Photo; Gerd Altmann/Pixabay
Despite a year of unprecedented pressure, the just-published results of the latest Civil Service People Survey reveal in increase in the key employee engagement index and pay and reward satisfaction at post-2010 highs.
But while the results of the 2019 survey – conducted in the autumn by a record 308,556 staff – have many positives, they also show an increase in the proportion of civil servants reporting that they were victims of bullying or harassment.
The People Survey’s headline score is the employee engagement index, which reflects the proportion of staff who answer positively to statements about how motivated they feel and whether they would recommend their organisation as a good place to work. In the 2019 survey it increased by 1 percentage point to 63% - the highest level in the survey’s 11-year history.
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On a department-by-department level, staff at HM Revenue and Customs remain the least engaged civil servants at any of government’s main departments – as categorised by the Cabinet Office.
The tax-collection agency has bumped along the lower end of People Survey engagement index scores for much of the barometer’s life. The 2019 results show it scoring 49% on the engagement index, the same as last year.
Most engaged of the main departments was HM Treasury, which notched up a score of 74%, even though that was a one point dip on 2018.
The Cabinet Office’s engagement index score dropped from 66% to 65% year on year; while the Department for Education’s index score rose from 65% to 69%.
Perhaps not unconnected with the looming end of its existence, the Department for Exiting the European Union marked a dip in its employee engagement score, which declined from 68% to 64% – exactly the same proportion it posted in 2016, just weeks after it was founded.
Another department posing a dip in its score was the Department for International Development, with its 69% figure representing the first time in the department’s history that its engagement index was lower than 70%.
Pay-satisfaction rises 3%
After a year in which civil servants had less to cheer about in terms of pay than counterparts elsewhere in the public sector, the 2019 People Survey shows a three percentage point rise in satisfaction levels for both pay and benefits.
According to the data, 34% of civil servants agreed that their pay “adequately reflects” their performance, while 39% of respondents said they were “satisfied” with the total benefits package they received. Both scores were at their highest since 2010, when they were 38% and 39% respectively.
The proportion of survey respondents who believed their pay was reasonable compared to that of people doing a similar job in different organisations also increased by one point to 28% in the 2019 survey’s results. The figure is also a post-2010 high.
Cabinet Office perm sec and civil service chief executive Sir John Manzoni said the 2019 figures were based on sentiment from an “extraordinary year of change” and were being published in the middle of an “even more urgent endeavour” in the form of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Across the civil service there are some really positive survey results. Scores in eight of the nine core themes showed an improvement, including for ‘leadership and managing change’, up two percentage points and its highest since the survey began in 2009,” he said.
Manzoni, who is due to step down from his civil service roles later this year, accepted that the survey results also showed areas where Whitehall could not rest on its laurels.
“We would never pretend that there aren’t areas where we can, and must, do better. For example, while average rates of discrimination have fallen slightly from 12% to 11%, bullying and harassment rates have gone in the opposite direction, rising from 11% to 12%,” he said.
“There is no place for bullying, harassment and discrimination of any kind in the workplace, and I remain committed to stamping it out in the civil service.”
Manzoni said one notable positive movement was the continuing rise in the proportion of people who had been bullied or harassed reporting the problems they were encountering.
“It suggests greater awareness of the need to report – and how you can do it – and greater confidence that the issue will be met head on,” he said.
According to the survey results, 51% of people who said they had been bullied or harassed – or both – confirmed that they had reported their experience. Last year’s figure was 40%, itself up from 2017’s 36%. The People Survey only began asking staff whether they had reported their experience of bullying or harassment in 2016. In that year the proportion of people who answered “yes” was 36%.
The Cabinet Office said the 2019 People Survey had a 67% response rate, an increase of 0.2 percentage points compared to 2018.