How employee feedback led to a profit share scheme (and coincidentally, record-breaking sales & profits)

Background

Fourteen years ago, Accu started in a bedroom and has since become an £18 million turnover business, with over 130 people serving customers in more than 125 countries. Accu supplies engineering components to 70% of the world’s top manufacturers.

The road to The Happiness Index

Alastair Morris, UK Managing Director, joined Accu in 2022 when the founders recognised they needed dedicated leadership to oversee UK operations and scale the business, freeing them to focus on international expansion. 

Demi-Leigh Mitcheson, Head of Employee Experience, joined at the same time. Her role combines traditional HR with a strong focus on culture, wellbeing, and leadership development. Her priority was introducing a structured, trusted way for employees to share feedback.

They knew that as the company continued to scale, they needed to find a way to maintain the unique culture that was one of their greatest strengths. They also needed to rebuild trust in the feedback process, which had been compromised by past anonymity breaches. This is where The Happiness Index came in…

“The biggest challenge is staff believing that the comments they give are truly anonymous… there’d been some real hurt previously that people felt like they’d been exposed by providing feedback. THI has helped us rebuild that trust.”

How Accu use The Happiness Index

As the cornerstone of their listening strategy, Accu now runs a cultural assessment survey twice per year to give a broad and consistent measure of the company’s cultural health. Depending on the outcomes, Accu will use other surveys from The Happiness Index’s library to dive deeper into focus areas. 

Accu also use onboarding and offboarding surveys to understand how their people think and feel at different stages of their employee lifecycle, and uses our Employee Voice survey as an always-on tool for employees to leave anonymous feedback 24/7, while allowing for the HR team to respond to these anonymous comments via our platform. 

The impact

By implementing our platform, Accu created a structured and trusted way for their people to share feedback. They use our cultural assessment surveys twice a year and also utilise onboarding, offboarding, and “always-on” employee voice surveys to dive deeper into focus areas.

The results speak for themselves.

• Building trust and psychological safety: Our platform rebuilt trust by providing clear, consistent messaging about anonymity. Instead of raw comments, managers receive anonymised, theme-based summaries. This helps leaders focus on key trends and areas for improvement, rather than taking criticism personally. Response rates climbed as employees saw their input leading to real change and gained confidence in the platform’s true anonymity.
• Connecting contributions to performance: Based on employee feedback, Accu introduced a company-wide profit share scheme where a portion of the monthly profit is shared equally among its people. This created a tangible link between individual contributions and company performance, breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration. The psychological impact was huge. Since introducing this scheme last year, the business has become increasingly profitable, most recently breaking records for the month with the highest level of revenue and profit in the company’s history. 
• Unlocking operational gains: An initial cultural assessment revealed a striking disparity: of two similar teams, one was the happiest and most engaged in the business, while the other was the least. With this insight, Accu’s leadership made targeted changes to management, training, and processes, resulting in a significant performance increase for that team.
• Growing without losing identity: Even as Accu’s headcount nearly doubled, its Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) remained consistent as the business has retained its strong culture while expanding, thanks in part to listening to its people. 

“The profit share initiative has really changed people’s engagement. The feedback we’re getting is more constructive, principally because they have a broader understanding of the business. Our employees are thinking about the success of the business as a whole, not just focusing on their immediate area.”

Looking ahead

Accu plan to increase survey frequency, weave The Happiness Index’s neuroscience themes into leadership communications, and refine how they explain decisions on feedback. 

For Alastair and Demi-Leigh, The Happiness Index is more than a platform – it’s a strategic partner in ensuring that as Accu grows, it never loses the cultural strengths that made it successful in the first place.

 

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