Gauging the Impact
Improving workforce engagement and performance in local authorities
Elmira Bakhshalian
Mary Edbrooke
Fatima Elmi
Maryam Ahmadiyankooshkghazi
Martin Reddington
January 2018
Since 2012, around 20 local authorities and 5 NHS trusts or healthcare providers have used TEDD®, The Employment Deal Diagnostic, to measure workforce performance by looking at the quality of the employment relationship, which is expressed as an exchange of contributions of various kinds between employer and employee. TEDD®’s personification of the employment relationship or ‘deal’ as a dynamic and social exchange process and a distillation of its research effort in the public sector can be found in our recently published White Paper, Developing a New Employment Deal for Local Government. The current paper builds on Developing a New Employment Deal for local Government, by demonstrating how different local authorities have used TEDD® to help develop the design and delivery of shape initiatives that can improve workforce engagement and performance. It will focus on five local authorities, namely, Kent County Council, Tendring District Council, Haringey London Borough Council, Maldon District Council and Wrexham County Borough Council. Primarily for two reasons: first and foremost, they have all used TEDD® more than once to inform their HR/OD interventions and second they cover different sizes (approximately 300 to 40,000 employees) and types of authorities (i.e. county, district and unitary). We see the deal-in-action by presenting the case studies through the lens of TEDD®. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and promote good practice across the public sector.