HSS Hire Group is a market leader in equipment hire and support services in the UK and Ireland. It offers a one-stop marketplace for all equipment hire through the complementary combination of its HSS ProService and HSS Operations divisions. HSS ProService is a capital-light, scalable, technology-based business focussing on sales acquisition, whilst HSS Operations is a fleet-owning fulfilment business focussing on customer service, health and safety and efficiency.

HSS’ first ever Group-wide survey was discussed with Anthem in 2016 and we felt that a company wide engagement survey would provide them with data that would help with our people & wellbeing strategy. It was a monumental task and they wanted to get feedback from all of our different colleague groups, who work in a variety of different working environments and locations.

Max Morgan, HR Director wants to understand what colleagues think about all things HSS, how they can make things better and the company a great place to work. Specifically, HSS want to get a better understanding of what their colleagues think about their job role, how they are managed, and if they enjoy working here. They want to know if colleagues believe senior leaders look after them and what the HR team could improve upon.

Crucially, they wanted to provide managers with information that would highlight what mattered locally to their colleagues that would shape post-survey work with their teams to develop tailored and meaningful action plans, demonstrating to colleagues that we take their feedback seriously.

Anthem and HSS met to understand our challenges and the objectives we wanted to achieve from the survey and had several meetings to agree the approach and how we would launch to the business. We discussed the content of questions, business units to be included and total number of colleagues and the HR team were involved and kept informed throughout all stages of the process. Initially in 2016 we agreed on an on-line survey with a paper copy included to capture those in Operations but this has developed to an on-line version only.

Max said “colleague engagement survey is an invaluable tool for us to understand how engaged our colleagues are with all things HSS.

We have seen response rates improve year on year. Our colleagues are telling us what they enjoy about HSS, but more importantly, what we can improve.”

The survey has helped support 2-way communication with colleagues across the business. The action plans from each business division have helped to develop a programme of ‘You Said, We Did’ feedback to include in all communications activity, supported our engagement, benefits and wellbeing strategies and informed how and what we communicate in our colleague engagement channels including Hiya magazines & bulletins.

It has allowed us to collate colleague feedback which has led to areas of concern becoming a focus for improvement at a local level and helped us to understand why these concerns are important to colleagues and to help implement change. The overall Engagement index as it keeps us focused on key trends, identifying areas of improvement and on creating strategies to increase employee
engagement. We also use it to measure the impact of employee engagement initiatives and track progress over time