Delivered the Hays Way
Our people and culture
At our core, we are a people business. Every day, we match organisations with talent, and talent with opportunity. Delivering consistently for our clients
is driven by the engagement and performance of our colleagues.
Last year, clear priorities were set to evolve our culture, strengthen capabilities, enhance our colleague experience and amplify our colleague voice. During the year we made significant progress against these priorities, with a sharper focus on how our culture is embedded and experienced across our business, including how inclusion and wellbeing are reflected in how we work, lead and deliver for our clients.
Defining how we work
This year, we launched our brand-new Valued Behaviours. These were shaped in collaboration with colleagues across Hays, setting a clear and consistent ambition for how we drive performance, collaborate effectively and deliver together. This marks a significant step forward in the evolution of our culture; retaining the best of Hays while adapting, to ensure we are able to deliver our wider business objectives.
These behaviours are shaping the future of our business, balancing performance and accountability with collaboration, inclusivity and curiosity, all in service of delivering for our clients, candidates and
the communities we support. They create a shared language across our markets and build a consistent understanding of how success is achieved.
Alongside these, we introduced a focused set of global People Standards, Treating Each Other with Respect and Health, Safety and Wellbeing, which set out the behaviours and expectations we expect across our whole business. These set the foundation for the day-to-day experience of our colleagues, ensuring inclusion, wellbeing, mental health and psychological safety are embedded into how our work gets done.
Measuring and acting
Our refreshed approach to colleague listening brings together multiple sources of insight to create a more continuous and responsive view of colleague experience:
- Your Voice, our annual engagement survey
- Pulse surveys, at mid year
- New monthly Heartbeat survey.
This provides a more continuous understanding of our colleague experience, including how the Valued Behaviours are showing up in practice, levels of psychological safety, and broader wellbeing trends.
Engagement scores this year reflect a period of significant change across our business. While overall engagement has declined by 3 percentage points to 67%, it remains broadly in line with external benchmarks. We recognise there is more to do and are focused on improving engagement as we embed our strategy across the organisation.
Importantly, there have been improvements in areas linked to colleagues living the Valued Behaviours, putting customers at the heart of what we do and receiving useful feedback to improve performance. These are important signs of progress, and all three link directly to our culture roadmap.
“Joining Mark Dearnley for International Day of Persons with Disabilities was a
powerful moment to share my experience with neurodiversity, learn from others and
explore how technology, including AI, is reducing barriers, enabling innovation and
creating new opportunities for everyone to contribute, collaborate and succeed.
Working in change, it reinforced for me that when we design with inclusion at the
centre, we create environments where people can thrive and deliver better outcomes
for our colleagues, candidates and clients alike.”
David Butler Smith
Senior Change Manager
Making it real through leadership
Defining our Valued Behaviours is only the start. Our new leadership framework sets clear expectations for leaders at every level, defining what good leadership looks like in practice. It places accountability on leaders to role-model our Valued Behaviours, foster psychological safety, create positive and inclusive environments and enable high-performing teams. This is being embedded through Leading Better Together, our global leadership immersion programme for 700 of our leaders, focused on turning expectations into everyday practice. Across 16 weeks, six interactive workshops, three peer coaching sessions, and three accountability labs provides leaders with practical tools and a shared approach to learning.
“It was important that our new Valued Behaviours became more than words. Our role as leaders is to make them tangible in everyday moments, through how decisions are made, how teams are empowered and how we deliver for our clients.”
Deborah Dorman
Chief People Officer
Colleague voice
We have made a step-change in how colleague voice is heard and acted upon, directly supporting our priority to amplify engagement and strengthen two‑way dialogue. When diverse perspectives inform our work, decisions are better, solutions more innovative, and the relationships we build with clients and candidates deeper. Colleague feedback and input were instrumental in shaping our Momentum strategy.
Building deeper insight
We have made colleague engagement a visible priority, led by members of our ELT and Board through regional sessions across our global markets. These have created space for open, direct conversations on culture, business priorities and colleague experience, reinforcing our commitment to hearing from colleagues at every level of the organisation. These opportunities for ongoing dialogue help ensure we’re harnessing the rich insights of our colleagues to help shape how we deliver for clients and candidates, as well as how we create a positive experience for our people.
This approach has been complemented by deeper, targeted engagement with key groups, including senior women in operational roles, colleagues with disabilities and neurodivergent conditions, and employee network leads. Alongside this, a wide range of global and local inclusion-focused events has strengthened connection and broadened the range of perspectives shaping our thinking.
Insights generated through this listening are actively informing how we design and evolve our organisation inclusively. A key enabler is our new partnership with the Business Disability Forum, which is supporting us to embed accessibility into our ongoing business transformation. This includes our systems, tools and ways of working, ensuring that inclusion, alongside mental health and wellbeing, is proactively designed into how we operate.
“We see DEI, mental health and wellbeing as a catalyst for growth – helping us broaden our access to talent, strengthen our client impact, and build a culture where difference drives our collective performance. It is both a commercial advantage and the right thing to do.”
Hannah Sargeant
Global Director of Colleague Experience
Moving forward
This year was about putting the foundations in place. Clearer expectations. Stronger leadership. Better listening.
As the world of work continues to change rapidly and the need to adapt at pace as an employer increases, this has a direct impact on how we attract, develop and retain talent. Our focus now is on continuing to embed the changes we have made, ensuring the Valued Behaviours are experienced consistently across the organisation and reflected in how success is delivered – for colleagues, for clients and for candidates.
We will make Hays a destination for talent, supported by strong skills development, career opportunities and reward, flexible and hybrid ways of working, capable line managers and a culture built around our Valued Behaviours.
People and our Momentum strategy
Our people are central to delivering our Momentum strategy. As we reshape Hays into a more specialist, insight-led and technology-enabled organisation, we are building a People & Culture function that will support every colleague to thrive.
We are evolving into a more globalised People & Culture function to give colleagues a more consistent and higher quality experience across talent, learning, performance, reward and colleague experience.
Under the banner of our new Hays Academy, we will support delivery of our strategy by investing in the knowledge and skills our colleagues need to become trusted experts. We will expand learning pathways focused on specialist knowledge, leadership excellence and consultative selling skills. The Hays Academy will become our global centre for learning, performance, reward and career development, bringing together on-boarding, capability building, leadership development, career progression and reward into one connected experience.
We are also continuing to invest in modern tools that make work simpler and faster, enabling our colleagues to be more productive. As the Hays Digital Platform rolls out, colleagues will benefit from improved digital platforms, streamlined processes and automation that frees them to focus on high-value work.
To support this, we will also strengthen digital and data capability, ensuring colleagues can confidently and responsibly use new tools, platforms and AI-enabled matching technology. This combination of state-of-the-art tools and colleague development will support our colleagues to be the very best they can be.