Turning Employee Feedback into Real Business Impact: How VolkerWessels UK Strengthened Retention, Unlocked £5.8M in Savings, and Embedded a Listening Culture
Turning Employee Feedback into Real Business Impact: How VolkerWessels UK Strengthened Retention, Unlocked £5.8M in Savings, and Embedded a Listening Culture
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Saved through reduced attrition
Voluntary attrition fell from 16.5% to 10.5%, generating £5.83M in cost savings.
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Record survey response rate
Improved accessibility, clearer communication drove VolkerWessels UK’s highest-ever participation
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Intention to leave
Just 6% of employees plan to leave, reflecting a stable workforce supported by open leadership and a strong people-first culture.
Led by, John Backhouse, Head of People Science at WorkBuzz, with:
Survey Response Rates
Q: What did you do to get your notable increase on response rates to now be at the highest ever level at 79%, which is particularly impressive given the number of colleagues out working in the field?
The survey is now more embedded, and people are familiar and open to completing it. We've done a lot on explicit "we said, you did" feedback. We've utilized different technologies like mobile devices so it's easy to access.
Location managers have put in more effort to get people together in one site, such as gathering everyone in the canteen with food, providing devices to complete the survey right there. Finding dedicated time helped significantly.
We also streamlined the survey, making it shorter and focusing on areas people wanted to talk about, including the most impactful items from previous surveys. The survey was open longer and ran over summer. Unlike previous surveys where we saw a mad rush in the final days, this time we had a more regular flow of completions.
Maintaining High Engagement
Q: What were the key actions you did to get continually high engagement scores, despite the industry facing many challenges over the previous few years?
People feel like they're being listened to. We hold shared service-specific conferences that include all departments to tell people where the business is heading. We discuss both positives and key challenges, which helps employees be more aware of what's happening and how it will impact them. When the CEO shares information directly, it carries more gravitas than people realize.
We constantly work with managers to give constructive feedback and recognition for good work. Our HR teams are out talking to people, listening to what matters most. For example, FIR (Fairness, Inclusion and Respect) really matters to our people, and we're quite advanced compared to competitors - we've taken this to a very good level. Not to say there isn’t always more to work on, but we are very pleased where we have managed to move this to.
We refresh what we do and align with what's happening in the world, tying everything back to business priorities. We've introduced tools like "MyReview" performance management - shorter, sharper, and more regular.
There are two elements to engagement: day-to-day ways of working that we've tried to make easier, and a deeper reflection of the culture, which is positive and well-received. We see this reflected in our turnover rates and exit interviews - three-quarters of departing employees would recommend us.
Despite market changes and external challenges, we've managed to move forward. We maintain a family feel, supporting people through personal challenges. It’s not necessarily about being the best payers in the industry in pure monetary terms, but offering many other benefits to help look after our people, such as food trucks, ice cream rounds, and birthday days off - going above and beyond, not just focusing purely on pay at the expense of providing an amazing experience for our colleagues.
Leadership Perceptions
Q: Why do you feel most questions are above external benchmarks, particularly on things like perceptions on leaders doing the right things to give us success/being open to ideas and feedback/understanding challenges?
Our leaders talk more and share more. While we naturally will have a management hierarchy, it's not how we behave. Our CEO would stop and talk to anyone who wants to, whereas in other organizations there's sometimes no access to leaders. We've made a conscious effort to increase communication and transparency from leadership. We're currently working on having leaders share more about strategy and future plans.
We're not firefighting every day. We have the basics in place and a strong culture. Despite the disruption during COVID, we tried very hard to keep our foundations strong and the basics right so we could focus on value-added activities.
There's been a shift in the leadership team to prioritize people matters on the agenda. We now have designated meetings just to talk about the people agenda, plus people items on other meetings.
The CEO, CFO, executives, and SLT have structured regular meetings specifically about people. We can only do this because we have a strong business. Our CEO truly recognizes that without the right people, we don't have a business - having the right people delivering in the right ways helps the business achieve its targets.
Action Planning
Q: How do you action plan following each survey, and monitor progress against those actions?
Every business unit gets a feedback session from WorkBuzz. They take this information and work on what they need to do specific to their context and challenges.
When we implement initiatives like the ability to buy additional leave, we tie it directly to survey feedback: "in the survey you told us you want this, and we are introducing it."
We don't monitor progress in a highly structured way; it's done more informally and empowering local areas. Within business units, HR teams drill down to local team levels for actions. Overall, it's a "you said/we did" approach, with business HR partners working closely with teams.
Following up happens at the local level. The fact that engagement is high and improving suggests this informal but empowering approach is working.
Retention and Turnover
Q: The score for intention to stay is +7 percentage points above external benchmark and the intention to leave is only 6%, which is pretty significant compared to other organizations. Why do you think this is, and is it backing up real attrition and retention figures?
In the last two years, our voluntary attrition has decreased from 16.5% to 10.5%. WorkBuzz has a return on investment calculator developed by the People Science Team, that takes into account the total costs of attrition and re-hire e.g. average salary, number of actual leavers before and after, costs to hire, loss of productivity of the new hire until they get fully operational, loss of productivity of existing employees to fill in any operational gaps and their time spent getting a new hire operational etc.
Using this calculator, the total saving for VolkerWessels of reducing voluntary attrition is £5,832,062!
This cost-benefit analysis of why to invest in employee listening is often missed and lost by just moving scores in survey rather than focusing on measuring the often significant impacts to organisational performance metrics and KPI’s.
Business Performance Metrics
Q: Have you seen any other notable improvements in business performance metrics and KPIs as a possible result of your people being engaged and happy?
For our MyReview performance system, the completion rates are in the high 90%- managers are doing what we ask of them. Our communications app has a 90% adoption rate, and our reward scheme has a 90% adoption rate as well.
People see the investment and benefits in what we put in place. You can feel that engagement is high and improving - it's tangible, and the day-to-day engagement is evident.
Engaging Younger Employees
Q: WorkBuzz often find the youngest people least engaged in employee surveys with other clients. However, for VolkerWessels, they were the most engaged age group. Is there anything in particular you are doing with your younger people?
When younger people join us, they benefit from our family-feel culture and receive strong support. Psychological safety and wellbeing are high priorities, and people are well looked after. It's a warm culture where older, more experienced colleagues take younger people under their wing. We'd rather people swim than sink - it's not just about getting someone to do a job.
We give people time to grow, and are asking all our managers to spend more time working with on people activities.
There's an emotional intelligence piece where managers understand people who are new to the world of work and help build their resilience. This manager awareness allows young employees to grow.
WorkBuzz Partnership
Q: How has WorkBuzz supported you in helping improve your response rate and scores in the survey/actual employee experience, and how do you value this relationship?
It's a true partnership. WorkBuzz actively encourages feedback from VolkerWessels as a client and is never afraid to change things up. They understand us as an organization and our industry.
The individual sessions are really powerful - having WorkBuzz talk directly to our Managing Directors as an impartial expert has more impact than if it came from internal HR. We do make decisions based on the data WorkBuzz provides - they give us good data and insights.
WorkBuzz has been an enabler for our people to have a voice. Their system is easy and straightforward to use, making it simple to understand the results. The integration with Blink (our communication platform) has also been valuable.