Elis UK

The Covid-19 pandemic hit rental and laundry company Elis UK, whose customer base spans the hospitality, workwear and healthcare sectors, hard. Some employees were furloughed due to a significant fall in customer activity and, while the organisation “believed we were supportive, we didn’t know for certain how employees were feeling”. 

Then, in mid-2021, the UK hospitality industry experienced a huge surge in activity and Elis UK recruited nearly 1,000 employees – a “significant challenge”. The company hoped it had an engaged workforce but recognised the need to engage its staff more effectively. 

It set out to take a measure of employee satisfaction that could be remeasured at future intervals; give employees a permanent voice and mechanism by which to feedback on topics important at an individual, site and UK level; create a cultural shift where employees believed their feedback would bring about positive change; see an improvement and/or reduction in productivity, profitability, retention and recruitment cost and improve employee satisfaction across nine themes. These were: communication, engagement, leadership, manager, organisation, performance, personal development, role and team.

A survey was developed and posters displayed at the company’s sites to count down the survey window and generate intrigue. Employee survey champions were designated to work with employees, who were given time during working hours to complete the questionnaire. Elis UK agreed to donate £1 per completed survey to charities of the sites’ choice, and the survey was available via a QR code displayed on the posters. The organisation also published league tables showing site percentage completion during the two-week survey window. 

Aftwards, the results were shared with all employees, and sites and departments formed Employee Voice Committees to discuss results and agree action plans. A new Employee Voice logo became the visual link back to the survey. The percentage of those who agreed with the survey statement “I have seen and experienced positive change in my workplace since the last survey” stood at 77 per cent in 2023 compared with 44 per cent in 2021. 

The judges praised Elis UK’s “extremely strategic approach to identifying the nine themes on which to focus” because “everything then followed from and aligned with this”. “This then made everything easy to compare,” the judges said, adding that “the clarity of scoring detail was excellent and highlighted the impact of their initiatives and the stark difference before and after implementation.”