Institute of Internal Communication

The government’s Task Force on employee engagement needs you.

People working in internal communication are needed to join a national network to pool expertise – and case studies are wanted to show how engagement works.

Nita Clarke (right), vice chair of the government’s Task Force and director of the Involvement & Participation Association (IPA), has made a personal appeal to members of the Institute of Internal Communication.

“The Task Force aims to spearhead a movement to enhance levels of employee engagement across the UK workforce,” she says.

“Following the MacLeod Report in 2009, it is generally accepted that engagement does work – it affects everything from profitability to the well being of employees. We’re now looking at how do you engage during austerity, when you’re making people redundant and making huge changes.

“We’ve created a guru group of academics, concentrating their intellectual firepower on the issues – and now we’re setting up a national network of practitioners, of people interested in or practitioners of engagement, HR or comms.

“Anyone who’s interested in joining the network should get in touch.”

The Task Force is also looking for case studies of work carried out by internal comms experts that have been really effective in developing, improving or maintaining engagement.

Nita says: “Please get in touch and let us know about what works. We want to create a huge interactive website - in a Mumsnet style - where people can share ideas about engagement and discuss problems.”

The co-author of the MacLeod Report under the former Labour government, Nita is now working with the current coalition government and says: “After last year’s election, David MacLeod and I were called in to see Vince Cable (Business Secretary) and Ed Davey (Employment Minister).

“It’s quite unusual for something produced for one government to be part of the thinking of the next government.

“Ed said ‘Look we have this growth challenge, we absolutely do think the work you’ve done on engagement is really important’. So we set up the Task Force.”

The idea has the backing of lots of chief executives from organisations like Lloyds, Thomson, M&S, the NHS, O2, Barclays, BT, and the TUC.

Anyone interested in joining the network or providing useful case studies can email nita.clarke@ipa-involve.com .