Lessons from a culture survey run for 63,800 employees of a leading NBFC, in 12 languages, over three weeks.
Most organisations judge an employee survey by its response rate. When a leading NBFC asked us to run its organisation-wide culture survey for all 63,800 employees, from corporate offices to branches across the country, 91% completed it.
But participation is not the goal in itself. It is what makes the data credible: results leaders can act on because they reflect the whole organisation, not just the people who answer every email. So we looked at the behaviour behind the number. What moved people to respond, when they did it, which language they chose, and where they hesitated. Five lessons stood out.
The survey stayed open for three weeks, and the follow-up came in layers.
One-click access. Every employee got a personal single sign-on link by email. There were no IDs or passwords to find, copy-paste or forget.
Two voices at launch. The client's internal communications explained why the survey mattered. A separate email from us, as an independent partner, made the promise of anonymity credible.
Paced reminders. Every other day for the first two weeks, then twice a day near the close.
People on the ground. From 6th October, HR business partners followed up with their business units, one by one.
The reminders worked: Each reminder day stands out against the quiet days in between. But on their own, they brought in less than a fifth of all responses. The real shift came when HR business partners stepped in. Daily starts went from under 2,000 to over 10,000 overnight, and four in five responses came after that.
What this means: Your HRBPs and business leaders are the survey's real distribution network. Brief them before launch, give them a clear role, and build their follow-up into the plan from week one, not as a last-week rescue.
People answer surveys in the same hours they do their work. Two in three started between 11 am and 5 pm, and the busiest hour was 12 to 1 pm.
The send time mattered. Reminders went out at 9 or 11 am, with a second at 3 pm on two-reminder days. Morning sends kept starts high through lunch. The 3 pm sends brought a quick rise that faded once the working day ended. Saturdays are working days for this client and still drew 7% of starts. Sundays drew 1%.
What this means for reminders:
The survey was offered in English and 11 Indian languages. Nearly 15,000 employees, one in four, chose a language other than English. Without those versions, a quarter of the workforce would have answered in a second language, or not at all.
They finished just as often. Respondents who chose a regional language completed at 98.7%, against 98.2% for English. Every Malayalam respondent who started went on to finish.
They did take longer, though. Most regional-language respondents spent 1 to 3 minutes more on the same 33 statements.
What this means: Language is not a translation task. It decides whose experience shows up in the results. Each version here was adapted for its audience, not translated word for word, and reviewed by native speakers from both the client's team and ours. A work scenario that sounds natural in English can read stiffly, or mean something different, in Tamil or Assamese. And when you plan the survey window and the time you ask people for, plan for the slowest language, not the fastest. (We wrote more on this in Beyond English: Designing Talent Interventions for Bharat.)
At this scale, small frictions add up to thousands of missing voices. This is where the survey platform earns its place.
Getting in. Of the 59,209 employees who opened the survey, 58,210 answered all statements, a completion rate of 98.3%. Most of the other 999 stopped right at the start.
A third of all drop-outs (322 people) chose a language and left before answering a single statement. Another 345 left on the first page. After page 2, drop-off falls to a handful of people per screen. The first minute decides participation: open with the most familiar situations, keep the instructions short, and tell people upfront how long the survey will take.
On any device. Most people at this firm work at a desk, and 88% answered on a laptop or desktop. But almost 7,000 employees, 1 in 9, took the survey on a phone, mostly Android.
Chrome (55%) and Edge (44%) covered almost everyone, and Safari was used by fewer than 1 in 500. Test on the browsers your people actually use, and treat the phone as a must-have: a scenario with four answer options has to read comfortably on a small screen, without zooming or sideways scrolling.
Finishing. About 1 in 14 employees paused and came back on another day to finish, so saved progress matters. And 13 people answered every statement but never pressed Submit. A clear final button, and a nudge to anyone who stalls on the last page, closes that gap.
What this means: None of this is glamorous, but each friction point costs responses. Look for a survey platform that offers single sign-on, saves progress, works on any phone and browser, and shows you exactly where people stop.
The questionnaire was built on everyday work scenarios. Instead of asking people to agree or disagree with statements, it asked what they see colleagues do in familiar situations, with four realistic choices and no obviously "right" answer. For example:
When a process change is introduced, people in my department most often…
This format gets closer to real behaviour than a rating scale, but it asks more of the reader. And timing affects effort. Employees who started in the first two weeks took a median of 14 minutes. Those who started in the final days took 12. As the push to finish grows, people move faster.
What this means: Reminders get people to the finish line, but the questionnaire decides how much thought they give. Keep it short: ask only what you will act on. Keep it simple: plain words, and options that are clearly different from each other. And make it relevant: people give real attention to surveys they believe will lead somewhere.
A response rate tells you that people showed up. Behaviour data tells you how they showed up: what moved them, when they had time, which language they trusted, and where they hesitated. Read together, these signals make the next survey shorter, simpler and easier to say yes to, and make the results more reliable.
If you are planning an employee survey at scale, across languages, locations and roles, we would be glad to share what we have learnt.
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