What do Grinnell Mutual, Foster Group and Cedar Valley Hospice have in common? They are Iowa companies that have been recognized among just 39 world-class organizations assessed by Gallup as having some of the most engaged workforces in the world.

The three companies have each been named winners of the 2021 Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award.

According to Gallup, a global analytics firm, employee engagement in the United States fluctuated more in the past year than it has since Gallup began tracking engagement in 2000. “But through it all, the most engaged workplaces in the world continued to put people first,” the firm said in its announcement of the winners.

“It required communication and vulnerability — especially from leadership. The applications and interviews with award nominees revealed a common theme: leaders trying to embody their organization’s values while empathizing with what their employees were going through and doing what’s right for team members and customers.”

Grinnell Mutual in Grinnell is a first-time winner, while Waterloo-based Cedar Valley Hospice is a second-time winner. This is the fourth consecutive year that West Des Moines-based wealth management firm Foster Group has received the award, according to Gallup’s list of winners. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., which has a large operational presence in Des Moines, is also a 2021 winner.

“In 2020, organizational cultures saw historic threats,” said Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being. “It took an exceptional amount of resilience for organizations, and their employees, to make it through. The abundance of well-managed and highly inspired teams inside Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award-winning organizations puts them in a particularly strong position to adapt quickly to meet the needs of their customers.”  

Jeff Vogts, Grinnell Mutual’s vice president of talent development, said the company’s culture of trust and respect has always been a draw for potential talent. “Grinnell Mutual is a company that actually lives its core values and treats its employees as what they truly are: the most important factor in all of our business successes,” he said.

At Foster Group in West Des Moines, the financial adviser firm began tracking employee engagement with Gallup five years ago, said Kate Juelfs, the firm’s chief operations and compliance officer.

“I think for us, where we really found the value is understanding how connected everyone on the team feels to the mission of the organization,” she said. “We do the survey a couple of times per year and we’ve been between 85% and 88% [engagement] consistently, although there is some weighting behind [the scores]. … For us, it’s been really evident that when our employees are connected to our mission, we give our clients the very best service.”

The engagement level among Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award winners is 73%, based on the firm’s “Q12” employee engagement surveys administered between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2020. On average, these 39 organizations have 18.3 engaged employees for every one actively disengaged employee ­– seven times the U.S. average and 14 times the global average.

The Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award criteria are more rigorous than other workplace awards, according to Gallup. While many workplace awards only require a small sample of survey participants, Gallup asks for every employee’s opinions, and winners must achieve a qualifying score that places them in the top tier of organizations.

Exceptionally high employee engagement allowed these organizations to adjust their focus quickly, with the trust of their employees, according to Gallup. “And, as Gallup’s engagement meta-analysis shows, employee engagement drives business improvement, from lower turnover to higher customer engagement to higher profitability, even during disruption.”