Publications

This report was produced for the GEO by the Institute for Employment Studies and aimed to understand transparency on gender pay gaps and workforce diversity in organisations with between 150 and 249 employees. It investigated both the propensity of organisations of this size to be open about pay and diversity in their organisation and what they do analyse and report on.

In terms of engagement and motivation, the evidence shows that well-managed flexibility elicits higher performance and the potential business benefits of flexible working on productivity, financial performance, quality, employee attraction, retention, commitment and reduced absence are well documented. Many organisations have deployed flexible working in the recession with great success. This benchmark aims to provide data and a crucial insight into what is currently working in practice, what needs to work, and the direction of future organisational focus.

The UK Commission developed a series of Briefing Papers with a focus on equality and skills in a changing economy. The aim was to inform and enable connected thinking about how to enable opportunity in the labour market through skills. Each paper provided commentary and analysis for an equality group or theme: disability and skills in a changing economy; gender and skills in a changing economy; low skills and social disadvantage in a changing economy; older people and skills in a changing economy and spatial inequality and skills in a changing economy.

To further explore how highly-skilled doctoral graduates contribute to UK society, culture and economy, this report highlights the employment pathways of researchers within and between six distinct occupational clusters; describing the stability, mobility and progression of researcher careers. This study illustrates that doctoral research training is a good foundation for a wide variety of occupations and demonstrates the flexibility of researchers who take advantage of a diversity of employment opportunities.

This research evaluates the impact of the Duty to Manage asbestos in non-domestic premises. It aims to: establish levels of compliance with the Duty; establish the extent to which compliance by dutyholders has brought about improved work practices among maintenance workers; re-assess the assumptions made in the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) which accompanied the introduction of the Regulations about costs/benefits of the duty; identify/investigate factors influencing dutyholders' compliance with the Duty and examine any barriers to compliance; and determine the proportion of non-domestic and domestic rented premises which contain asbestos and the rate at which this is being removed.

The study provides an invaluable resource to inform policy in this area covering business start-up, support for unemployed people to become self-employed, enterprise education, and business growth. This small scale, explorative research study looks at the hitherto relatively under-researched question of the role of skills and training in the development of self-employment. It draws on a literature review, data analysis from the Labour Force Survey, and a series of expert interviews.

In 2008 the Institute for Employment Studies and Ipsos MORI were commissioned to conduct a two-year evaluation of National Skills Academies (NSAs) by the former Learning and Skills Council (LSC), now the Skills Funding Agency. NSAs were first established from 2006 and were rolled out incrementally over five rounds of development, under a competitive bidding process. This report synthesises evidence gathered over both years of the evaluation.

This interim report sets out the findings from a survey undertaken of all care homes and domiciliary care organisations that had introduced changes to information and communications technology funded through the first round of the Get Connected grant scheme (funded through the Department of Health and managed by the Social Care Institute for Excellence, SCIE). It gives examples of the ways in which technology is being used to improve quality of life for residents in care and nursing homes and for individuals receiving domiciliary care services.

This qualitative study, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), was designed to provide a detailed understanding, from a customer perspective, of the views and subsequent experiences of people who apply for Employment and Support Allowance but whose claim is unsuccessful – either because their claim was closed by Jobcentre Plus or withdrawn by the customer before it was assessed, or because the customer was found fit for work and not entitled to ESA.

This publication was authored by Stefan Speckesser before he joined IES.