Publications

This paper outlines how managers can improve their effectiveness in developing others, and covers setting the climate, building a developmental relationship, feedback and focus, delivering development and active career development. It also demonstrates how these elements relate to each other. The paper outlines what managers should not do when developing others.

This paper is based on a study by IES that investigated the behaviour of managers who are good at developing other people in the workplace. This paper contains: characteristics of good and bad development support; situations where good developers make a difference; what motivates good developers of others; enablers and barriers to developign others; the impact of good and bad development support; a framework for managers as developers; some practical suggestions for managers; and information about the research.

Organisations are now placing heavy emphasis on the role of the manager as coach, and on the workplace as a learning environment. This report contains a literature review of ideas about managers as developers of others, presents the IES research findings, including a framework for managers, and relates some of the narrative accounts collected.

Engagement is a frequently used and fashionable term. Research into engagement, however, is almost non-existent. It appears that 'engagement' is not a recognised academic construct, yet all of us feel intuitively that we understand what it means. The work in this report is built on in 'Engagement: The Continuing Story', an IES report which tests our enagement measure and drivers tool in different settings and sectors.

This paper presents a small selection of a large volume of data collected in a study that investigated the behaviour of managers who are good at developing other people in the workplace. It was conducted in four major UK organisations.

The paper covers: the growing role of the line manager in development; managers as career developers; managers as mentors and coaches for staff; the business importance of managers as developers; developing the competency to develop others; barriers to staff development; and relation to management theories and formal frameworks.

This briefing aims to help you think about employee opinions, specifically: Why collect employee opinions in the first place. Is there are business benefit? What different methods are available for gathering employee opinions, and which is best for your organisation? How can your employee opinion survey really help you in understanding and managing your workforce?

Despite the relative lack of empirical work about survivor syndrome, there seems little doubt of its existence, and the challenges it poses not only to the HR function, but also the organisation as a whole. Strategies for tackling such an issue are highly organisation-specific, but there are several overriding themes and considerations that may help inform approaches to current, and future, organisational change.

The first Human Resource Strategy for the NHS ('Working Together') was published in September 1998. This required all NHS employers to carry out annual surveys of the attitudes of their staff. Since then, IES conducted three annual London-wide surveys, on behalf of a total of 99 London employers. A total of 97,000 employees at all levels completed questionnaires. This report encapsulates their views.

Low skill, low status jobs in the UK can constitute a first step on a ladder to rising lifetime earnings, in which experience, tacit skills, contacts and know-how can be acquired and used to promote a pay off later. However, in practice, they provide little or no basis for substantial advancement through the labour market: the evidence suggests that short-term mobility in the wage distribution is limited, and that individuals who do progress, do not generally progress very far.