Source · Select Committees · Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Recommendation 5
5
Accepted
Paragraph: 23
Employee Engagement Index value unclear, overlooking tangible Civil Service issues.
Recommendation
It is not clear what value the Employee Engagement Index offers, beyond consistency with previous years’ results. In drawing together responses on abstract questions on issues such as pride, advocacy, and attachment, it overlooks more tangible issues such as leadership, learning and development, and pay and benefits, where action could usefully be taken.
Government Response Summary
The Cabinet Office accepts the recommendation, committing to explore the content and usefulness of the Employee Engagement Index in wider work planned for the Civil Service People Survey. They are examining options to improve the survey, aiming to implement changes over the next two years for a new version by 2025.
Paragraph Reference:
23
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The Cabinet Office conducted a strategic review of the Civil Service People Survey over Summer 2022 in collaboration with a wide-range of users and stakeholders including: diversity & inclusion leads; digital experts; analysts; survey managers; Civil Service Internal Communications; Office for National Statistics experts; and academics. These discussions included the usefulness of the engagement measure. The group agreed that the Survey should continue to have the Employee Engagement Index as one of its key measures. The Civil Service People Survey uses five questions measuring pride, advocacy, attachment, inspiration and motivation to produce an engagement score. Our theoretical approach to engagement is designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being, in line with existing literature. An identical or very similar engagement index is used widely in e.g. the Australian1 and US governments surveys2 and in the NHS England3 and UK Armed Forces4 staff surveys to distil the employee experience into one measure. The analytical framework used in the Civil Service People Survey does not consider engagement as an isolated concept, but is one which is linked to and driven by nine key themes of employees’ experience at work (the themes are: my work, my team, resources and workload, organisational objectives and purposes, learning and development, pay and benefits, my manager, inclusion and fair treatment, and leadership and managing change). The results of the Civil Service People Survey have shown consistently that ‘leadership and managing change’ is the strongest driver of employee engagement in the Civil Service, followed by the ‘my work’ and ‘my manager’ themes. The ‘organisational objectives and purpose’ and ‘resources and workload’ themes are also strongly associated with changes in levels of employee engagement. Taking action on people’s experience of work in these nine themes, increases the level of employee engagement which then should raise performance and increase wellbeing. The Cabinet Office accepts this recommendation. We will build on the work done in previous years and will explore the content and usefulness of the Employee Engagement Index in wider work planned on the Survey beyond 2023. As part of this work the Cabinet Office is currently examining different options on how to improve the Survey in the future, embedding the recommendations from the Committee’s report, and plans to implement those changes over the next two years working towards a new version of the Civil Service People Survey in 2025.