What’s the difference between happy and engaged when it comes to employee motivation and retention?

Mark Crowley recently interviewed Jim Clifton, Gallup’s CEO for the past 26 years, and asked him to provide his prescription for bringing American workplaces back to full health. Leveraging insight gained from Gallup’s decades-long global engagement and well-being studies, not to mention his own work with hundreds of companies across the world, he offered this often contrarian advice:

  • We should NOT be trying to make workers “happy.”
  • Free lunches (freebies) don’t drive achievement.
  • Perks aren’t much better (than freebies) at driving engagement.
  • Engagement is driven by what many CEOs still believe are soft practices (i.e., heart).
  • So goes the manager, so goes engagement.

Read more at Fast Company.