What makes an employee Highly Engaged?

On first take I'd say employee engagement is more a factor of the organization than the employee. Your graphic is exceptional but if the organization does not have a culture that fosters engagement your employees will have a difficult time moving from the low engagement to the high engagement side. Unfortunately not all organizations are looking for their employees, especially at lower levels, to be engaged, they want the assigned task to be completed in a timely manner period. I don't think that this is necessarily the best business plan, but in my opinion and from my observations this appears to be more common than the highly engaged business model.

Highly engaged people generally understand the organization. They learn their section and see the interconnectivity with others. The rest is on how hard they want to work.

One needs to be inspired by both what they are doing and whom they are doing it with.

Highly engaged employees who interact with customers of clientele should be outwardly focused on serving the needs of the customers IAW the business principles and guidelines COL Mikel J. Burroughs
Employees who interact with systems, processes, and software and rarely interact with people should be internally driven to do their best as they may well be some of the most important people who are rarely noticed unless something goes wrong.

Personally, if I feel like I am a part of the organization, that's what makes me highly engaged. If you feel like an easily replaceable cog in the corporate machine, your work will reflect that. But if you feel like a valuable asset to the company, you'll work a little harder because you know someone appreciates the work you do.

These engagement questions are the Gallup Organizations top 12 survey questions. I have been involved in Gallup Surveys for over 10 years. Mostly the results are misused by managers and eventually end up being manipulated by employees.

What I mean by that is lower scored areas are given action plans to work on as part of the annual goals/review process. Employees figure that out pretty quickly and give higher scores to avoid the extra work. Ta da! Consequently you can get good scores in low performing organizations with great engagement scores. Gallup doesn't like to talk about that.

Employees that are highly engaged are usually self motivated, self starting, goal oriented and driven. Folks waiting to have someone tell them how wonderful they are and have someone make them feel welcome and happy are likely not going to leaders in any organization. They may be good employees and do good quality work and every organization needs many of those.

I guess I am a little jaded about the value in Gallup's approach to employee engagement after having seen it in action for so long.

I wish I grasped this concept when I first checked into my first unit. I think I was finally able to fully engage squad leaders that were my age or older a year after my first day as a platoon commander.

I agree with every point in the diagram. The one thing I have found that motivates the new younger generation is saying something along the lines of this phrase "Please do...", "I would appreciate if you would do...", "When you get a moment..."

This irks me to no end. Are you serious? I am your boss and your paycheck is your "thank you." I could see it now the COL telling me to assault the bridge and I say "No, you didn't say please." I am not advocating for a rude and intolerable work environment but the new generation is filled with weenies.