1. Employee engagement
Assisting HR Business partners in aligning employee surveys with HR strategy: the Flemish case
OECD
Annual meeting of the Working Party on Public Employment and Management
April 20, 2015

2. Agenda Introducing the Flemish public service
Employee surveys at the Flemish public service
Supporting HR business partners

3. Introducing the Flemish public service

4. Employee survey Every 2 years
Questionnaire with 42 items on 5 parameters
Job(content), leadership, values, career, engagement
Additional questionnaire for management (16 items)
Use of results
At the level of the Flemish public service: to define general HR policies and to assess the impact of those policies.
At the level of each organisation: to improve the organisational HR management.
Several questions refer to engagement:
I can do things I am good at.
I am recognised for the work I do

5. Results employee survey 2014

6. Supporting our HR business partners
Global reports , organisational reports and excel database (staff and management)
Series of workshops for HRBP’s organised by the expertise center Stakeholder management
Consists of 3 parts
Getting the management summary right
Focus on benchmarking employee engagement against age group, gender, organisation, and over time
Supoorted by statistical methods
GETTING THE MANAGEMENT SUMMARY RIGHT:
What do the numbers and graphs ‘say’, independently of the strategy. This is the ‘first screening’ of results. The focus is on benchmarking employee engagement on different levels: benchmarking is provided by age groups, EDUCATIONAL LEVEL, gender, organizational entity and by a general mean of all participating entities. Also a benchmark is provided over time, so the evolution on different items becomes apparent. These benchmarks are supported by statistical methods e.g. confidence intervals and box plot methods.

7. Supporting our HR business partners (2)
Bringing in HR strategy
Method to support HR professionals on distinguishing the most important items for their organisation and setting targets for the future
Enriching the data with other HR metrics to determine patterns
Supported by a template
Converting numbers into actions
Long term perspective: using the employee survey results for defining HR and organisational targets, benchmarking evolution and organisational development
Emphasis on broad communication and follow-up
BRINGING IN HR STRATEGY
This is the ‘in-depth analysis’. We provide a method by which HR professionals can deduct which items in the engagement study are most important for their organizations and set targets (e.g. being in the top 25% for this item) for those items. We advise HR professionals to add more metrics from other surveys in the organization and analyze hard data to enrich the numbers. In that way a pattern can become clear, and the metrics can provide real insights in the organization. A template is made available for plotting targets against obtained results, in more detail
CONVERTING NUMBERS INTO ACTIONS
We discuss different roles and stress the importance of a broad communication and follow-up. Over all, the importance of a long term perspective is stressed throughout the workshop: integrating employee engagement studies in defining HR and organizational targets, using them in benchmarking the evolution and further organizational development. This also assists in meaningful communication and avoiding a one-shot approach that may be more harmful then helpful.

8. Next steps
Thorough review of the questionnaire by 2016, increasing the focus on employee engagement
Adding more benchmarking variables e.g. job type
Integrating these perception data with “hard” HR and organisational data (e.g. sickess rate, exits, …)
Sharing best practices between organisations
Building online reporting website
Supporting communication to further increase the response rate

9. Questions
Flemish Public Service Team Stakeholder management Teamlead: Linda Wouters