This month, HSD Metrics is proud to announce the celebration of its 20th Anniversary. The company was founded in 1992 by its current president, Deborah Dwyer. Deborah first started the business with one employee and a fax machine. Since then, the company has grown to a team of resources including 12 expert phone interviewers, 2 IT professionals, and 3 individuals on an administrative services team.
In the beginning, HSD’s purpose was to measure the health of an organization to achieve high performance and high involvement (now the common term is engagement!). Deb Dwyer’s father, who had retired as the chief engineer at Delphi, offered to design HSD’s proprietary software in 1992. Within a year, HSD had completed three major surveys in the paper and building industries. Deborah lead a retention project team for an electronic publishing company that involved conducting interviews with former employees to better understand the barriers to upward movement by women and minorities. This study became the driver for ExitRight’s development ten years later. During the first ten years of HSD’s history, Deb also designed and facilitated hundreds of training sessions and workshops to improve team performance and enhance a leader’s effectiveness.
Benchmarking of survey data began with their first employee survey in 1993. This second year of business launched the design and implementation of HSD’s proprietary software system for employee satisfaction surveys. From day one they believed the quality and support they could offer alongside their proprietary software would set them apart from the competition. All surveys were by paper with resources from HSD actually gathering the data.
By 1996, HSD had gathered enough employee survey responses to establish an external database of norms for employee survey question items. This database continues to grow annually, with over 600,000 collected respondents. HSD houses this data for its clients, providing insightful benchmarks as well as an extensive question library.
1998 brought the release of HSD’s 360-Degree Feedback tool. This tool focuses on identifying strengths and development opportunities based on the feedback of peers, leaders, and subordinates. HSD’s 360-Degree Feedback tool is unique because it is based on a common set of customized question items aligned with the organization’s business strategies and values.
HSD’s first web-based organizational effectiveness survey was launched in the year 2001 at a large financial institution. In the following three years, HSD grew to provide web-based services across the gamut of their offerings.
In 2002, HSD extended their metric offerings to include employee retention with the introduction of their proprietary exit interview software, ExitRight®. Now, in 2012, 140,000 exit interviews later – HSD is vastly known as an exit interview company and is able to provide a wide variety of clients with external benchmarks on turnover causes for exiting employees.
To meet client requests for instant information on exit interview findings, HSD launched its first web portal in 2004. After this advancement, clients were able to access their exit interview findings online with 24/7 availability. The ExitRight® reporting tool has continued to expand its features with filtered data, instant red flag notification on ethical/legal matters, download features, access to the full interview contents, anonymity options, and extensive data sets aligned with the client’s unique organizational structure.
The expertise acquired from the exitrightnow.com portal was expanded to employee surveys. Clients using HSD’s employee surveys no longer had to wait for a report. Once a survey is launched, data is instantly populated onto a flexible, all-in-one platform.
Another strong player amongst HSD’s product offerings, ReferenceRight®, was introduced in 2011. This intuitive program helps HR departments gain fast and thorough reference reporting on an applicant’s previous work experience and performance.
Since its inception, HSD has performed work for over 650 organizations with most employing 5,000 or more employees. HSD is proud to assist their customers with surveys and interviews that cover the full spectrum of an organization’s health. From entering the organization to exiting, HSD’s metrics are provided to improve employee retention and organizational performance. With a focus on current technology, HSD strives to continually improve its multi-survey platform of products. While providing 24/7 access to organizational metrics and real-time reporting, HSD is passionate about its dedication to customers and continued innovation.
Celebrating twenty years of providing surveys and questionnaires to organizations while improving their employee retention is a sincere milestone they are proud of. HSD looks forward to twenty more years of helping organizations save time and money by offering improvement efforts that help retain employees.
HSD Metrics offers new hire, stay, and exit interview platforms that can help your business improve employee engagement, as well as employee experience and retention. If you are interested in learning more, contact us today.