I was recently working with one of my San Francisco Bay Area executive coaching clients – the president of a professional services firm. We talked about how some of his employees were actively disengaged.

My executive coaching client and I discussed how to motivate and energize his workforce. I am coaching my client to create a more positive workplace culture that will fully engage his people.

Does your organization have zombies? A frequent character of science fiction novels and movies is the zombie – a soulless being with vacant eyes who wanders around purposelessly. The statistics on workforce engagement are shocking. According to research, only 29 percent of employees are motivated and energized. What, then, is happening to the other two-thirds of the people working in organizations? This is an even worse scenario than the old joke in which a manager is asked how many people work in his company and he responds, “About half of them.

Measuring employee engagement is critical for executives who should analyze their business for the second half of the year. Since 1997 the Gallup Organization has surveyed over 3 million employees in three hundred thousand work units within corporations. This survey consists of 12 questions—called the “Q12” — that measures employee engagement on a five-point scale indicating weak to strong agreement. The analyses of survey results show that those companies with high Q12 scores experience lower turnover, higher sales growth, better productivity, better customer loyalty and other manifestations of superior performance.