Engaged employees, who understand the importance of their role, and who feel valued, will contribute to improved organisational performance. Regular employee engagement surveys can be a very effective tool for measuring satisfaction levels, benchmarking progress and identifying areas of high or low engagement across organisations, and can be used to measure and evaluate leadership, engagement, performance and operation across the public service. Such surveys can also help identify factors that contribute to high or low levels of engagement and thereby highlight the possible levers to address any engagement issues. The RDO and HR leads from across the Sectors will be responsible for implementing this action and will:

• use employee engagement surveys and similar tools to support more data-driven, evidence informed and individualised HRM strategies; and
• consider the results of feedback on employee engagement and use them to inform HRM and leadership approaches.

This will improve employee engagement over the medium term, thereby working towards improved organisational outcomes.

See fully expanded description of this action on P.37 of Our Public Service.

While this action was not selected as a specific action for 2018/2019, the core values are being progressed as part of other actions in Our Public Service, including:

• Action 4: Significantly improve communications and engagement with the public
• Action 12: Embed strategic human resource management in the public service
• Action 14: Continuous and responsive professional development