Total Reward

Feedback

• Website feedback
• Send to a friend

Quality of Work

See the elements of Quality of Work, and their definitions.

Actions

• Assess the evidence from your diagnostic work - and any related work recently done in this area - this is an area where work on diversity is likely to produce evidence for policy change
• If you have used the Total Reward Diagnostic look at the responses relating to:
  • how employees feel about perceptions of the value of their work;
  • whether there is sufficient challenge and interest in their work;
  • whether they feel they have enough opportunities to achieve in their work;
  • whether levels of freedom and autonomy (being trusted to get on with it) are sufficient or not;
  • whether there are any workload issues - do they have enough time to do their work? (this is about pace of work, manageable workloads and whether working relationships are good - all are essential for both teamworking and effective service delivery).

  You will need to look at these by employee group and any other breakdowns where you believe diferent views will surface

• Benchmarking to assess market practice where you need evidence to support recommendations for change

Benchmark

External benchmarking (pdf, 24Kb) of non-financial awards may help you gather the evidence you need to support recommendations for change.

Change

This is an area where you will need to work with other colleagues from HR as well as the SMT in reviewing your evidence and developing policies to improve Quality of Work in your organisation

Consider

• Looking at the quality of internal and external communications to ensure that the value of employees different contributions is appropriately recognised
• Looking at leadership behaviours to ensure there is enough support and recognition. Ensure that people from all roles and backgrounds feel valued, feel that their work is worthwhile and that they receive regular attention.
• Looking at work design - are there opportunities to increase the challenge and interest available to individuals or teams who would welcome this
• Supporting teams in the allocation of work to increase challenge and interest for individuals - encouraging them to offer suggestions
• Improving the way the organisation fosters and recognises achievement - working on improving self confidence, self esteem and a constructive approach to performance management
• Making sure that working relationships are as far as possible adult - adult rather than parent - child
• Ensuring that high levels of trust and respect are part of the organisation culture
• Ensuring that leaders and managers delegate effectively and have the training and support to do this
• Investigating the causes of unmanagemable workloads - or insufficient ones - e.g. poor planning, misallocation of work, poor/workaholic leadership, low trust, micromanagement or insufficient management attention - taking action to deal with the cause to manage workloads more effectively. The aim should be a fair planned workload with scope for discretionary effort and recognition when this is made
• Setting values about the importance of commitment within reasonable working hours and the diminishing returns of workaholic behaviour in terms of health and work performance
• Investigating how collaborative the environment is - or whether internal competition is getting in the way of overall performance
• Setting values, from the top around the importance of teamworking and effective, open, friendly working relationships at all levels in the interests of improving motivation, promoting service orientation and high performance

Examples

• Job design - are your roles too simple?
  • ''McJob' - A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.' (from 'Generation X' by Douglas Coupland)
• Are your roles too challenging? Goals and objectives need to be stretching but achieveable.

Further Resources

Review of Progress