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Employee Engagement and Unionization



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Why else do workers unionize? Modern Survey conducted a study that measured things such as employees’ interest in being represented by a union, confidence in senior management, and employee engagement. It concluded that 50% of actively disengaged employees would vote yes to unionize, while only 20% of such employees would vote no union.

It concludes that paying attention to employee engagement levels within your organization helps to foster positive relationships between employees and management and decreases the likelihood of a workforce seeking union representation. Gallup surveys complement these conclusions. For example, among the over 500 organizations in which Gallup measures employee engagement, 45% of nonunion employees were engaged, while fewer—38%—of unionized employees were engaged.

Findings like these don’t prove that engaged employees are less likely to support a unionization effort in their companies, or that unionized employees are less engaged. The findings are correlational, so they only “prove” that when employee engagement goes up, unionization goes down. It could be that the same management policies affect both employee engagement and nonunionization. But on the whole such findings do suggest that the same sorts of policies that improve employee engagement may also reduce the likelihood of being unionized.
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Management
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