The Gallup Q12

Gallup has spent over two decades developing their employee engagement model, surveying over 57 million respondents, and has developed twelve employee engagement indicators that represent employee needs and describe a supportive and productive workplace.

Gallup's model predicts a team's ability to meet its goals and correlates strongly with things like productivity, retention, and well-being.

• Forty-four R1 universities have participated in Gallup's model, representing over 195,000 faculty, staff, and other university employees.
• Because the Q12 indicators are clear and actionable, the snapshot they offer provides employees and leaders a toolkit for moving forward.

The university's employee engagement survey includes Gallup's Q12 indicators because Gallup's model is highly able to predict our ability to meet our team and organizational goals.

Domains of Flourishing

The university's strategic plan, Oregon Rising, has a primary goal of creating a flourishing community at the University of Oregon. Employee engagement is a critical part of flourishing. Within the flourishing goal, the university has identified five domains that we consider when we talk about employee engagement:

• Growth.
• Well-being.
• Resilience.
• Community.
• Purpose.

Our employee engagement survey includes questions designed to measure these domains.

Areas of Ongoing Focus

Based on results of the university's 2022 climate survey, the university has identified key areas of focus to strengthen our workplace experience and support our teams, which are also represented in the 2026 survey.

Why a survey?

To improve our employee engagement and flourishing, the university needs to first understand how we’re doing. 

We have partnered with Gallup to create and administer an employee engagement survey that will launch in February 2026. 

The survey uses the model described above to better understand how our employees experience their work, highlight where we are doing well, and provide actionable insights and tools for areas where we need to grow.

Survey Logistics

• Who will take the survey? Faculty, classified staff, officers of administration, and graduate employees will take the survey.
• When will the survey be open? The engagement survey will be available from February 23 to March 9, 2026.
• How will employees take the survey? Employees will receive a unique survey link via email on February 23. If you do not have access to a computer workstation, your unit will help you arrange to take the survey another way.

Survey responses will be 100% confidential. 

Gallup collects the survey responses and will never share respondent-level responses with the university. UO leaders and teams will receive their results at the unit-defined workgroup level. A workgroup must have at least five members completing the survey for results to be shared. Individual responses will not be shared.

Survey and Engagement Milestones

What you can do before the survey

To prepare to take action after the survey, and to get started promoting engagement and flourishing, here are a few things you can do right now:

• Connect with your supervisor or unit leadership to learn about plans in your unit for the survey and beyond.
• Tap into our employee engagement resources and put a couple small things into practice for yourself or your team.

Long-term, meaningful action

We recognize that a survey offers only a moment-in-time snapshot, while engagement and flourishing are long-term processes. Our goal isn’t simply to raise scores. We want to understand the issues our results raise, to spark meaningful conversations, and to use the insights the survey offers to make real change that supports our employees and our mission. To that end, in the coming weeks we will provide a framework for reviewing and taking action on our survey results.