Strategic HR Review

Employee engagement welcomes the dawn of an empowerment culture

Gary Cattermole Jaime Johnson Karen Roberts

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To cite this document:
Gary Cattermole Jaime Johnson Karen Roberts, (2013),"Employee engagement welcomes the dawn of an empowerment culture", Strategic
HR Review, Vol. 12 Iss 5 pp. 250 - 254
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Employee engagement welcomes the

dawn of an empowerment culture
Gary Cattermole, Jaime Johnson and Karen Roberts

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Abstract
Purpose This paper seeks to address the role and impact of employee engagement within an
organization undergoing cultural transformation, addressing the issues of monitoring and increasing
levels of staff engagement over time.
Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on in-depth employee engagement surveys over a
five year period as part of a case study to illustrate how HR drives and monitors change through
employee engagement.
Findings This paper follows a company through enormous organizational change, firstly towards a
high performance culture and then to a culture of empowerment. The role of engagement and monitoring
processes are highlighted as part of the transition.
Research limitations/implications The case study does not offer a true multinational case study as
only a small proportion of employees are based overseas.
Originality/value This paper illustrates how an international organization can deliver organizational
change and build employee engagement to drive the business forward. The case study offers best
practice material for HR managers.

Gary Cattermole and Jaime

Johnson are Co-founders
and Directors of The Survey
Initiative, Frinton-on-Sea,
UK. Karen Roberts is head
of HR at the Royal Society of
Chemistry (RSC),
Cambridge, UK.

Keywords Employee engagement, Employee surveys, Empowerment culture, Change management,

Organizational change, Employees involvement
Paper type Case study

ince the beginning of the recession employees across the UK have been pushed to
work harder, take on more responsibility and work longer hours, often for little reward.
Many staff members have also experienced redundancies in the workplace and
stress levels within UK businesses have reached unprecedented levels (The Mental Health
Foundation, 2010; Health and Social Care Information Centre, 2012).

Whilst many businesses have been struggling to motivate and engage their employees,
other UK organizations have invested in employee engagement techniques to ensure they
are working at optimum levels (Dodge, 2012; Darwent, 2012). The recent launch of the UK
government-backed Engage for Success movement supports this move to invest in
employee engagement. The main aims are to develop a better way to work and a better way
to enable personal growth, organizational growth and ultimately growth for Britain by
releasing more of the capability and potential of people at work.
This case study draws on the experience of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) to examine
the effects of employee engagement over a five-year period, in particular as a means of
achieving cultural transformation.

An overview of the RSC

The RSC is the largest organization in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences. Supported
by a worldwide network of members and an international publishing business, its activities

PAGE 250

STRATEGIC HR REVIEW

VOL. 12 NO. 5 2013, pp. 250-254, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398

DOI 10.1108/SHR-04-2013-0039

span education, conferences, science policy and the promotion of chemistry to the public. The
RSC employs 460 staff and has over 4,600 members across the world. Its headquarters are in
the UK but it has international offices in the USA, China, Japan, Brazil and India.
Back in 2008, the RSC wanted to gain a better understanding of how its employees felt about
working for the organization. The RSC wanted to engage with its staff and discover what
motivated its employees. The organization employs a very highly-skilled workforce and knew
that its success was down to its staff, but wanted to ensure it was getting the very best from
each team member.

Benchmarking performance

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To benchmark performance, the RSC decided to work in partnership with a specialist staff
survey provider, The Survey Initiative, to ensure the right questions were asked to get to the
heart of what staff were feeling about their role within the organization, its management team
and the companys strategic direction. By employing an external provider the RSC instilled
trust into the system and ensured all staff members felt confident that their feedback would
be anonymous.
After meeting with the management team at length, and focusing on the key issues affecting
the RSC, The Survey Initiative created a bespoke survey to analyze the main drivers for
employee engagement and motivation. The first survey helped to benchmark levels of
employee engagement within the organization. This starting point helped the organization
develop new ways of working collaboratively with employees on a variety of initiatives to
improve employee engagement.

The process
All staff were invited to take part in the survey on a voluntary basis over a two-week period.
An email was issued from HR to invite them to take part, and a poster campaign around the
offices was also put in place. Managers encouraged staff to take part but the emphasis was
upon staff members taking ownership of the process and the initiative was positioned as
their chance to give feedback.
Table I demonstrates the RSCs starting point in 2008 and the significant successes over the
past five years. The figures show that it already enjoyed higher than industry average figures in
a number of areas, but the results helped it to focus on issues that were affecting staff
members. The HR team focused on boosting the organizations learning and development and
communication functions, but never forgot about the areas where it was excelling, such as
management style and team working, and always looked to drive forward new ways of working.

Delivering the results

The Survey Initiative has created in-depth reports following all annual surveys, which
highlight areas the RSC is doing well and areas for improvement. These results are fed out to
the entire organization to show total transparency in the survey process. The Survey Initiative
Table I Benchmarking engagement throughout cultural change

Leadership
Management style
Learning and development
Communication
Team working
Views on RSC overall

2008
(%)

2012
(%)

55
86
61
63
84
79

85
89
75
77
90
89

Note: % of positive responses to question items within each topic area

VOL. 12 NO. 5 2013 STRATEGIC HR REVIEW PAGE 251

conducts a series of employee feedback sessions to all employees in advance of the

leadership team reviewing the results. Here they are provided with a synopsis of the survey
findings for the organization and individual departments.
The leadership team is then taken through the organizations results in an action-planning
workshop. Informed by the action planning session, workbooks are created for each
department to allow managers to work with their teams to celebrate success and work on
their local engagement scores.

How the RSC moved its business forward

HR instructed The Survey Initiative to run a series of focus groups to look deeply into the
areas the RSC did well and not so well. The management team wanted to ensure that staff
were given the opportunity to have their voice heard and given the confidence that action
would be taken as a result of what was said.

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Following the success of the focus groups the HR team launched a new high performance
culture at the RSC, which was positively received by its workforce. Prior to the focus on high
performance, the RSCs strategy was not clearly defined resulting in a lack of clear focus and
direction with two very distinct cultures not always working well together. There was a lack of
commercial thought applied to decision making and a general risk adverse approach. This
resulted in leaders struggling to provide direction, managers struggling to manage and
employees being unable to articulate how they contributed to the organizations success.
The following initiatives were used to help the transition towards a performance culture:
B

A new appraisal system was introduced with staff members monitored upon the RSCs
values customer focus, enterprise, inspiration, knowledge and inclusion.

A series of excellence awards were launched to give employee recognition across all
sites thanking staff for their contribution to the RSC. These bi-annual awards can receive
nominations by anyone for anyone in the company, and have continued to prove popular.

All managers within the organization were scheduled to join a management development
program with the first phase commencing in mid-2009. Each participant is assessed at
the beginning using a 360 degree feedback mechanism and a bespoke training program
is put in place to ensure they reach their potential at the RSC.

To improve its internal communications the RSC launched an in-house magazine,

Cohesion, to keep everyone updated with the latest company news. This has been
updated over the years and now arrives in each staff members inbox as an e-format
newsletter. To ensure the organization kept everyone up-to-date with strategic
developments a series of communications and consultations were set-up to engage
with each level of worker at every stage.

Monitoring success
Since 2008 the RSC has conducted employee engagement surveys to ensure the company
is on the right track and that its actions are creating the desired results. The Survey Initiative
has been employed over the duration to ensure continuity and has built up a high level of
trust with the RSC workforce from the regular and in-depth focus group research. In 2012, 83
percent of employees felt that action would be taken upon feedback in a staff survey. That
figure is nearly 20 percent points higher than the industry norm of 64 percent (based on
research conducted by The Survey Initiative).

Fresh issues at the RSC

Although the RSC has enjoyed a steady curve of improvement in its employee engagement,
the surveys have highlighted various other staff issues. They include the following:

PAGE 252 STRATEGIC HR REVIEW VOL. 12 NO. 5 2013

 Whilst many businesses have been struggling to motivate and

engage their employees, other UK organizations have
invested in employee engagement techniques to ensure they
are working at optimum levels.

High expectations for L&D

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The RSC employs over 460 members of staff, each being highly skilled to undertake the
nature of their business. However, employing highly educated and skilled staff, top science
graduates among them, also means there is a high expectation from the workforce to receive
a high level of training/mentoring and career development opportunities.
The RSC has extended its training programs and identifies key training needs at its six-monthly
appraisals. The level of some of the training programs is very high, with a publications trainee
placed on a nine-month training scheme to be able to do their job to the required standard. Of
course, this investment is high and the RSC has found that via employee engagement and
pre-empting staff problems this has led to general retention of staff in the RSC.
Career development
Another issue was career development. As the organization does not employ thousands of
members of staff, the HR department looks for opportunities where employees can be
seconded to other departments/roles to keep them fresh and motivated about their job and
working for the RSC. In the past 12 months the RSC has managed to create 170 moves for its
staff.
To keep the organization fresh, employees are sent on a strategy day every year to get
everyone to think innovatively about the business for the next 12 months. The RSC is
passionate about involvement from its staff members as they are capable, talented and
willing people. The leadership team believes that if it did not tap into their knowledge and
imagination it would be a waste of resource.
Flexible working
Flexible working has become popular within many organizations helping staff create a more
enjoyable work/life balance. The HR department was keen to offer staff the opportunity to do
flexible working but ensured that all staff were consulted to make sure the RSC could support
employees with this new way of working. Pilot schemes were set-up to see how it would work,
and what IT/support services staff required at home. A flexible working agreement is now in
place for all members of staff.

The dawn of a new era

The RSC has seen an increase in its overall staffing numbers (in the last five years numbers
have risen from 353 to 460) and productivity in its publishing division has increased with the
number of print books published increased from 60 (2008) to 92 (2011) and the number of
articles published increased from 7,273 to 23,566 (ca. a 225 percent increase). The RSCs
overall market share has increased from 5 percent to almost 25 percent during the period
2008-2012; part of this growth is directly attributed to employee engagement.
In September 2012, the RSC, following much consultation with staff, launched under a new
CEO a new empowerment culture at the RSC. Over the past five years the RSC had seen
what an engaged, hardworking, enthusiastic and knowledgeable pool of talent it had
recruited and trained. It realized that by giving staff members greater autonomy over their
everyday working lives the RSC would be an even more engaging place to work and the
organizations bottom line would continue to thrive.

VOL. 12 NO. 5 2013 STRATEGIC HR REVIEW PAGE 253

Continued focus on engagement to support change

Following the announcement of the empowerment focus, The Survey Initiative completed the
RSCs fifth employee engagement survey and the research was very warmly received with
an 86 percent response rate, a level maintained throughout the five years of operation. The
RSC were also delighted to see that 89 percent were in favor of the management style at the
RSC and that in the five years of the survey the staffs view of leadership had improved. There
was an increase from 55 percent to 85 percent in positive responses to leadership-related
statements such as The leadership team work hard to keep in touch with staff and I have
confidence in the leadership provided by the RSC.
The RSC will continue to monitor its employee engagement through its first year under the
new empowerment culture and will make strategic changes to the research to ensure it can
compare results and identify any new issues.

References

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Darwent, S. (2012), Creating an engaging employee experience, BT presentation, available at: www.
kent.ac.uk/kbs/ecg/news-events/documents/ESRC%20Engage%20for%20Success%2017%20Dec/
Sharon%20Darwent.pdf
Dodge, T. (2012), Nailing the evidence, Marks & Spencer, presentation at Engage for Success launch,
available at: www.engageforsuccess.org/ideas-tools/presentation-nailing-the-evidence/#UT8YHBx
9d48
Health and Social Care Information Centre (2012), Hospital admissions for stress rise by seven per
cent in 12 months, available at: www.ic.nhs.uk/article/2233/Hospital-admissions-for-stress-rise-byseven-per-cent-in-12-months
(The) Mental Health Foundation (2010), British approach to dealing with stress runs risk of serious mental
health problems, available at: www.mentalhealth.org.uk/our-news/news-archive/2010/2010-11-03/

About the authors

Gary Cattermole is a co-founder and director of The Survey Initiative and over the past five
years has focused on new business development, account management and survey
reporting. He has managed numerous employee research projects for a variety of
organizations from The Telegraph to the Natural History Museum. Cattermole has also given
up his free time to become a Guru with Engage for Success. Prior to founding The Survey
Initiative he was a director at employesurveys Research and Consulting, where he was
responsible for consulting and business development. Gary Cattermole is the
corresponding author and can be contacted at: gary.cattermole@surveyinitiative.co.uk
Jaime Johnson is a co-founder and director of The Survey Initiative. She has an MSc in
Applied Social Research coupled with nearly ten years employee research expertise. She
originally worked within the Ministry of Defence, then a dedicated psychology-based
consultancy, before founding The Survey Initiative.
Karen Roberts is the head of HR at the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). She has a Masters
degree in Organizational Development and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of
Personnel and Development. She has worked as an HR professional at a number of small
and large international organizations across a wide variety of different sectors. Developing a
mutually productive and sustainable work environment lies at the heart of her endeavors.

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