People Leave Managers Not Jobs

The "Q12" questions, dubbed by Buckingham and Coffman, were key to Best Buy's findings. As Buckingham notes: "We had grown tired of not being able to convince executives that treating employees well makes them more productive. We set out to prove that if your Q12 scores go up, you'll lose fewer people, face fewer worker-compensation cases, suffer less shrinkage, and earn higher profits."

So what exactly are the Q12 questions? Listed below, they deal primarily with employees'emotions. The questions really give insight into how managers are actually managing.

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?

9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

With more than 25 years of research and more than one million interviews with employees, Buckingham and Coffman found that what positively affects employee productivity and loyalty most is not money or bennies, but a quality relationship between the individual and the boss. What people want, explain Buckingham and Coffman in their book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999), is someone who sets clear and consistent expectations, cares for them, values their unique qualities, and encourages and supports their growth and development. And these researchers have the data to prove it.

Employees who respond "strongly agree" to the 12 questions are 50 percent more likely to work in business units with lower employer turnover, 38 percent more likely to work in more productive business units, and 56 percent more likely to work in business units with high customer loyalty.

What's interesting in the case of Best Buy is that stores with practically identical design and operation revealed radical differences in employees' view of work. For example, the number of employees giving the score of five to one of the 12 questions averaged as much as 60 percentage points higher at the most productive (higher profit, better retention, etc.) stores than the least productive stores.

Stores in which employees ranked in the top 25 percent of the 12 questions exceeded profit goals by an average of 14 percent. Stores ranked in the bottom 25 percent missed profit goals by 30 percent. In addition, Best Buy stores in the top 25 percent retained a total of 1,000 more employees than the stories in the bottom 25 percent. Based on the Gallup Organization's calculations, these findings translated into an additional $27 million in direct hiring and training costs for stores in the bottom 25 percent. Another stat: In the most productive Best Buy stores, 45 percent of employees strongly agreed that they had the materials and equipment to do their job, compared with 11 percent of strongly agreed responses from the least productive branches. Here's a situation in which stores with the same materials and equipment ranked very different because employees' perceptions outweighed reality.

"You take the same company, the same system, and basically the same pay scale, and yet you get tremendously different attitudes among employees from different stores," Brad Anderson, Best Buy's president and COO was quoted by Fast Company Writer Tony Schwartz. "The only logical explanation is leadership. We knew that human capital mattered, but these questions helped us understand just how it mattered. Someone who is gifted as a manager knows how to unlock the skill sets of people who work in that environment."

Special thanks to the SHRM