institute for employment studies

about IES

Dilys Robinson BA, MBA, FCIPD, FRSA

Profile

Dilys’ main research and consultancy interests are employee attitudes (specifically employee engagement) and workforce planning. She has also has expertise in evaluation.

Employee attitudes

At IES, Dilys manages the Employee Motivation and Well-being theme of the HR Network. The focus is the business benefits that can be gained from a greater understanding of employees’ attitudes, motivation and commitment towards their job and their organisation. Dilys has recently completed a major two-stage research study to define and measure employee engagement, and to understand its drivers. The engagement research is continuing, with a literature review and a new research study, ’The Engaging Manager’, nearing completion.

In terms of client work, Dilys has conducted a variety of surveys for employers in the private and public sectors. Examples include a multinational investment bank, a private hospitals group and a high-technology research and manufacturing company. For four years, she managed a project to conduct annual surveys for a consortium of 55 London NHS trusts and health authorities, which included the production of annual benchmarking reports. A survey of senior HR professionals for the CIPD explored HR career paths, while for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons Dilys ran the 2006 membership survey, and the 2008 survey of veterinary nurses. A study for MoD examined the motivation of Regular Reservists to maintain contact and play a more active role.

Workforce planning

Dilys has run a number of workshops for different clients to introduce HR practitioners to workforce planning. HR business partners have found these techniques particularly useful for encouraging dialogue with managers. She also has expertise in workforce modelling. A project for the Association of Chief Police Officers, for example, modelled promotions into the senior ranks of the police force, and a follow-up study examined the issue of how many new entrants should be recruited onto the police fast track graduate scheme each year. Dilys has also carried out workforce modelling for a major multinational bank, looking at the impact of talent and management development schemes. For DEFRA, she carried out a study of veterinary career choices, while a further study of perceptions of veterinary careers was funded by DfES, as part of the ‘Gateways to the Professions’ initiative.

Dilys is recently completed an action learning research study, on behalf of IES’s HR Network, on the theme of human capital measurement. She is co-author of IES’s 2008 Guide to Workforce Planning.

Evaluation

Dilys has carried out a variety of evaluations, mainly for NHS clients. For example, she managed the evaluation strand of the NHS team pay pilot study, which examined the impact of introducing team pay bonuses and improvement funds in selected trusts in England. She recently carried out an evaluation of the pilot phase of the introduction of innovation and improvement learning modules for the NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement, and a further evaluation of the No Delays Achiever spread and adoption pilot for the same client.

Education

Career