Vodafone - Establishing the link between people management and organisational performance

There have been a number of attempts over the years to prove the link between employee engagement and business performance – with varying degrees of success. As a result, management decisions are (still) too often based on anecdotal evidence, instinct and assumptions.

PA Consulting Group worked with Professor John Purcell (of the Bath People and Performance Model) to apply systems thinking to the problem, developing a causal model that identifies the critical factors that influence an employee’s motivation and performance.

To validate this innovative model, we partnered with Vodafone over a three-month period to examine its contact centre operation – with the aim of providing a holistic picture of employee engagement and identifying the management interventions that would increase service quality and drive costs down.

Working closely with Vodafone staff, our model was able to:

• bring quantitative and qualitative information together for the first time

• identify three specific career phases in the life cycle of Vodafone employees where aptitude, engagement and commitment to the organisation varied dramatically in each

• show which 'people levers' Vodafone managers needed to pull to have a real impact on their business.

According to the HR Director, the model also identified practical actions which had not previously been considered: “PA has told us things we did not know about our organisation… the model has exceeded our expectations.”

To find out how people management can drive your organisation's performance, please contact us now.