Publications

What are job families? Why are job families used in reward systems? What are the advantages of reward-linked job families? What do job families look like? This paper addresses these problems and discusses the practical issues and problems associated with job families.

The research was produced for the South West Regional Employment Forum. It presents the findings of an analysis of the health of the South West labour market on a range of labour market indicators.

As the first stage of a programme of research to investigate gender segregation IES carried out a review of research and an analysis of labour market and training statistics in five occupational areas where there were skills shortages. This publication is no longer available.

The subject of HR outsourcing has attracted considerable attention during recent years and there is a lot of talk in the personnel press about the subject. However, there exists rather less detail on its extent and the strategic intent that underpins it. Is there really a shift towards a greater and deeper outsourcing of HR activities? This review seeks to address this question.

Over time, there has been a general shift away from considerations of internal equity towards external equity. The value of a specific job role has become less about the particular skills that the employee brought to the job and more about its market price. This paper discusses how to establish the value of a job and looks at the issues of occupation, sector and location. The authors answer the question 'what drives interest in market-based pay?' and examine market-based pay in practice.

Managing careers in large organisations looks at the changing context of career development, processes for managing careers and career development roles and organisational capability.

What is 'poor performance', and who defines levels of acceptability? There are many reasons why people perform poorly, each of which can be tackled in a different way, ranging from formal to informal approaches, and with intentions to either improve or remove. This report looks at the approaches by seven large employers and offers strategic choices in understanding and tackling poor performance.

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.

The rapid development of eWork in Asia was, by the mid 2000s, leading to an equally rapid growth of a new professional and technical middle class in the Asian cities and regions where this development was taking place. This was driving a general development process, accompanied by an equally explosive growth in markets. This study drew on 59 in-depth case studies of eWork relocation, exploring the trends and implications for managers, workers and policy makers. It built on earlier work by the EC-sponsored EMERGENCE project carried out on 2000-2001.