Recommendation 5

HM Government · verbatim extract Accepted

Recommendation: Fourteen years on from the launch of the People Survey, the Cabinet Office should review the value of its headline Employee Engagement Index, in consultation with users of the survey. This review should consider the degree to which the measure is used to inform decision-making, and whether there may be other, more helpful measures available. The Cabinet Office should provide an update on its plans for this work in its response to this report. (Paragraph 24). 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 Australian 1 and US governments surveys 2 and in the NHS England 3 and UK Armed Forces 4 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. Recommendation: As part of its plan to improve available data on the experiences and performance of civil servants (see paragraph 20), the Cabinet Office should summarise the opportunities that are available for enhancing existing quality assurance processes via the cross referencing of sources, and which of these it intends to pursue. (Paragraph 30). The Cabinet Office has a robust quality assurance process in place to ensure the validity of the findings. There is a broad range of validity checks including automated ones built into the online platform; offline ones run through automated, reproducible, version-controlled scripts where outputs are tested with code using different softwares (e.g. R or STATA [programing languages for statistical computing]); and manual checks to maximise the chances of spotting errors by using different methods. The Cabinet Office accepts this recommendation and recognises the usefulness of including additional cross-referencing of sources in the quality assurance processes. At this stage we think options to pursue include: the current year’s scores will continue to be ‘sense checked’ by comparing them to previous year’s scores before release; each organisation will continue to cross-reference their findings with those organisations of a similar size or doing similar type of work e.g. policy or delivery; participating organisations will cross-reference the results from the survey with the findings from their pulse surveys programmes (if they have one) that include the same measures. For example, DWP has a Listening Programme with quarterly (and/or as required around business priorities) Pulse Surveys to engage with colleagues and gain feedback across the employee journey. The pulse surveys are specifically designed to respond to DWP needs a