Section 1: About You

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. Our vision is to become the market-leading, digitally-led brand for equipment services.

Section 2: The Challenge

We want to understand what our 2000 colleagues think about all things HSS, how we can make things better and our company an excellent place to work.

Specifically, we want to get a better understanding of what our colleagues think about their job role, how they are managed, and if they enjoy working here. We want to know if colleagues believe we look after them and what we could improve upon.

We were struggling to get feedback from all of our different colleague groups, who work in a variety of different working environments and locations.

Our first ever Group-wide survey was launched in 2016 and we felt that a company wide engagement survey would provide us with data that would help with our people & wellbeing strategy.

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

To support with the design, construction, administration and management of the survey and to collate the responses in a meaningful way that could be shared with the business.

Section 3: The Solution

Consulted with Anthem to understand our challenges and the objectives we wanted to achieve from the survey.

We 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. We 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.

The process was agreed over a number of months preceding the survey, the survey itself is open for 4 weeks. Results are provided within 4 weeks of the survey closing.

Section 4: Results

The 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.

That’s why HSS are one of our favourite clients. They are an Employer of Choice.