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Events Civil Service Live News Day 1 – Making the Civil Service a great place to workCivil Service Live
Making the Civil Service a great place to work
This content is written by the Civil Service News Team
The Civil Service is facing more challenges than ever before in terms of its reform agenda and increasing demands for high performance. So it's increasingly important to ensure the people who have to deliver against such a backdrop have everything they need to help achieve success.
That means understanding more about what connects civil servants to their department and the Civil Service overall, what aspects of their working lives and working environment matter most to them and what might need to change to improve their experience of work.
Why bother? There's a huge amount of evidence from the private and public sectors that shows engaged employees have a positive effect on an organisation's performance. Essentially engaged employees want their organisation to succeed which represents a significant opportunity for Government to deliver better outcomes for citizens.
At Civil Service Live, Government Communications' Imogen Wade and John Bell from the Civil Service Capability Group, shared the background and progress to date of a major cross-Government programme to develop a common approach to employee engagement across the Civil Service. It's designed to help identify the issues that drive people's profound and personal commitment to their organisation and enables managers to act on this information at a very local level to improve performance. It also shows how to align this to the business planning and performance review cycle, bringing major benefits.
A bespoke employee engagement training course has been developed and will be available for GCN members in April and will also be rolled out to HR and Change professionals and individual departments' training teams.
A DVD has also been produced on the work to date. It features input from the Cabinet Office and DEFRA – two of the departments who have piloted the new employee engagement approach. This, alongside an employee engagement toolkit, is available on this site.
If you would like any further information, please contact John Bell or email employee.engagement@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk The National School for Government is also offering employee engagement consultancy aligned to the cross-Government approach. Please contact Janet Waters at janet.waters@nationalschool.gsi.gov.uk for further information.