Projects

This project is an employee engagement survey which will use an online survey. The project aims to explore the attitudes of staff members on a range of key subjects, including: wellbeing, change, job engagement etc.

The aim of this research is to investigate how early experiences of the workplace shape young people’s life at work and later working life – and therefore their long term health. IES will explore the nature of work available to 18-24 year olds and the trends in the sectors they work in. They will identify what would “good” look like in terms of good quality entry level work, the barriers for achieving this and finally suggest the asks of policy and practice (national and local) to deliver the support required.

We conducted four case studies with NHS Trusts in North-East England, selected from volunteer trusts by NHS Employers. The focus of the case studies was on the relationship between human resource management interventions, staff satisfaction and patient satisfaction. The method will be mainly interviews with senior people, particularly HR directors, although evidence will also be sought from other sources such as staff and patient surveys and key performance indicators.

IES, working with the Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC) and Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA), is undertaking research for the Department for Education into EU staff at UK higher education institutions to understand in greater depth individuals’ routes into working in the UK, their skills, current roles and longer-term career plans. The project will also develop the department’s understanding of how this relates to providers’ recruitment and retention plans in the short- to long-term, alongside wider workforce planning. The work involves analysis of HESA data, an online survey of HR directors, and an online survey of EU staff.

NHS Employers asked IES to produce a paper for line managers about employee engagement, based on our experience of running events for line managers in NHS trusts. The paper aimed to focus on engaging managerial behaviours and ways of building resilience within the team.

Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) and Universities HR (UHR) jointly commissioned IES to devise and test a standard measure of employee engagement for the HE sector with two parts: work engagement and organisation engagement. This involved the creation of a 12-statement, two-part indicator; testing the indicator via a pilot of two different HEIs; and analysing the results to demonstrate firstly reliability, and secondly the relationship of work and organisation engagement to positive organisational outcomes. The results showed that work engagement and organisation engagement emerged as two clear and separate factors, and confirmed the anecdotal belief that academic/research staff have higher levels of work engagement than corporate/professional/support services staff, and conversely that corporate/professional/support services staff have higher levels of organisation engagement than academic/research staff. They also demonstrated that work engagement is on the whole more important, as a predictor of positive organisational outcomes than organisation engagement. The report is available (to UCEA/UHR members only) on UCEA and UHR websites.

IES was commissioned to deliver the 2015 online employee engagement survey for a major regulatory organisation. We administered the survey on the organisation’s behalf and analysed results to identify engagement levels and highlight longer term trends by making comparisons with previous engagement surveys carried out by IES in 2010 and 2012. Findings were reported back in both written format and via presentations to staff to support action planning.

In early 2016, NHS Employers commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies to conduct an evidence review in the areas of total reward and employee engagement. The review looked at the nature of any relationship between the two and whether there was a link to organisational performance.

This study, led by Brighton Business School (University of Brighton), will pilot a short personal development programme with 20 to 25 employees in each participating organisation to find out if meaningfulness improves engagement, performance and well-being. The programme will involve a one-hour workshop followed by weekly (one hour) personal activities for four weeks. There will also be a control group that will have access to the materials later. Focus groups and surveys will be conducted during and one month after the intervention. Participating organisations will receive a research report and feedback session. An event will be held for participating organisations and IES HR Network members.

IES is collaborating with the University of Brighton to conduct some original research into the links between HR practices and employee performance and well-being. The research study will be led by Dr Luke Fletcher of Brighton Business School, and will involve a survey, to be administered twice at an interval of six months, of at least 300 employees across a minimum of two organisations. The results will be disseminated at an event (planned for January 2017) to be hosted by the University of Brighton.