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Engaging for success: Enhancing performance through employee engagement Case Study Marks and Spencer Marks and Spencer is, like most retailers, feeling the effects of the current difficult economic climate. Cost base reduction and resource maximisation are key issues facing the company at present and it is working with its employees to help find solutions. Marks and Spencer has long involved and consulted with staff to good effect through its network of elected employee representatives. Their Business Involvement Group (BIG) gives employees the opportunity to voice their opinions and ideas and to have their views represented when the Company considers changes that impact on them. The Marks and Spencer BIG network took a proactive approach to supporting the company in addressing cost improvement by canvassing employee ideas on ways to improve the filling of stock in their food departments. They highlighted the best ideas to senior stakeholders at Marks and Spencer via their National BIG team and a set of guidelines for ‘Food Fill’ were produced incorporating many of the ideas suggested by employees. As a result of the improvements made to ‘Food fill’ processes, over £4million has been saved. Tanith Dodge, HR Director at Marks and Spencer says, “We are very proud at Marks and Spencer of our Business Involvement Group (BIG) and the way they represent our employees’ opinions and ideas. We believe it is vital to the success of our business to engage our employees and listen to their views, and by doing this we ensure that our employees feel motivated and are aware that they can influence the business to change things for the better.” 40 Work by Kingston Business School and Ipsos Mori for the CIPD based on a nationwide survey of employee attitudes and engagement from 2,000 employees across the country in July 2006 found a key driver of engagement to be the ability of employees to feed their views upwards, feeling well informed about what was happening in the organisation, and thinking that one’s manager was committed to the organisation. 121 Acting on feedback is critical as discussed in Hockey and Ley’s recent work on leadership and engagement. 122 They quote Sue Davies, Head of Human Resources at Bourne Leisure Limited, who says “ If somebody says there is a particular area that we are not good at we do something about it as quickly as possible. We don’t just do the surveys and ignore them. Each survey is done by brand, site and department so we can feed back on specific areas.” 123 121 Truss C., Soane E., Edwards C., Croll ., and Burnett J. (2006) Working Life: Employee attitudes and engagement published by the Chartered Institute for Personnel Management 122 Hockey, J, & Ley, I. (2009). Leading for Engagement: How Senior Leaders Engage Their People. Sunningdale: National School of Government 123 Ibid. 98
Chapter 4: Enablers of Engagement – What has to happen to make engagement work 41 Nevertheless, communication and transparency are two areas that require a greater focus from business leaders. According to Towers Perrin, only 31 per cent of employees feel that their senior managers communicate openly and honestly. Moreover only 41 per cent agree that their senior managers try to be visible and accessible. 124 The role of workplace representatives 42 During the course of our review, we received evidence from employers and trade unions of the value of engaging with a collective voice in the workplace, as an integral part of engagement approaches. Many companies with trade union or collective representation pointed to the importance of aligning their industrial relations with engagement strategies. As one said: “You don’t want to find yourself in the position where the union tells staff not to fill in the survey.” 43 In the past, trade unions have expressed wariness about employee engagement, regarding it as a potential alternative to the traditional model where employers communicated with their workforce through the union machinery. They have also expressed concern about the term ‘discretionary effort.’ As a report for the Wales Public Service Workforce Forum put it, trade unionists felt, “the inferences were too close to a case for effort over and above the agreed, contracted job, and so tantamount to unpaid overtime.” 125 44 The TUC in a note to the review emphasised that properly done, engagement could be of significant benefit to employees, and pointed to their emerging work with Tesco and O2 as showing the importance of, “getting real employee engagement, both for the benefits of providing ‘good work’ for employees but also in terms of achieving better productivity through best working practice.” Organisations benefited too: “If relationships of trust can be built around areas of common agreement, such as health and safety, skills, performance and quality of work, these relationships can be useful in more difficult situations, most obviously at times of downsizing, when workforce insecurity is high.” 45 But independent voice was crucial: “If employees were to engage constructively and put in discretionary effort they would need to be given the opportunity to put their views to employers and be assured that their views would be at least heard, if not acted upon. Although individual engagement between managers and employees was important, to build the necessary trust between employees and employers, employees should be allowed and encouraged to express their views through independent collective representation.” 46 Employers and unions said that an independent voice could be important for the individual employee too. Union learning reps for example acted as important 124 Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study (2007-2008) 125 A Report to the Wales Public Service Workforce Forum: May 2009. www.wlga.gov.uk/download.phpid=2757&l=1 (last accessed 1 July 2009) 99
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Foreword by Secretary of State This
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Chapter 2 The Case for Employee Eng
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