Publications

It seems so obvious that a culture of openness and transparency is a ‘good thing’. If people are encouraged to speak out, they will prevent harm; make suggestions for improvement leading to a better quality product or service; come up with creative ideas – and this will lead to better organisational performance. This paper looks at the need for organisations to establish a culture of openness, the drivers and practical considerations.

This paper explores some of the literature about achieving a diverse top team, and some of the organisational benefits that diversity brings. The literature demonstrates that the benefits flowing from a diverse top team are only achieved if they are not tokenism and the culture of the organisation supports diverse working throughout its processes. The paper was also published as an article in IES Perspectives on HR 2014: HR responding to threats and opportunities.

We have stumbled across a few references recently to crowdsourced leadership and were intrigued. Is this something new, a repackaging of old approaches or a quickly forgotten fad? We thought it worth exploring what is being said about the concept and what the implications might be for employers.

IES has collaborated with work-life balance charity, Working Families, on the ‘Top Employers for Working Families’ benchmarking and awards. The plan was to develop a benchmark which showed employers the ‘platinum standard’ in being a family-friendly, flexible employer. The idea has developed over the years to demonstrate to employers that flexibility is also about business excellence and that being flexible and wanting your employees to be flexible creates the right conditions for productivity and competitive advantage. This paper outlines the benchmark and standards behind the awards.

Talent management continues to be high on employers’ agendas and over the previous year IES has both researched and advised in this area with organisations at varying stages of their talent management journey. This paper was also published as an article in IES Perspectives on HR 2014: HR responding to threats and opportunities.

The research is an exploratory study into whether employees receiving coaching at work experience any impact on their perceptions of well-being, job satisfaction and engagement at work. The study is unique in its focus on coaching primarily delivered by internal volunteer coaches to a range of managers and non-managers. Previous studies into well-being have tended to focus on top leaders coached by external coaches.

This eight-page paper offers an overview of what is meant by resilience and related terminology, to support HR when navigating relevant advertising literature and other HR information sources.

The European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER) is a pan-European survey of management and worker representatives in enterprises with more than ten employees on how health, safety and well-being are managed at work. This project involved in-depth cognitive interviews with ESENER respondents in five EU countries aimed at exploring the reasons and thinking behind the answers given by respondents to the survey, both to enhance understanding of what respondents mean by their answers and as a means for developing and improving the quality of future versions of the survey.

In this issue: job creation and job loss at a glance; support instruments for restructuring in Greece; cases in focus: Radio Television Valenciana, Spain and Liepajas Metallurg, Latvia; and sector in focus: transport and storage – Amazon’s expansion in Central and East Europe.

This report is part of The Engaging Manager Series. Each short report in the Engaging Manager Series explores different aspects of engaging management. This report explores how engaging managers deal with difficult situations at work. These include managing poor performance, tackling unacceptable behaviour, and breaking bad news to individuals or the team.