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High Speed Two (HS2) Ltd 
Neil Hayward, HR Director, High Speed Two Ltd, and Steve Frost, CEO and Founder, WorkBuzz
WorkBuzz is a company that is on a mission to help improve the working lives of millions of people. As a supplier in the employee experience and engagement space, they were contracted by HS2 to help the company build a great culture and make much smarter people decisions by providing HS2 with regular, actionable employee feedback. HS2 wanted their people to be working towards a common vision, be emotionally invested in the purpose of the company, be able to realise their potential and be supported in becoming their best selves at work all day every day. WorkBuzz was the supplier chosen, after a competitive tender exercise, to help HS2 realise this vision. Steve Frost is the CEO and Founder of WorkBuzz.
Why did HS2 and WorkBuzz decide to work together, and what was the agreed scope of that work?
Hayward: When I joined HS2 back in 2017, I found a company that was in danger of failing. There were clear signs of distress in terms of our reputation and our performance. Our people were disengaged and unmotivated. A lot of change was required. That change had to embrace every aspect of our operating model – structures, systems, processes, governance, as well as our people.
“Since passion and commitment are voluntary, we need to create workplaces cultures and positive experiences where people choose to be engaged and provide discretionary effort.”
In May 2018, our board signed off a new People and Organisation strategy which committed us to do things very differently and in particular to building HS2 as ‘an effective client organisation with the right capabilities and to developing a talented workforce and an inclusive culture. I’ve overseen a complete rebuild of capability, capacity, and the company’s culture since then, with the support of the board and my executive colleagues, and WorkBuzz has been a company supporting me on this journey.
They helped me define what we wanted employee experience to mean at HS2. WorkBuzz brought extensive experience, combined with a very agile and intuitive employee engagement platform, into play as part of our very significant business transformation. We’ve succeeded together. I’ve been working with them as a partner that I respect and trust for over two years now.
Frost: HS2 is a unique organisation; it’s fast-paced, constantly changing and has an ambitious mission to create a positive legacy. When we first started working with Neil and his team, we co-created a vision for what a world-class employee experience would look like at HS2 and how we could revamp its employee engagement strategy.
In terms of employee voice, HS2 had previously run a bi-annual employee survey, and by the time the results were shared with people managers, the feedback was often dated. And from an employee perspective, they saw little change as a result of their feedback. We set out to change this by introducing much more agile, quarterly pulse surveys and empowering managers with real-time feedback. Shortly before we were due to launch, the Coronavirus pandemic took hold in the UK, with the first lockdown announced.
HS2 responded brilliantly. We pivoted, and within just four days, we launched a remote working and wellbeing pulse, to ensure every colleague had what they needed to work from home productively, they were receiving effective comms from HS2 and to identify what else we could do to support their wellbeing. Most importantly, the questions were relevant to employees and provided actionable insight. Through a series of bi-monthly wellbeing pulses, HS2 could track and adjust its approach, with response rates and wellbeing levels measurably improving as employees could see positive change resulting from their feedback.
With the UK in and out of lockdowns, HS2 has varied the focus of each pulse survey to ensure these are meaningful and timely, helping to shape its hybrid working and wider people strategy. The focus now is on improving the wider employee experience throughout the employee life cycle.
What is employee experience and why is it important?
Frost: The link between improving employee engagement and business performance has been well documented. But you can’t simply drive employee engagement. Since passion and commitment are voluntary, we need to create workplaces cultures and positive experiences where people choose to be engaged and provide discretionary effort.
The employee experience, often shortened as just 'EX', is exactly what it sounds like—the experience that a company provides for each person it employs. It describes how they think and feels based on what they encounter and observe at work throughout their tenure. It includes their candidate experience, initial onboarding all the way through to when they leave the organisation.
If you select the right talent and create a positive employee experience, the vast majority of employees will go the extra mile for your customers, their colleagues and the company. It will also help you attract and retain talent.
Hayward: WorkBuzz has given us insights, in real-time, at every stage of an employee’s experience journey with us, and those insights can be segmented and analysed by demographics, seniority, location, and much more.
They have ensured that we truly do now understand what makes our people tick. I can see from these insights what might happen in my workforce in future if we don’t respond to their questions and concerns, and this has driven change in all our people policies and processes. This is lead, not lag business information.
My normal range of HRMI is backwards looking reporting on what has happened, whereas our employee experience insights from WorkBuzz get us onto the front foot and keep us there. Their benchmarking is particularly useful in this respect as they have over 400 other clients in 20 countries.
Why is technology important?
Frost: Technology is a huge enabler – platforms like WorkBuzz enable organisations to stay tuned in to how their people are feeling in real-time and translate this into actionable insights to help them make better people decisions and keep their people engaged.
In this rapidly changing world, there’s never been a more important time to give employees a voice, make data-driven decisions and empower leaders to manage change better. But technology alone doesn’t help HR leaders navigate the challenges ahead – it’s about aligning this to what your organisation is ready for, your wider people strategy and empowering managers to act on their feedback.
Hayward: I agree with Steve. Lots of companies say that they can bring HR Tech into help you solve your problems but then they turn out to be much less flexible and adaptable in practice. They give you a product, whereas WorkBuzz uses technology to give me a service. They are an exception in the employee experience and engagement space.
As a result of your partnership what’s changed for each of you?
Hayward: HS2 is unrecognisable from four years ago. As a result of listening and responding to employee feedback continuously as part of how we do business, we are now a very different business.
Back in 2018, when we started our transformation, only 76 percent of our employees responded to our then annual staff engagement survey. Now, we have consistently higher responses rates much more frequently (85 percent+), and our staff are significantly more engaged too (76 percent +19 percent in 2018). We ran six engagement or pulse surveys last year, and 95 percent + of our people tell us that they believe our values on the wall – Respect, Integrity, Safety, and Leadership - are embedded in how we do our business.
And we are winning awards for how we’ve changed our approach in response to such feedback. HS2 was recently confirmed by the Clear Company as having achieved the prestigious Clear Assured Platinum Award for our efforts to improve Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. We are the first UK company to achieve this.
Even more importantly, after 18 months of the pandemic, we remain on track to deliver Phase 1 of the programme to schedule and cost having kept construction working at more than 250 sites up and down the line of the route through an approach that has put staff wellbeing and safety front and centre throughout.
We have also seen the bottom-line benefits that come from targeting candidates to join us more specifically and focussing on talent retention too. Churn has slowed, and hiring costs have been reduced. We’ve seen a lot of change for the better from working with WorkBuzz.
Frost: HS2 having the success they wanted is the outcome that pleases us the most. We exist to help our clients achieve their goals. Their success is our success.
Any final thoughts?
Frost: Developing a great employee experience leads to employees feeling happier, being more productive and motivated. This increased productivity can have an amazing impact on your business. A motivated team engages more with their work and provides better results. It’s a great business to be in…. helping others to succeed.
Hayward: We see this at HS2. Employee Experience is an emerging business function focussing on how employees think and feel during every single touchpoint of their journey through a company. Our experience suggests that if you do focus on your people, then you can overcome significant business issues. Employee experience has been at the heart of the transformation of HS2 for the last few years, and that’s where it will stay.
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