Publications

All of IES's work on employee engagement to date has pointed to the importance of the relationship between the employee and the line manager. These findings led to this research, which aimed to identify how, in practice, engaging managers behave. We visited seven organisations and interviewed 25 managers, their teams, and their own managers, about their management style.

Business Link Health Checks were introduced in November 2008 as part of the government’s Real Help for Businesses Now package to help businesses identify and respond positively to the issues faced as a result of the economic downturn. This report provides an early assessment of Health Checks in terms of the effect it has on business behaviours and the anticipated longer-term outcomes.

The paper describes how organisations pursue effectiveness in reward management. It goes on to distil the lessons learnt into a model of evidence-based reward management that has the potential to enable line and HR managers to make better reward decisions and inform confirmatory research.

This project informed the development of critical mass pilots to tackle inequalities in the representation of particular groups in apprenticeship programmes. The pilots offered additional support to assist in the attraction, retention and completion of apprenticeships. The groups targeted included potential apprentices with disabilities, those who would be gender atypical within an occupation, and those from ethnic minority groups. This project consisted of three elements: a literature review, analysis of secondary data, and findings from 24 expert interviews.

This report is one of a suite of outputs of the Review of Employer Collective Measures study. The study reviewed the effectiveness of levers on increasing employer investment in skills on a collective basis, such as through levies and tax incentives, in order to provide advice to Ministers on which collective levers might be most effective to introduce or expand.

This report is one of a suite of outputs of the Review of Employer Collective Measures study. The study reviewed the effectiveness of levers on increasing employer investment in skills on a collective basis, such as through levies and tax incentives, in order to provide advice to Ministers on which collective levers might be most effective to introduce or expand. This paper draws together the study as a whole and presents advice on policy development options in light of the existing evidence.

IES Annual Review 2009

The Procurement Pilots were an initiative that was introduced in three government departments in 2006 to encourage procurers to achieve better race equality outcomes when procuring services. This report presents the full findings from the research to evaluate the models developed by procurers in the three departments to achieve the equality outcomes by working with suppliers in selected contracts, and assisting them to change or improve their approach to workforce equality and diversity. The specific means of achieving the changes were through compliance with new conditions in the selected contracts.

This study assesses the range of schemes introduced to prevent early exit (whether voluntary or involuntary) and to facilitate the employment of staff to pension age and beyond. The project was designed to explore how effectively and comprehensively different types of employer (eg by size and sector) are responding to workforce ageing.

In this paper Cowling considers, in a UK context, how talent is distributed across the larger cities of the UK and the key factors which appear to be driving this spatial distribution. He also considers what the potential economic outcomes of these disparities are for cities in the UK.