furious. It also measures engagement as Gallup defines it, which is not the same thing as job satisfaction or wellbeing.
If the score moves but turnover doesn't, you improved the survey, not the team.
Origin: Gallup (Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman)