The Dennemeyer Group's work requires dedication to its clients and highly focused attention to detail. As a full-service provider for Intellectual Property (IP) protection and management, Dennemeyer occupies a singular space in the legal market. The team works with various clients, protecting their IP rights and ensuring the health of prominent brand identities. Dennemeyer’s own team reflects the diversity of its clients: With over 20 offices spread across six continents, employees represent a global mix of backgrounds.
Soh-Pih Mariette Nikolai-Schneider, a marketing manager in Dennemeyer’s employer branding department, works to position Dennemeyer as a quality employer both externally and internally. Nikolai-Schneider supports recruitment efforts, aims to keep building Dennemeyer’s diverse team, and prioritizes internal employee retention and engagement. When Dennemeyer wanted to turn its attention to one of its most important audiences—its employees—with renewed focus, Nikolai-Schneider knew the first step was the deceptively simple task of listening to feedback from employees around the world.
While adopting the mindset of listening more closely to employees was an easy shift for Dennemeyer, the act of collecting anonymous feedback from approximately 1,000 team members around the world required a more in-depth strategy. Nikolai-Schneider wanted to start with a survey of employees to give them a chance to provide direct feedback in a broad range of areas. To do that, Dennemeyer needed a tool capable of collecting thousands of responses and presenting the data in a format that would be easy to parse and share. After considering a handful of other feedback platform options, Dennemeyer ultimately settled on a familiar and proven tool. Company employees had been using SurveyMonkey personal plans for other projects for some time, and after looking into SurveyMonkey Enterprise, the company decided that upgrading its subscription would provide exactly the capabilities it needed.
Reaching thousands of diverse, global employees
The initiative would be the first-ever company-wide employee survey for Dennemeyer. While a substantial undertaking for an initial campaign, it was crucial for Nikolai-Schneider that all employees be given a chance to share their voices. As the company worked toward becoming more employee-centric, it needed to understand how different regions, departments and teams varied so that any changes made could be tailored to specific contexts.
“We wanted to truly understand what employees were saying and see what they were seeing,” Nikolai-Schneider said. “We created questions that covered what they think about the company, what they wish for, what their needs are, areas in which they have critiques, and what they see as strengths of Dennemeyer.”
Nikolai-Schneider and her team crafted an extensive list of questions they wanted to ask employees—65 in total, including ones with open-ended responses that allowed employees to provide as much or as little detail as they wanted. As this was an initial survey, Nikolai-Schneider and her team used some educated hypothesizing to set KPIs for tracking, such as the number of respondents they hoped to have, response time, and completion rate. Once finalized, the survey was sent to the entire Dennemeyer global workforce. The responses proved to be a wealth of information and opportunity for the company.
Understanding geographic differences and turning feedback into action
Nikolai-Schneider and her team collected over 7,000 comments—an impressive figure on its own but even more so after they noted that the average survey time was 34 minutes. Hundreds of employees jumped right in and took the time required to give honest feedback. Ultimately, about 53% of all Dennemeyer employees completed the survey.
The team used Enterprise’s built-in tools to analyze the data and created unique presentations to showcase the findings for employees, management teams, and the firm’s regional directors. The decks included data on various questions asked as well as memorable or illuminating open-ended responses.
Nikolai-Schneider said Dennemeyer was very interested in the regional differences in feedback. Career development, internal communication, and recognition were hot topics globally, but opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of these areas varied geographically.
Nikolai-Schneider said the team used the feedback to identify and prioritize new regional and global initiatives. She also added that Dennemeyer’s use of Enterprise is expanding—in addition to employee surveys, the marketing department has started using the platform to collect customer feedback. Nikolai-Schneider foresees Enterprise continuing to be an essential tool in her arsenal.
“SurveyMonkey Enterprise is easy to use, and you don’t need to be a statistics professional to use it. The question types and survey design are adaptable, and we can create something that will fit our needs.”
Soh-Pih Mariette Nikolai-Schneider, manager, events and employer branding, Dennemeyer
Learn how your team can tap into valuable feedback from your employees and turn it into actionable steps with SurveyMonkey Enterprise.
