A few weeks ago I mentioned that the 2012 People Survey was a key mechanism we will use to “listen and act”, and I want to thank the more than 297,000 people who took the time to complete the survey and provide their views.
Today, we have published the Civil Service benchmark scores. If you don’t know what your Department or Agency is doing with their results then you should ask your manager or senior leaders. After sharing results internally with staff, Departments and Agencies will be publishing their results over the coming months. As we have done in previous years we will be publishing a summary of organisational scores and a more detailed analysis of the Civil Service-wide results on 1st February 2013.
As the results have just come out I don’t have all the answers and explanations, but it is clear that we must work together to make our organisations not only places where we do great work but also places where it is great to work. Today I want to share my initial reflections on the results and welcome your comments and views on what the results say and mean for the Civil Service and the Civil Service Reform agenda.
When we talk about the People Survey we usually head straight for what isn’t going so well, but this year’s results show some great strengths about the Civil Service. There are some areas, such as the work we do, the teams we work in, and our line managers, where we have some great scores – 89% are interested in their work; 84% are clear about what is expected in their job; 79% saying their manager is open to their ideas; and 79% saying their team works together to improve the service they provide. We should be proud about these scores because over the past four years they have remained high. We must make sure that in the year ahead we don’t forget about these strengths.
Last year the benchmark scores were generally unchanged from the 2010 score, which may have surprised some people. This year, despite a tough operating environment the benchmark scores have broadly increased. The benchmark employee engagement index is up two percentage points to 58%, back to where we were in 2009. Across the nine other survey themes all but one has seen an increase in the benchmark score. The largest increase has been for the leadership and managing change benchmark, up three percentage points – but this remains our greatest challenge, while 56% of our people say they are kept informed about matters that affect them, only 29% say that change is managed well. This has already been recognised in the Civil Service Reform Plan and we are working on making improvements to our management of change.
We’ve also seen some encouraging improvements on a number of questions where we’ve previously seen drops or which have been historically low-scoring. For example, the benchmark score for feeling involved in “decisions that affect your work” is up four percentage points to 53%, after dropping seven percentage points beteen 2009 an 2010.
Similarly the questions about learning and development dropped between 2009 and 2010 but we’re starting to see things improve this year. The benchmark for thinking “there are opportunities to develop my career in my organisation” has also risen four percentage points, but that’s only taken us to 35% so there’s still a lot of room for improvement. The Civil Service Reform Plan is addressing this issue with a commitment to give staff at least five days a year of learning and development.
Finally I’m pleased to see that the three questions we ask on taking action as a result of the survey have all seen good improvements this year. I want to make sure we continue the good progress on this, because I want to make sure we put our people at the heart of the way we manage the Civil Service.
You may be thinking that talking about two, three and four percentage point movements isn’t really very much at all, but that’s because of the way we calculate the benchmark scores. The Civil Service benchmark is the median score of all the 97 Departments and Agencies that take part, and in the past we certainly have seen much bigger movements in the results of individual organisations. I’m sure it will be the same case again this year. To move the median we have to make the whole of the Civil Service better not just a few places here and there.
Whilst I have spent some time focusing on what is improved or what is a good score, I am not complacent about some very challenging numbers in the results. The 29% score for believing that “change is managed well” is too low and something we must get better at.
Over the next month I, and other senior leaders across the Civil Service, will be looking at the Civil Service level results in more detail, and I think it’s important that just as everyone has an opportunity to take part in the People Survey everyone has an opportunity to comment on the results. I don’t say this because it’s the “right thing to say”, I say it because I know that organisations perform at their best when everyone feels they are in great place to work where they are able to fulfil their potential.
People Survey results show that leadership and managing change continues to be a problem but this is not confined to the public sector; it is only visible because of we run the annual survey and publish the results. Our immediate reaction is generally to look internally for quick fixes. We should look at other sectors first to generate ideas.
The importance of leadership and leadership development in supporting knowledge creation, sharing and utilisation is the subject of the upcoming Henley Knowledge Management (KM) Forum annual conference (http://www.henley.ac.uk/executiveeducation/excellence/cl-knowledgemanagementforum.aspx) on 27 and 28 February 2013. There are a host of pre-eminent speakers including Air-Vice Marshall Mike Harwood from the RAF who will talk about knowledge leadership in combat, and Professor Karl-Erik Sveiby, one of the founding fathers of knowledge management.
I would recommend that Permanent Secretaries or Director General-level attend Day 2 which focuses on leadership. Several departments (including Cabinet Office, HMT, HMRC, FCO, Home Office, BIS) are members of the Henley KM Forum and, as part of membership, have 2 places each allocated at the conference. We should use these spaces wisely to increase the value of our membership, for the good of individual departments and for the civil service as a whole. (More spaces at the conference can be purchased.) Other members include Syngenta, Allianz, Deloitte, Ford, United Utilities, EDF Energy, MWH, BAE Systems, Cranfield School of Management, Greenwich University.
The Civil Service Reform (CSR) Plan (p24) recommends more points of contact between the civil service and other sectors. The Henley KM Forum is an easy way to achieve this.
Is there any information on why we can’t see our department’s results on the survey? We work for Cabinet Office Communications and we seem to have been excluded from the results
Jo, Cabinet Office results are viewable on the CabWeb Restricted intranet.
The results for Cabinet Office Comms/including those people in the ragions are not available. They seem to have gone into a black hole. Not very transparent!
*regions
Systematic attacks on pay, pensions,terms and conditions, possible regional pay and even cuts in how much time my union rep can spend helping me; these are the real fundamental issues affecting civil servants today not whether i feel well managed or what my engagement score is. I understand these things all add to a better working environment but they only have prominence now to make us feel we have a contribution or in other words to distract us while the rug is pulled from under our feet. It is extremely hard to feel engaged when our own employer whips up the press to attack us, giving them leverage to beat us with a bigger stick
32,670 people said they are bored – Blimey!
47,520 people said they didn’t what they were doing – Wow!
29% is up 3% is the largest rise – futile?
103,950 people see their career path – how many were promoted this year?
this is 35% of people which is up 4% – by my mathematical reckoning this is larger than the 3% increase above – Confused?
Fair play for using the median – I think this is the best avergae in this case. Means get skewed and modes prove nothing.
Does age of staff affect the change management data?
I assume the 53% of people that said they were not involved in changes were not all members of the senior civil service.
The 37% response to question B18 ‘poor performance is dealt with effectively in my team’ seems out of kilter with the other responses (60 – 81%) in the ‘my manager section’. I think the problem lies with the wording of question B18. Answering Yes to the current question suggests that poor performance is a problem even if it is dealt with effectively. Answering No implies that poor performance is a problem but is not being dealt with effectively. Either way the answer implies that poor performance is a problem so what is the correct answer to B18 if poor performance is not an issue or doesn’t occur? The current wording is on a par with the old music hall joke about ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’
I think that question B18 needs to be split into two questions:
B18a ‘Poor performance a problem in my team?’
B18b ‘If so, poor performance is dealt with effectively in your my team’
I think your logic is infallible on this point, but I do now need closure on the music hall joke
B18 ‘poor performance is dealt with effectively in my team’ only partially addresses poor performance. The survey did not ask about my perception of poor performance being dealt with elsewhere in the organisation. In my view, poor performance is not only about lack ability and low movitation, it also includes behaviour.
Senior managers are under pressure to deliver specific objectives and if someone is prone to narcissistic behaviour, the rest of the organisation suffers. When I witness the impact of boorish behaviour and it is unrelated to my immediate team, I ask myself, who is addressing this bad behaviour? Why is it acceptable? Bad manners affects the whole culture, causing stress, anxiety, reduced productivity, and others take it as permission to emulate, making a bad situation worse.
I’d like to see a promotion of good manners so that trust and respect are included as measures of performance.
I think it is fantastic that this data is made so visible and freely available. This can only breed healthy analysis and comparisons. One particular point, raised in this article, takes my attention and that is about how well (or unsuccessfully) change is managed. We know from good research that in most cases (as high as two thirds) change programmes fail to deliver what they set out to. So perhaps these engagement scores on change aren’t so bad after all. However, we have to get better at this. My first proposal is that organisations move from an age of tell (regarding change) and even an age of sell to the ages of involvement and empowerment. These are illustrated in the attached Diagram. Ultimately though I think that better change will arise through dismantling the dangerous and performance constraining habits of deference. I write about the solution in “Never Mind the Bosses” http://www.nevermindthebosses.com thank you for sharing this data http://t.co/WvXLd1X7
Thank you for this I shall take a look – sounds interesting – I think change can be best managed by not really thinking about it in the first place.
There is nothing more obstructive than the human mind when it begins to ponder the unknown future.
#justnevermindfullstop
Once again the top of Ministry of Defence will look at the results and assume its some other manager’s problem – not us up here. Its the fools down there in the boondocks!
Leadership & Managing Change only 22% positive – same as last year – 19% below the CS score and 28% below CS high performers.
Defence Transformation is wreaking havoc in the Department changing everything at once. No stability anywhere. The financial system is broken. The planning system is broken. We are selling Trading Funds and outsourcing services on a large scale as well as driving towards GOCO for the DES & DIO. Who on earth is going to be left who is capable of managing these monsters and what chance is there that we have properly defined effective customer/supplier relationships between all the players?
A trite round robin e-mail from the DG Transformation is no real comfort. Get a grip, kill the GOCOs now, and provide some anchors around which the others changes can be made well.
What’s going on in the MoD? I’ve always been led to believe that HMRC were the most cynical of all the government departments?