As the University of Oregon launches our employee engagement survey this week in partnership with Gallup, we’re taking a closer look at what engagement really is and what it looks like in a higher education workplace. To ground the conversation in both research and real-world experience, we spoke with Gallup’s Tim Hodges about engagement in higher education and how institutions can turn survey results into meaningful action.
Tim is a senior consultant for Gallup who works with K–12 and higher education clients. He also serves as executive director of the Clifton Strengths Institute, the Joan Heiser Endowed Presidential Chair and associate professor of practice in the UNL College of Business.
Q. Thanks for talking today, Tim. Can you start by defining employee engagement for us in two or three sentences?
A. Sure, thank you for talking to me. At its core, employee engagement is the involvement and enthusiasm employees have for their work and workplace. If you’re an engaged employee, you’re psychologically committed to your organization’s success and you feel emotionally connected to your purpose, team and contributions.
Engagement really isn’t a program to implement; it’s a measure of whether the workplace fundamentally works for people. And we measure engagement by looking at whether your fundamental workplace needs are being met, things like knowing what’s expected of you and having opportunities to grow.
Q. What does engagement look like for faculty? For professional staff?
A. For faculty, engagement often means feeling connected to their institution’s mission, having autonomy in and support for their teaching and research, and receiving recognition for their scholarly contributions.
And then for professional staff, it can look like having clarity about how their work supports the university’s goals, getting regular feedback from supervisors and opportunities to develop their skills. Both groups need strong relationships with colleagues and a sense that their opinions matter in decision making.
Q. Can working on engagement improve trust and collaboration among different employee groups — for example, staff and faculty — at a university?
A. Absolutely. When both faculty and staff experience engaged workplaces — where they’re heard, recognized and connected to purpose — natural silos begin to break down. Engagement creates shared language and expectations across employee groups, making collaboration feel less like navigating different cultures. And when everyone experiences fairness, development opportunities and managers who genuinely care about them as people, trust will grow.
Q. What are some of higher education's unique engagement challenges?
A. Higher education faces at least three distinctive challenges: extreme mission diversity, since research, teaching, service and administration all require different engagement approaches; decentralized management structures where many leaders lack formal training; and cultural tensions between academic freedom and institutional accountability.
Faculty often report to well-meaning department chairs who are scholars first and who’ve stepped up to do something difficult that their academic training may not have fully prepared them for. For their part, staff may feel less seen than faculty sometimes, despite being essential to operations. Budget constraints and institutional bureaucracy can also slow meaningful change.
Q. Higher ed employees experience a lot of rotating initiatives and buzzwords. Why should someone who’s skeptical of buzzwords like “engagement” pay attention to this effort?
A. The research on employee engagement has appeared in top tier academic journal articles for decades. See William Kahn’s work from the ’80s and ’90s and Schaufeli and Bakker’s research from 2004 for some examples. Unlike fleeting initiatives, engagement directly predicts outcomes that skeptics care about: retention, productivity, student success and institutional reputation.
Gallup’s research across industries was published as a meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2002 and updated more than ten times since. Our research consistently shows that organizations with highly engaged employees experience significantly lower turnover and higher performance, which are metrics that directly impact a university’s mission.
Q. Finally, how can a university move from measuring engagement to making meaningful change?
A. Start by equipping managers, department chairs, deans and staff supervisors with coaching on how to have meaningful conversations about the engagement data with their teams. Measurement alone changes nothing. The transformation happens when managers take ownership of their team’s results and commit to specific actions based on what employees need.
I advise people to focus on a few high-impact areas rather than trying to fix everything at once. Make sure to celebrate progress publicly and hold leaders accountable for creating engaging environments, just as you would for academic or operational outcomes.
The employee engagement survey launches Feb. 23, when you should have received an email from Gallup with a unique survey link. Learn more about engagement at the University of Oregon, and the survey, on the Ducks Engage website.
—Anna Duncan, University Communications