The importance of employee engagement is well documented: organisations with highly-engaged teams have been shown to be more profitable, more productive, and deliver better customer service. This impact on customer satisfaction is especially significant for retail and hospitality businesses.

Put simply, the best driver of happy customers is happy employees – and no one believes this more than the leadership team at Harrods. The luxury department store has won plaudits for its people-first approach, recognising excellent service through business-wide awards, and providing extensive growth opportunities to employees.

As a result, Harrods has been named one of Glassdoor’s UK’s Best Places to Work three times in the past four years, and a UK Top Employer for six years running.

”An annual survey wasn’t giving us the level of insight we needed as a business. Moving to a more continuous approach will allow us to be more responsive to the needs of our team.”

“We consider ourselves to be both a customer and employee-centric business,” say Harrods. “We run many programmes to ensure our employees feel recognised, rewarded and valued – and with that, it is extremely important we empower them with a voice, and opportunity for regular feedback. We believe that Harrods should be as great a place to work as it is to shop.”

Moving from an annual survey to a continuous approach

For many retail and hospitality businesses, implementing a continuous feedback strategy can be a challenge. The biggest hurdle can be gathering regular and reliable employee feedback in the first place – especially with a large proportion of non-office-based workers.

Having previously conducted an annual engagement survey, Harrods were keen to open a more regular line of communication between employees and senior leadership, and improve the level of engagement data they had available.

”Our choice of Peakon was driven by a need for us to work with a provider that not only excelled in question design and survey implementation, but also had the data intelligence and technology infrastructure to find deeper insights into employee engagement.”

“Getting feedback from our team on a regular basis is going to be key to us refining our people strategies,” say Harrods. “An annual survey wasn’t giving us the level of insight we needed as a business. Moving to a more continuous approach will allow us to be more responsive to the needs of our team, and ultimately help us continue to improve the employee experience, and in turn the experience of our customers.”

“We understand the power of using data to support what we do for our customers and employees. After reviewing a number of survey providers, our choice of Peakon was driven by a need for us to work with a provider that not only excelled in question design and survey implementation, but also had the data intelligence and technology infrastructure to find deeper insights into employee engagement.”

Using Kiosk mode to survey shop-floor employees

As part of their engagement survey roll-out, Harrods will be using Peakon’s Kiosk feature, which allows employees to respond to a survey on-site without the need for an individual company email address or access to a personal device.

“We were especially impressed with how easily Peakon integrates into the way Harrods already runs as a business. Our employees will be accessing the platform using their existing employee IDs. Keeping these processes as simple as possible for our team will help to improve the quantity and quality of feedback that we receive.”

”Building a picture of how engagement and performance are intertwined will be important for us in achieving our long-term business goals.”

Harrods isn’t the only organisation to be using Peakon’s Kiosk mode. WASH, the US-based laundry services provider, implemented Peakon’s Kiosk and SMS surveys to achieve a 71% response rate from a largely field-based team.

Linking engagement to business metrics

As data-driven HR platforms become more commonplace, many businesses are beginning to recognise the strategic benefits of frequent employee feedback. Harrods are very much at the forefront of this HR tech revolution.

“The real value for Harrods is being able to combine our employee engagement data with our key business metrics of sales and service. Building a picture of how engagement and performance are intertwined will be important for us in achieving our long-term business goals.”

With an open API, Peakon makes it easy for any organisation to correlate their engagement metrics and business performance.