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Employee engagement and job satisfaction

Employee engagement

The extent to which agencies’ policies and practices encourage employees to actively engage with their work and their organisation is a key component of better organisational performance. In addition to driving higher levels of productivity and employee retention, engaged employees are more likely to act as organisational advocates and can play a powerful role in promoting their organisation as an employer of choice.²

The areas which are said to most strongly influence employee engagement include:

• immediate management
• career development and/or opportunities
• regular feedback and communication of goals and expectations
• good working relationships
• leadership and the purpose and values of the organisation
• salary and conditions.³

Engagement is not about driving employees to work harder. It is about providing an environment where they will work more effectively.

Employee satisfaction with employee engagement factors

This year, the employee survey again included a number of questions that particularly related to the concept of employee engagement. As for last year’s report, factor analysis, a statistical technique used to group together variables where responses are highly related, was used to give an overall summary picture of how the APS is performing in the area of employee engagement.⁴ Results for the 2007 factor analysis are not directly comparable with the 2006 results, as the questions that make up each factor are not necessarily the same.

The factor analysis this year identified a set of 12 factors which provide an overall summary of employee perceptions of issues ranging from governance, agency culture, merit, work-life balance and work group effectiveness. They do not attempt to measure how important each factor is to an employee’s overall level of engagement with their organisation. In the broadest sense, however, they can be said to provide an overall indication of employee engagement in the APS.

The results of the factor analysis continue to indicate a generally healthy APS. More than 60% of respondents to the employee survey were satisfied with the majority of the factors. Figure 3.1 shows employee satisfaction with each of the 12 factors.

Although the factor results are not directly comparable, they were broadly consistent with the analysis in 2005–06. Employees were most satisfied with the factor Understanding Current Role (83%), closely followed by the factors Work Group (77%) and Current Job (72%). The factors that employees were least satisfied with were Agency Culture, Merit, Career and Development Opportunities, Senior Leaders, and Learning and Development. Each of the factors will be discussed in more detail in later chapters.

A summary employee engagement item was also created to provide a single overarching view of employees’ satisfaction with the engagement factors. The APS-wide result on this summary measure shows that on average, 66% of employees were satisfied with the factors relevant to employee engagement (see Table 3.1).

The summary measure was used to compare satisfaction with employee engagement factors in different groups. There have been mixed findings about the impact of demographic attributes on employee engagement in international research. The Corporate Leadership Council (CLC) found that employee engagement was not dependent on employee work segment and demography.⁵ The Institute for Employment Studies (IES), however, found that employee engagement can vary in association with personal and job characteristics, and with experiences at work. Engagement levels, for example:

• decline as employees get older
• are higher for minority ethnic respondents
• tend to be higher for managers and professionals than for their colleagues in supporting roles
• decline as length of service increases
• are negatively impacted if employees have an accident or injury at work, or experience harassment (particularly if the manager is the source)
• are positively impacted if employees have a personal development plan and have received a formal performance appraisal within the preceding year.⁶

Although the APS results are not a direct measure of employees’ levels of engagement, they do broadly support the findings of the IES. Satisfaction with both the summary measure (see Table 3.1) and individual employee engagement factors varied substantially between different segments of the APS workforce.

Table 3.1: Employee engagement—overall satisfaction by group, 2006–07⁷

Group	Employees agreed/satisfied (%)
Indigenous employees	82
Employees from non-English speaking backgrounds	64
Employees with disability	66
Employees aged 45 years and over	60
Young employees (under 25 years)	78
Women	72
Men	61
APS 1–6 employees	65
Executive Level employees	68
SES employees	91
<1 year service in APS	90
1–5 years service in APS	76
>5 years service in APS	61
All employees	66
Source: Employee survey

Consistent with the IES findings, the SES, Indigenous employees, and employees with shorter lengths of service were more satisfied overall with the factors relevant to employee engagement than the APS average. Women were also more satisfied, as were employees who had received performance feedback in the last 12 months.

The least satisfied demographic groups were men and employees aged 45 years and over. Satisfaction levels with the 12 employee engagement factors for each of the diversity groups are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Employees who reported that they had been subjected to harassment or bullying also reported much lower levels of satisfaction (38% compared with 72% for those not subjected to harassment or bullying).

These results suggest that in focusing on strategies to increase levels of employee engagement, agencies should take into account the different needs of particular groups of employees. The impact of bullying and harassment and performance feedback on the results also emphasises the importance of agencies having in place effective and consistently applied HR policies and practices. Staff surveys are a useful vehicle for agencies in assessing how levels of engagement and satisfaction vary within their own organisation.

 

2 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), Employee Engagement (Factsheet), January 2007; <http://www.cipd.co.uk>

3 These groupings are based on a range of sources in the literature, including the following: D. Robinson, S. Perryman & S. Hayday 2004, The Drivers of Employee Engagement, Institute for Employment Studies, Sussex, UK, <http//www.employment-studies.co.uk/>; Corporate Leadership Council 2004, Driving Employee Performance and Retention through Engagement: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Employee Engagement Strategies, CLC, Washington, D.C., <http//www.corporateleadershipcouncil.com>; J. Sasaki & M. Norquist, ‘Grim News for Japan’s Managers’, Gallup Management Journal, 14 July 2005, <http://gmj.gallup.com>

4 Full details of the factor analysis, including details of the methodology and questions used, are set out in Appendix 4.

5 Corporate Leadership Council 2004, Driving Employee Performance and Retention through Engagement: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Employee Engagement Strategies, CLC, Washington, D.C., <http://www.corporateleadershipcouncil.com>

6 D. Robinson, S. Perryman & S. Hayday 2004, The Drivers of Employee Engagement, Institute for Employment Studies, Sussex, UK, <http://www.employment-studies.co.uk>

7 These factors emerged from the questions used in the employee survey. They can be said in the broadest sense to provide an overall indication of employee engagement in the APS.