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.
How the People Survey’s nine themes influence levels of employee engagement
- Strong association with employee engagement: The survey’s ‘leadership and managing change’, ‘my work’ and ‘my manager’ themes all have a strong association with levels of employee engagement. Increases in score for these themes are strongly related to increases in levels employee engagement - if scores in these areas are low these should be an immediate priority for action.
- Moderate association with employee engagement: The survey’s ‘resources and workload’, ‘organisational objectives and purpose’, ‘my team’, ‘inclusion and fair treatment’, and ‘learning and development’ themes all have a moderate association with levels of employee engagement. Increases in score for these themes are related to increases in employee engagement but not strongly so - these themes are still important for fostering high levels of employee engagement in a team/organisation but their impact is likely to be less direct.
- Weak association with employee engagement: The survey’s ‘pay and benefits’ theme has a weak association with levels of employee engagement. Increases in this theme only have a limited relationship with increases in employee engagement.
Background
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, a separate 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 (2024 model)
As mentioned above,driver analysis based on the relationship between survey themes and the engagement index has not been included in outputs since 20171. An updated driver analysis has been carried out using the published 2009 to 2024 data and is included in the reporting of the benchmark and organisational results on this website.
The updated analysis identified 8 underlying ‘drivers’ within the structure of the published People Survey data, but they remain closely related to the existing survey themes. Figure 2 summarises the findings of the driver analysis, how the underlying drivers relate to the theme scores and how they relate to levels of employee engagement.
Source: author's recreation from the technical guide to the Civil Service People Survey (Cabinet Office, 2014)
The survey themes and the underlying drivers can be considered two sides of the same coin, they both provide information about the nature of people’s experiences of work. Although grouped into specific themes individual questions in the survey can relate to more than one underlying concept. For example the question “I have a choice in deciding how I do my work” although this is in the survey’s ‘my work’ theme, but the factor analysis undertaken as part of the updated driver analysis shows it is also related to questions in the ‘my manager’ theme. This is not unsurprising, the question is clearly about an individual’s experience of how they do their work, but their level of autonomy in doing their work is moderated and determined by their supervisor or manager.
Figure 2 shows this complexity through the arrows connecting the survey themes (in pink on the left hand side) with the underlying ‘drivers’ (in blue in the middle), in addition to showing the dominant relationship between a given theme and one of the underlying drivers (via a pink double-headed arrow) the figure also shows other important and relevant interactions between the survey themes and drivers (the grey double-headed arrows).
Outcomes of the updated driver analysis
The strongest drivers of employee engagement are ‘leadership’, ‘work’ and ‘management’, which are closely related to the survey’s ‘leadership and managing change’, ‘my work’ and ‘my manager’ themes respectively.
The survey’s ‘my team’ and ‘inclusion and fair treatment’ theme also have a close relationship with the ‘management’ driver. This is likely as a result of the importance that managers and team leaders have in setting and influencing the culture of their team. These themes are therefore assigned as having a moderate effect on levels of employee engagement since they are associated with the ‘management’ driver, the ‘my team’ theme is also related to a specific ‘teamwork’ driver but this relationship is weaker than the one that the theme has with the ‘management’ driver.
The ‘workload’ and ‘objectives’ drivers have moderate effect on levels of employee engagement and are closely related to the survey’s ‘resources and workload’ and ‘organisational objectives and purpose’ theme respectively. However, these survey themes also have some relationship with the ‘leadership’ driver, most likely due to the role senior managers have in setting direction and allocating resources for the organisation as a whole.
The survey’s ‘learning and development’ theme is related to a distinct ‘career’ driver which has a weak relationship with levels of employee engagement. However the ‘learning and development’ theme is also related to the ‘work’ and ‘manager’ drivers which have much stronger relationships with levels of employee engagement, therefore overall the ‘learning and development’ theme is assigned a moderate effect on levels of employee engagement.
The analysis identifies a distinct ‘pay’ driver that has a strong relationship with the survey’s ‘pay and benefits’ theme, neither the driver or survey theme have a connection with any other driver or survey theme. This driver has a weak-to-moderate relationship with levels of employee engagement.
A separate ‘teamwork’ driver was also identified, which was also related to the survey’s ‘my team’ theme. This driver has a relatively weak relationship with levels of employee engagement, and the survey’s ‘my team’ theme has a stronger relationship with the ‘management’ driver. While the ‘teamwork’ driver could have been dropped from the analysis it was considered conceptually useful to retain it in the model to flag the distinct importance of having teams that work together well. This is also denoted in the decision to assign the ‘my team’ theme a moderate association with levels of employee engagement owing to its relationship to both the ‘management’ and ‘my team’ drivers.
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.↩︎