Publications

Several organisations that realise the importance of a diverse senior team, and are attempting to address inequality at this level, have asked IES to investigate what is going on: what are the barriers stopping women from getting to the top, are HR systems and processes inadvertently discriminatory, and what actions should organisations take? Although the majority of this client work has explored the career paths of women and the obstacles and enablers they have encountered, many of the findings can be applied across all under-represented employee groups.

There can be no doubt now that the public sector is going to have to find significant savings over the coming years. HR will have to both play its part in facilitating that process but also find its own new ways of working. This may not be painless but, as many are recognising, a crisis can often also be an opportunity to go back to first principles and make more radical changes to ensure that the service is truly fit for purpose.

This research captures data on issues relating to the consultant practitioner role in clinical imaging. It explores their impact on service operations and service improvement, and hence their immediate impact on clinical imaging services at two National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England.

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement commissioned IES to undertake market research to support the development of a 'National Ideas Platform'. There were four broad learning outcomes from the work, providing information on: what affects people's use of online resources and why some networks work; how do people go about sharing ideas at the moment; what technologies are people using at present and for what purposes and whether people want a new network.

As part of its ‘Delivering Quality and Value Programme’ on Children and Young People’s Emergency and Urgent Care, the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement designed two products - an engagement tool and a lesson plan - to promote the involvement of young people. This report is an evaluation of the prototype testing phase.

NHS Institute commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies to undertake work to understand how social movement theory could provide insights into how to reconnect the Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention message to the core values of staff and create a ‘contagious commitment’ to rapidly increasing quality and driving down costs. This report is structured around a visual summary of the social movement literature.

This report summarises the findings of an evaluation of Workplace Projects. The evaluation consisted of a telephone survey and four in-depth case studies of organisations. The aim of the evaluation was two-fold: to evaluate the impact of Acas Workplace Projects on client organisations; and to illustrate why, how and to what effect a selection of Workplace Projects had been commissioned.

The HR team at IES reflected on some of the priorities for organisations as they started to emerge from recession and looked to the future. In these short articles topic leaders provided insights that had emerged from recent consultancy and research practice across the public and private sector.

This report offers a contemporary look at Organisational Development (OD) practice from multiple perspectives. It considers the legacy of classical OD and the transition to a post-modern field of practice. Through practitioner and senior executive interviews, the research examines provider and customer perspectives and the implications for OD career development. There is also a very personal perspective with insights into the authors’ own careers.

The Acas Pre-Claim Conciliation Service (PCC) aims to identify workplace disputes between employers and employees which may become employment tribunal claims and resolve them effectively before they enter the tribunal system. The findings of this evaluation show cost and time savings to both employers and employees involved in this pilot and a net financial benefit to the taxpayer.