The well-being of a company’s managers may be the single most important factor in achieving the corporate mission.

The folks who ask the questions at Gallup combined data from two manager-focused surveys, and came up with a near shocker: Managers who say they enjoy a high sense of well-being are more than twice as engaged in their work as those who report having a slightly less robust sense of well-being.

Gallup gauges well-being by asking respondents questions that penetrate their feelings about themselves in five key areas: purpose, social, financial, community and physical.

Most employers, Gallup says, tend to offer employee/manager support programs that are skewed toward physical well-being. By expanding programs to include healthy doses of support for the other four areas, Gallup believes employers could boost overall well-being, and reap the substantial rewards.

In the latest report, Gallup found that 61 percent of managers who rated themselves strongly in all five areas also said they were strongly engaged in their work. Meantime, only 29 percent of managers who rated themselves highly in three or fewer categories described themselves as actively engaged in their jobs. There were three times as many in the three-or-fewer group who reported that they were actively disengaged in their work — the worst possible condition for a manager.

“Managers' influence on employee engagement is vital to a team's success. Employees who are supervised by a highly engaged manager are 59 percent more likely to be engaged than those supervised by an actively disengaged manager. An engaged manager supervising engaged employees leads to increased productivity, better-quality work and lower turnover,” Gallup commented. “Having low engagement at the managerial level reveals an urgent need for companies to retain their top-performing and engaged performers.”

Instant Insights /

Manager&rsquo;s sense of well-being vital to work outcomes

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Manager’s sense of well-being vital to work outcomes