By Michael F. Carmichael
Dec. 2, 2010
For 20 years or more the Gallup Organization has been looking at the idea of employees’ attachment to their jobs, trying to understand whether that attachment does anything to the bottom line of their employers.
Yes, says social scientist Katherine Loflin, there is a connection between employee attachment and a company’s bottom line. “More interestingly,” she continues. “Gallup has found that the employees’ feelings about their job comes before other factors. As those feelings increase, they become more productive which makes the company more successful, which helps its bottom line.”
|
For the past four or five years Gallup has been looking at whether this “attachment” is true for a community. Loflin, formally a program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, now serves as a consultant to both Gallup and Knight. She says the two organizations were interested in collaborating to determine whether there is “some kind of relationship about how people feel about a place and the economic growth and health of that place. Does attachment to place matter in the same way that it did in the workplace setting.
“The Knight Foundation at the same time had been looking at the idea of ‘does place matter?’” Loflin continues. “What is the role of ‘place’ as we become increasingly more technologically dependent? Have we lost ‘place’? Or, is place still an important factor in our lives? So the ideas of Gallup and Knight coincided and they developed this project together to further both of their interests in the area.”
The result is a three-year study called The Soul of A Community.
Knight – funded in part by the publishing giant by the same name – has been working on community-based projects for 50-plus years in the 26 communities where the publishers either have or had newspapers. At the same time, the other side of the Foundation’s effort is devoted to bringing journalism into the digital age. So, technology is a ‘pivot point’ as Loflin says, in their approach.
Does the fact that technology is enabling people to connect on a much more global scale trump the notion of place? Loflin explains, “It’s been an interesting journey for all of us to wonder where are we with place? Is there such a thing anymore as place-making? Or are places just a collection of buildings and streets and where people put their heads at night to go to sleep? Does place still have an identity for people? What we’re finding is that place still seems to matter in real tangible ways.”