Civil Service Engagement Index 2014: Most Departments Improve

DfID and the Treasury have the highest engagement score – 71% – while HMRC has the lowest – 43%.

The Department for International Development (DfID) has the highest engagement score for a sixth consecutive year, while HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has the lowest score for a sixth consecutive year. The Foreign Office, on 67%, is close behind DfID and the Treasury (HMT), while the Cabinet Office (CO, 62%) and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS, 60%) are also on 60% or higher. Most of these high-performing departments are relatively small in terms of staff numbers. Taking 50% (the point at which respondents neither agree nor disagree) as a baseline, only HMRC’s civil servants are negative about their engagement. The engagement score for thirteen departments rose, including by nine percentage points at DCMS, and seven percentage points at both DfE and DfT.

DCMS’s score rose, for a second consecutive year and to its highest-ever level. This may have something to do with the huge increase in response rate from DCMS civil servants – from 66% in 2013 to 91% this year. The 2012 survey, which recorded a low of 45%, was conducted just after the Olympic and Paralympic Games had finished, and when non-senior staff were at risk of redundancy. For the Department for Education (DfE) and Department for Transport (DfT), this year’s large rises follow a decrease between 2012 and 2013 – for DfE, this is a first recorded rise after a fall in every previous year of the survey. (We will look at DfE in more detail in a future post.) The engagement score for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) rose by four percentage points to 53%, continuing a recovery after a drop to 40% in 2011. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and HMT improved by three percentage points, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) by two, and CO, Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Department of Health (DH), Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) by one. Engagement scores fell (by one percentage point) in two departments: FCO and HMRC.

The FCO’s score fell by one percentage point to 67%, but it remains the third highest scoring department. HMRC also fell by one point to 43%, the first time its score has dropped since a 2010 low of 34%. Engagement remains higher among civil servants in the Welsh Government and Scottish Government than across the Civil Service as a whole.

As we have previously noted, the engagement scores for civil servants working for the Welsh Government (63% in 2014) and Scottish Government (63%) are higher than for the whole Civil Service (59%). Engagement rose by three percentage points in the Scottish Government between 2013 and 2014, while it fell for the first time – by one point – in the Welsh Government. This year’s full organisational results have been published much earlier than in previous years – only shortly after the benchmark scores were published. We will analyse them in more detail over a few more posts, and further detail (looking at Senior Civil Service scores and breaking results down by demographic factors) is expected to be published in January.