FEATURE
Rules of Engagement
Roger Parry, director at research consultancy, Agenda Consulting, unearths the key drivers of employee engagement in the social care sector.
The UK social care sector employs over 1.5 million people. While the sector is set to grow, social care organisations face the challenge of operating within severe financial constraints in the coming years while ensuring excellent standards of care.
As an industry that is so reliant on people, it is critical for social care organisations to understand how to develop and maintain high levels of employee engagement to ensure staff are committed to the organisation’s success.
Employee engagement is important for a number of reasons. According to David McLeod and Nita Clarke, joint authors of ‘Engaging for Success - Enhancing Performance Through Employee Engagement’, engagement is at the heart of the relationship between the employee and their organisation.
They say when employees are engaged there is a powerful win-win situation. Employees feel trusted and valued and, at the same time, organisations benefit from lower absence and staff turnover rates, higher levels of customer service and greater innovation.
Unfortunately there is no nationally agreed definition of employee engagement, which can make it difficult for organisations to understand and measure whether their employees are truly engaged or not.
At Agenda Consulting we recently conducted some research analysing employee survey data from 28 social
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care organisations involving over 11,000 respondents to find how best to measure employee engagement in social care; and which factors have a strong impact on engagement.
The research highlighted that the best question to ask to measure someone’s engagement is whether they would “wholeheartedly recommend their organisation as a good place to work”. This question is most influenced by organisational factors and as such provides the greatest insight.
To determine the key factors which influence engagement in the sector, analysis was also conducted on the relationship between respondents who would recommend the organisation as a good place to work and other key employee experience factors, such as colleagues, communications, leadership, values and wellbeing.
The results of our analysis showed that perceptions of the trustworthiness of the leadership group, the quality of the service delivered to external customers, and the strength of values and ethics in practice, most strongly influence the engagement of social care employees.
Achieving high levels of positivity on leadership, service and values is therefore important for a social care organisation that wishes to increase levels of engagement.
People’s perceptions of their role and the communications in the organisation appear to have a moderate impact on engagement. This suggests that feelings of personal achievement as well as the
extent to which employees perceive internal communications to be open and honest are important, but less so than leadership, service and values.
Reward, learning and development, management and wellbeing appear to have the weakest influence. These findings suggest that it is possible for employees to be happy about their reward, their learning, their manager and their wellbeing but not be engaged.
This might happen, for example, when employees identify with their local service, department or region rather than the organisation as a whole. It should be noted that the results do not indicate that these factors are unimportant, simply that getting these factors right on their own is unlikely to improve engagement.
The findings from this research shine a light on the key factors that impact the engagement of social care employees. Organisations looking to improve engagement should aim to achieve high levels of positivity about their leadership, services and values.
However, every organisation is different and we would recommend exploring the impact of different factors in your own organisation and prioritise accordingly. A survey of staff will help determine the key factors of employee engagement in an organisation and asking open questions about what staff would change in the organisation can help to find out where any dissatisfaction may lie.
www.agendaconsulting.co.uk www.tomorrowscare.co.uk
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