What makes your employees highly engaged?

This infographic I came across on LinkedIn is rather self-explanatory so I'll save an introduction.

Click on the image to enlarge

What I do find interesting however is the bottom statistic, knowing what is expected of them at work, which is the only element shown as being almost identical between engaged and disengaged employees.

When you contrast that against the highly engaged experiences - talking about progress, encouraging development and praising work there is a clear pattern. It's not so much about the 'what' but instead the 'how' and 'why' that can really help drive engagement when talking about management direction. Do employees still need to know what's expected of them? Yes of course they do but if you want highly engaged employees you'll need to deliver much more than that. 

I also took note of the phrase They have a best friend at work. This puzzled me a little bit however in my quick search for the original image source was not able to find further information. I can only think this refers to having a trusted friend in the colloquial sense. 

My final thought is some of these statements are almost truisms such as Their manager cares about them however even so there were a number of respondents who clearly answered in the negative. It would be fascinating to take a deeper look at some of these respondents and cross reference answers against other data points. Are these 'lone-wolf 'engaged employees who plough their own destiny or just unavoidable statistical deviations? Without knowing more background on these numbers I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I'll have a new perspective in a few years when I have run through number of new engagement pieces both individual and organisational.