Dilys was formerly employed by the NHS, where she held a variety of HR and project management posts at Regional, District and hospital level. Dilys’s main areas of experience at IES are employee engagement, workforce planning and talent management, and evaluation.
Employee engagement
Dilys has conducted a variety of employee opinion surveys for employers in the private and public sectors, including managing a four year project to conduct annual surveys for a consortium of 55 London NHS trusts and health authorities, together with annual benchmarking reports. Examples of recent employee survey clients are the Housing Ombudsman Service, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, the Architects Registration Board and the Institute of Cancer Research. In addition, she has conducted follow-up work in organisations (for example, the Health and Safety Executive) to delve deeper into their engagement survey results.
Dilys has also managed several surveys of professions, including a survey of senior HR professionals exploring HR career paths for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD); several surveys of the veterinary profession for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), the latest being 2014; and for the Bar Council and Bar Standards Board, the first and second (2011 and 2013) biennial surveys of practising barristers.
Studies for the Ministry of Defence have examined a variety of topics under the broad headings of ‘Personnel’ and ‘Training’, for the UK Armed Forces. A Department of Health project involved the production of business case materials in support of the NHS staff survey. Dilys has also managed the production of an ‘Engagement in HE’ toolkit for UCEA and UHR, and a further activity to devise and test an engagement measure for use within the HE sector. Currently, she is running a series of two-day courses on engaging management for line managers in the NHS.
Dilys has led IES’s research into employee engagement since 2002, and is currently developing a manager assessment tool based on her ‘Engaging Manager’ research which explored engaging and disengaging managerial behaviours. She is a member of CIPD Engagement Forum’s steering group and advised the MacLeod Review in 2008 to 2009, after which she became a member of the steering group for the Engage for Success movement’s guru group. She is co-facilitating a special interest group for Engage for Success, exploring the future direction of engagement (as both a concept and a practice), and is part of a team that carried out a systematic review of staff engagement in the NHS for the National Institute of Health Research.
Workforce planning and talent management
Dilys has run a number of workshops for different clients, including the NHS, Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Royal Navy, to introduce participants to workforce planning techniques. Recently, she co-facilitated an action learning set on strategic workforce planning for IES’s HR Network members. She has participated in a study for a large accountancy company to examine the way that trainees move through the organisation.
A project for the Association of Chief Police Officers modelled promotions into the senior ranks of the police force, and a follow-up project examined the issue of how many new entrants should be recruited onto the police fast track graduate scheme each year. Two studies for HSBC produced forecasts of the future progression of members of various talent pools.
For the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), she carried out a study of veterinary career choices, and a further study of perceptions of veterinary careers was funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), as part of the ‘Gateways to the Professions’ initiative. A study for the Royal Navy explored flexible careers options, and for the Family Nurse Partnership National Unit, Dilys led a study into the Family Nurse workforce. Currently, Dilys is co-facilitating an IES HR Network interest group on talent management.
Evaluation
Examples of the evaluations Dilys has managed includes the NHS team pay pilot study, which examined the impact of introducing team pay bonuses and improvement funds in selected trusts in England. A collaborative project for the Department of Health evaluated Nurse Education Partnership learning at the demonstration sites. For the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement she has carried out several evaluations, including the pilot phase of the introduction of innovation and improvement learning modules, the No Delays Achiever spread and adoption pilot, and an OD programme at an NHS Foundation Trust. Dilys has conducted an evaluation of partnership working within the Sussex Dementia Partnership, and is about to begin a benefits realisation project for the Police Federation, and an evaluation of a leadership programme for the NHS Leadership Academy.