Firstbus Case Study: Justifying the Value of Employee Engagement & Stakeholder Engagement

Insights From  Kevin Green, Chief People Officer at FirstGroup

Four years ago, First Bus was handed a report describing one of the worst workplace cultures its authors had ever seen. Today, employee engagement has risen from 41% to 66%, absence has almost halved and the business has doubled in size.

On day two of the Summit, Kevin Green, Chief People Officer at FirstGroup, explained how First Bus did it, and why he believes engagement is a business strategy, not a nice-to-have.

A tough place to start

Kevin's career has been spent in legacy organisations going through change. He was HR Director at Royal Mail when it was losing £1.5 million a day, then spent ten years as Chief Executive of the REC, the professional body for the recruitment industry.

First Bus brought its own challenges. It has 18,000 employees, most of them bus drivers and engineers, spread across around 80 sites. "That's 80 different cultures," Kevin said. "They're all microcultures."

The business is also highly unionised. It has 74 different sets of terms and conditions, 40 ways of managing absence and 32 different approaches to grievance and discipline.

Then came the culture report. It landed a week before Kevin started, and described bullying and harassment as rife and the culture as toxic.

The pandemic made things harder still. Sixteen First Bus drivers died during COVID. Then, during the Great Resignation, driver turnover hit 42.8%. Each new driver costs £9,000 to train, so that turnover meant a £26 million hit to the bottom line.

From buses to people

The big strategic shift was to move First Bus from an asset business, focused on the bus and the timetable, to a service business focused on people and customers.

Kevin noticed that some managers sent each other holiday photos of buses. "I go, who drives the bus? Who fixes the bus? Why no pictures of people?"

To win investment for that shift, he treated people programmes like any other business investment. He mapped the whole people strategy on a single page, linking eight people programmes to clear business outcomes. Then he built a hypothesis and a business case, and measured them throughout.

The logic is the service-profit chain: treat your people well and they treat your customers well. For First Bus, that means more trips, more customers and more profit, which can then be reinvested in people.

"If you want investment in employee engagement, you've got to be brave and build a business case — like anybody else putting in an IT system."

You said, we listened, we acted

At the heart of the change was a simple loop: listen to frontline colleagues, act on what they say, and tell them what you've done.

Surveys that lead to action. First Bus surveys its whole workforce three times a year, and managers at depot level and above are bonused on the results. There are no lengthy action plans. Instead, managers are asked one question: your people are telling you this, so what's the one thing you'll do about it?

Conversations, not paperwork. Driver reviews used to run to 14 pages, starting with attendance and disciplinary records. Frontline managers, each responsible for around 150 people, rarely had time to talk to anyone doing a good job. First Bus replaced the reviews with a voluntary 20-minute "catch-up" built around two questions: what can we do to make it better here for you, and for customers? The first round produced 4,000 conversations. By the ninth, more than 10,000 people took part, with 84% of frontline staff asking for one.

Small fixes, big symbols. In his first year, Kevin ran 25 toilet refurbishments after drivers warned him not to use the facilities. He also introduced free tea and coffee in every depot after drivers pointed out that managers had it and they didn't. Some managers warned that staff would steal the teabags. "That's the level of trust," Kevin said. "You've got to show that you mean it." Three or four years on, people still talk about it.

Where something can't be done, Kevin's rule is to explain why.

Millions of moments of truth

To bring managers on board, Kevin needed a story that would resonate. He found it in "moments of truth".

He shows managers a photo of a road worker painting a white line who comes to a fallen branch. A worker who cares stops, moves the branch and carries on painting. A worker who doesn't just paints around it.

Bus drivers face the same kind of choice about 25 times a day, by First Bus's conservative estimate. Do they wait for someone running for the bus, or stay on time? Do they take the extra minute to help a passenger on board with a pushchair or wheelchair? Across 13,000 drivers, that adds up to tens of millions of moments of truth every year.

"That's what employee engagement gets you," Kevin said. "In the moments of truth, they know their job matters, and they do the right thing."

The idea now runs through First Bus's internal brand, Everyday Actions. Alongside it, the business has refreshed its purpose, simplified its operating model from 14 businesses to six, and invested in leadership development and coaching.

The results

The numbers speak for themselves. First Bus's survey provider called it the fastest improvement in engagement they had ever seen in a dispersed workforce.

Depot by depot, the data shows the same pattern. Where engagement is higher, absence, attrition and customer injuries are lower, and operational measures such as on-time starts are better.

Kevin isn't stopping at 66%. His target is 70% or higher, and the transformation still has two or three years to run.

Five lessons for people leaders

1. Start with a hypothesis. Show from day one how engagement will improve business performance, and be prepared to be held to it. That's how Kevin has secured investment time after time.
2. Treat engagement as a lead indicator. Track it alongside the hard metrics it drives, from absence to safety, then move from correlation to proven cause and effect.
3. Build a compelling narrative. A story like moments of truth gives managers something to talk about "day in, day out".
4. Drive it locally. Set the strategy centrally, but let change happen as close to frontline teams as possible. There's no silver bullet.
5. Keep showing the data. Leaders want to see progress. Share the evidence regularly and keep reinforcing the message.

Kevin's closing advice was simple: "Be brave, be courageous, get a hypothesis, get a narrative, and keep showing the results of your hard work."

To register your interest for the 2027 Engage Employee Summit click here.