A big welcome to you if you are visiting our website as a researcher in the world of work, an academic teaching in this field, or a consultant offering solutions to organisations and businesses.
You can see our vision, aims and values and what we are trying to achieve. We would love you to get involved in our work.
You’re welcome to use our existing material (with appropriate acknowledgement), and this is available for free. At this point please read using our website and services.
But we would really love you to join in and contribute to cutting edge thought and practical action that helps work and workplaces for the 30 million UK employees become better.
Our movement is made up of people like yourselves, and practitioners working in private sector businesses, public sector organisations, schools, hospitals, charities, changing their workplaces for the better, whether they are employees, team leaders, managers, or senior leaders.
Why not join with others in an Area Network Thought and Action Group, meeting up with like-minded people in your locality, or in a Topic or Sector Thought and Action Group. You can find more information about these in our Get Involved section.
We have a Thought and Action Steering Group, made up of people like yourselves and practitioners. You can read more about the activities we would love you to get involved in, including speaking at conferences, posting articles on our blog, contributing to our Thought and Action groups.
Before going further, you may want to read about what we mean by employee engagement, what we see as the enablers of engagement, and the evidence we have found showing the links between high engagement, wellbeing and performance.
As Dilys Robinson, Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Employment Studies, has pointed out, it is worth understanding what practitioners mean when they talk about engagement:
- employee engagement (frequently measured using the say, stay, strive model, the Gallup Q12 questions, Net Promoter, the IES’s engagement measure, with particularly large public sector surveys in the field such as the Civil Service People Survey and the NHS Staff Survey)
- transformational engagement, suffusing every aspect of organisational culture and practice, rather than just action based on annual survey results, and
- organisational engagement, where the goal is to increase individual employee connection and commitment to the purpose and objectives of the organisation they work for.
And that they are more likely to be comfortable with looser, often fluid, definitions of employee engagement, with a focus on strategies to increase these, behaviours, and practical results and action following surveys.
In contrast, you may be more used to focussing on people’s personal engagement, their engagement with their job, and/or their engagement with their work, and you may be more comfortable working with precise definitions, a focus on the individual, their psychological state, and theoretical solutions.
