People auditing: assurance over employee engagement

Presented by John Chesshire 

"People are regularly described as an organisation's greatest asset. They can also be the source of significant risk. The Chartered Institute’s Risk in Focus 2024 survey highlights “human capital, diversity, talent management and retention” as second place in its list of key risks identified by CAEs. This topical course deep dives into one of the most important areas relating to our people - employee engagement."

Effective employee engagement helps organisations navigate the difficult ‘people’ challenges of the post-pandemic world, including recruitment, retention, motivation, and productivity. As the CIPD state, “Feeling engaged is evidently good for workers. Most definitions of engagement describe employees who are healthier, happier, more fulfilled, or more motivated. For organisations, research has repeatedly shown that measures of engagement go together with higher performance. More broadly, other studies show that positive relationships between aspects of employee engagement and other business metrics, including customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, staff retention, efficiency and health and safety performance”.

But how engaged are your organisation’s people? Is this a threat or opportunity today? How well is your organisation, its leaders, Human Resources, and managers across the entity managing the associated risks, in a joined-up, coherent and coordinated way? Not sure? You’re not alone!

This one-day course will help you provide effective, professional insight and internal audit assurance and advice over this emerging, and vitally important, area of Board-level interest.

Who should attend?

This course is designed to be relevant to internal auditors from every business sector and for delegates with varying levels of practical experience, from CAE to new joiner. Historically, internal auditors have often audited mainly procedural, hard controls, and this course will be particularly useful for those who also want to find out more about auditing soft controls, aspects of culture and behaviour.

It is of most relevance to those who are about to audit employee engagement, people risk, HRM activity in general, or the HR function, or who need to know more about these activities.

What will I learn?

Upon completion you will be able to:

• understand employee engagement, what it is and who should be doing what
• recognise the role and importance of employee engagement and how an engaged workforce can critically support the achievement of organisational objectives
• recognise the objectives of employee engagement and how to achieve this ‘holy grail’ in practice
• identify and assess risk and appropriate mitigation associated with employee engagement from an internal audit perspective
• deliver professional insight and internal audit assurance over employee engagement and associated initiatives
• access additional resources to help you audit employee engagement in your organisation more effectively.

Course programme

• people risk and its importance
• defining and understanding employee engagement
• a background to employee engagement and its importance for all organisations, irrespective of sector
• key employee engagement objectives
• alternate employee engagement strategies available to organisations
• key employee engagement risks and options for risk mitigation, both hard and soft controls
• topical issues, emerging trends, good practices, and developments in employee engagement
• common challenges and issues faced when auditing employee engagement and how to overcome these.

CPE competency areas covered

• Performance (Engagement planning)
• Performance (Engagement Fieldwork)
• Environment (Common business processes)

7 CPE points