Dirk Hahn on why culture is integral to Hays
Q: Why have you chosen to take deliberate action to evolve the culture in Hays?
A strong culture has always been important to Hays. It is part of what makes Hays an organisation that people want to join, stay and grow in. We chose to undertake a culture audit so we could
be confident that we have the right culture in place to set us up for long-term success. A strong and aligned culture acts as a powerful engine for driving engagement, influencing behaviours, and creating a solid foundation for trust and collaboration, and ultimately executing our strategy successfully. By proactively
shaping our culture, we will help create a more resilient, forwardlooking organisation, ready to seize opportunities and navigate the future with confidence.
Q: What do the new senior leadership team provide?
Our reshaped Executive Leadership Team now includes key Chief Digital and Technology Officer and Chief People Officer roles, clearly demonstrating our commitment to innovation and people. Additionally, as announced at our half-year results, we appointed Tom Way, an external candidate, to lead our UK&I division, strengthening our regional leadership. These additions add external experience and fresh thinking, which complements the deep operational knowledge provided by me, our CFO James Hilton, and the divisional CEOs.
The right team blending Hays experience with fresh external perspectives
Our senior leadership team is focused on navigating short-term market challenges, while positioning Hays for long-term growth. They are energised and highly committed to delivering our strategy. We are doing this by ensuring we have the right operating models for each business line, by embracing the huge potential presented by technology, and via our commitment to enhanced operational rigour.
Attracting and retaining the best talent is central to delivering the best outcomes for our customers and driving Hays’ medium term growth. Our ambition is for Hays to be recognised as the most inclusive and welcoming employer in our industry.
One of our core priorities is ensuring that our people understand our values and behave in a way that supports the delivery of our strategy.
Leading our People & Culture transformation
Deborah Dorman joined Hays in June 2024, bringing a wealth of experience in leading large-scale, people-centred transformations, including cultural change and organisational effectiveness.
Our People Vision – to be the best place for the best people
Our People Vision is built around achieving three key strategic outcomes.
A strong employer brand helps to differentiate Hays. We are able to recruit and retain the best talent in the industry by offering a high energy culture, an inclusive environment, exciting careers, world-class training and development, and opportunities to contribute to the communities in which we operate.
“We want to be the best place to work for the best people, where we empower our colleagues with the right leadership and skills for the future.”
Deborah Dorman
We want to increase individual productivity and performance, deliver excellence to our customers on a consistent basis, be a top destination for talent, improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the organisation, and maximise our collective potential. Our aim is to create a workplace where:
- People can learn and grow. We equip people to succeed through first-class training, ongoing development, and career support so they can build long-lasting, rewarding careers with us.
- People can be their authentic selves. We are a diverse organisation that welcomes difference, fosters equity, and enables everyone to fulfil their potential.
- People’s performance is recognised. We are performance focused and clear on expectations. We support people to succeed and recognise this through fair and transparent reward.
Our culture: Empowering, diverse and inclusive
Our culture is the reason why so many of our people choose to stay and grow their careers with Hays.
This year, to optimise our ability to deliver our Creating Tomorrow Together strategy, we undertook an audit of our culture to understand the Hays culture, where our strengths are, and where we need to change.
We embarked on this journey by actively involving our people in an open dialogue about our culture, with interviews and listening groups taking place in spring 2025 right across the Hays world. We also gave all colleagues in Hays the chance to share their views via two questions in February’s Your Voice Pulse survey.
When we ask colleagues to describe our culture, they have used terms such as “friendly and supportive”, “inclusive and fair”, “meritocratic”, and “a place to grow”.
We also identified opportunities to positively evolve our culture to optimise delivery of our new strategy. As part of a wider cultural evolution plan, we have created a new set of Valued Behaviours and a modernised leadership framework. This will be launched to the organisation in Autumn 2025 with plans in place to embed behaviours and drive continued cultural evolution in the months that follow.
Driving employee engagement
Having engaged colleagues is critical to our future success. A key method to understand the engagement of colleagues globally is through our Your Voice survey. In FY25 we rephrased our colleague voice surveys, with our Pulse survey taking place in February 2025. Going forward we will conduct two global employee surveys annually – a full survey in the autumn and a
- People feel their work is meaningful. We add value every day as trusted partners to candidates, clients, and the communities we are in, making a positive contribution to wider society.
- People have a voice. We actively seek ways to have regular, honest and transparent two-way dialogue with our colleagues so they can help to shape what we do for them and our customers.
- People want to work. We have a positive, fun, people-centred culture with a clear focus on first-class leadership and engagement which enables happy, high-performing teams.
- People have the best tools. We provide industry-leading tools, technology, and insight to enable colleagues to focus on value-adding activity.
Pulse survey in the spring, which is a temperature check of colleague sentiment as well as an opportunity to explore any specific areas of focus. Your Voice is translated into 12 languages, and is completely confidential, which allows colleagues to share their honest views with anonymity. Feedback is reviewed closely by the Executive Board and senior managers to identify and inform actions. We also use other continual two-way communication channels to ensure colleagues are kept informed of key developments, including town halls, CEO Q&A sessions and divisional CEO email campaigns. These enable us to engage with a broad cross section of our people and provide important opportunities to listen directly to their challenges, opinions and ideas.
In our Pulse survey (February 2025), 70% of our colleagues told us they would recommend Hays as a great place to work. Whilst our engagement score is still in line with benchmark, we acknowledge the decline we have experienced and are committed to improving this back to above market levels.
Pulse global results - 2025 Pulse vs 2024 full survey
Deborah Dorman
Delivering on our People & Culture vision
Q: What changes have you made since joining Hays in June 2024?
Working closely with our People & Culture directors worldwide we co-created a global people plan. We also hosted our first Global People & Culture town hall to engage colleagues as we embark on our journey together. Some benefits from working in a more collaborative manner are already starting to emerge. Global job levelling, development of new Valued Behaviours and a leadership framework, and global performance management have all been elements of the first phase of our plan.
Q: What changes have you made to reward and incentives?
There is already good work happening in our regions, for example CEMEA, towards creating a compelling colleague deal which we will seek to replicate in other territories. During the year, we recruited a new Global Head of Compensation & Performance. A review of management LTIPs, bonus, and incentive design is a key strategic priority for FY26.
Q: Which initiatives do you have in place to increase employee engagement?
Whilst our engagement score is in line with benchmark, we remain committed to increasing this through improved internal communications, initiatives to amplify colleague voice and involvement, empowering local managers to take action focusing on the things which make the biggest difference to our colleagues and celebrating our culture and people through internal and external recognition.
Q: What are your plans for FY26 and beyond?
We aim to support our operational teams, using our people levers to help improve consultant net fee productivity, and embed a target People & Culture operating model aligned to strategy.
“Whilst we are dissatisfied with the decline in engagement, in highly challenging markets we have had to make some difficult decisions and deliver significant change across Hays, and this has been reflected in recent Your Voice scores. However, these changes are needed to deliver our focused strategy and position the Group to capitalise strongly on market recovery when it comes. The benchmarks for the staffing industry have also gone backwards reflecting the challenges across the whole industry. That said, there is much we can and will do to focus on improving our results despite the challenging context. We are actively focused on improving people engagement and restoring our former above-market levels.”
Deborah Dorman
Chief People Officer