Source: author's recreation from the technical guide to the Civil Service People Survey (Cabinet Office, 2014)
This article is a short guide to the output of a ‘driver analysis’ that examines the relationship between employee engagement and the other main themes in the Civil Service People Survey.
From 2009 to 2017 outputs from the People Survey included ‘driver analysis’ that illustrated how the different themes of the survey influences levels of employee engagement. Changes to methodology in 2018 and a change of contractor in 2020 have resulted in this analysis being excluded from the standard reporting.
The Civil Service and organisation results sections of this website include outputs of a new and updated driver analysis. This article provides a high-level overview of the analysis, an in-depth article provides a more detailed and technical discussion of the analysis.
What is ‘driver analysis’?
‘Driver analysis’ is a term regularly used by marketing and consultancy firms to refer to a range of statistical techniques that look at the relationship between different variables in a dataset, such as a survey.
In this article, and website, ‘driver analysis’ involves three techniques:
- Factor analysis which takes survey questions and identifies underlying themes and structures in the data.
- Correlation analysis to understand the relationship between the output of the factor analysis and the ‘theme scores’ presented in the survey results.
- Linear regression analysis to understand the relationship between the output of the factor analysis and the People Survey’s employee engagement index.
The People Survey’s analytical framework
The Civil Service People Survey’s is organised around measuring levels of employee engagement in the Civil Service. There is a wide body of evidence that indicates employee engagement is positively related to organisational performance and individual wellbeing.
The questions that make up the People Survey’s employee engagement index measure individual’s overall feelings towards the organisation they work for rather than specific aspects of an individual’s experience of work (e.g. “I would recommend my organisation as a great place to work”). These experiences of work are instead covered by the questions that make up the survey’s nine themes and measure more tangible aspects that managers and leaders can take action on (e.g. “My manager is open to my ideas”).
The People Survey’s technical guide (Cabinet Office 2014, p12) summarises these relationships in a diagram of its analytical framework (Figure 1).
## Updated driver analysis
As mentioned above, driver analysis based on the relationship between survey themes and the engagement index has not been included in outputs since 20171.
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References
Cabinet Office. 2014. “Technical Guide.” Civil Service People Survey: 2014 Results - GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-people-survey-2014-results.
Footnotes
In 2018 and 2019, driver analysis based on the relationship between individual questions and the engagement index. In 2020, a change in contractor resulted in a switch to a new online-only reporting platform, which significantly increase the level of effort and complexity required to re-implement the historic approach to driver analysis.↩︎