It took about seven years of working with many companies around the world to develop enough of an understanding of employee engagement and see enough patterns for us to develop the first draft of The Engagement Bridge™ – the model which the book is organized around and can be seen below.
We then refined the Bridge model over 2 years, adding two new elements (it originally had 8) and reorganizing it several times as we started to understand better the relationships between the elements.
The book itself took two years to research and write. Glenn wrote the front of each chapter, which explains the strategy for each element on the bridge and the key behaviors we see in companies which do things differently. Co-author Debra Corey then researched and wrote the case studies which we call "plays" because it's a playbook.
Debra's research saw her look at another 120 companies over 18 months and we featured 60 of them in the book itself.