Source · Select Committees · Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Recommendation 6
6
Accepted
Review the value of the Employee Engagement Index for Civil Service decision-making.
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) 24 Civil Service People Survey
Government Response Summary
The Cabinet Office accepts the recommendation, stating it already reviewed the Employee Engagement Index in 2022 and will continue to explore its usefulness in wider work planned on the Survey beyond 2023, aiming for a new version in 2025.
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.