human needs. People need more measurement to be able to manage things in
their lives or within an organization.
Do your ideas come from your
personal experiences, research
data, or a combination of both?
TR: I may be the one who does a lot of
the early methodology, documenting
and writing up findings, but any given
research project involves a minimum
of 100 people—from editing to in-per-
son interviews to running data sets.
Candidly, the best part of my job on a
day-to-day basis is the people I work
with—thought leaders and minds here at
Gallup, employees and senior scientists
from the outside that we get to work
with—not just the ideas and the metrics.
Even when it comes to gathering stories
for the books, we have a lot of inter-
viewers who find the best anecdotes
across all of our client projects. It’s hard
to identify anything that I could claim
I’d done in isolation.
How do you keep current on the
latest trends, and how do you
differentiate what you view as trends
versus fads?
TR: I read everything I can get my hands
on. I’ll spend two or three hours a day
perusing scientific journals and newsletters to stay current on topics in the
business world and academic community.
In terms of spotting trends, honestly,
that’s fairly simple for us because we’re
looking for whatever we can see that
explains the most variance in our data.
In our consulting business, almost all
of our efforts are focused on helping a
client or organization grow and have
the most impact. If you ask why we
zoomed in on wellbeing, we were just
trying to find the broadest metric that
explained the largest amount of human
behavior collectively.
What are some of the ways you
can see and measure the impact of
your work?
TR: We have a session here in
Washington, DC, in which we gather
the top several hundred managers from
some of the most successful workplaces
in the world. You’re hearing the voices
of the very high end of world-class management. One guy, for example, talked
about the way he’s always viewed developing people as an end in itself and
never sees employees as a means to an
end. That was an important takeaway
for me, because it encapsulated the
mindset of some of the best managers
we’ve studied.
If an organization with hundreds
of thousands of employees can gain
an extra tenth of a point in employee
engagement, that can translate into
several millions per unit in additional
operating profits. We can quantify for a
company that, at an emotional as well
as a financial level, an investment for
10 years in employee engagement will
help people have better relationships, be
better parents, and have better physical
