Customer story · Fennia · 6 min read
Fennia changed what happens after the survey. Response rates went from 60% to 89%.
Fennia redesigned its entire employee survey process in 2025. The change that mattered most, according to the People Development director who ran it, was what happened once the survey closed.
60% → 89%
Response rate. Reached in the first cycle, held for three.
15 hours
From the survey closing to the leadership team discussing results.
90/10 → 10/90
HR's effort, running the survey versus acting on it.
Fennia rebuilt its employee survey process in 2025. Response rates rose from around 60% to 89% and have held for three cycles, HR moved from producing reports to working with them, and managers get their results within minutes of a survey closing.
Fennia is a Finnish mutual insurance company. By its own description it sits in the middle of the domestic market, neither the largest insurer in Finland nor the smallest. Around 1,300 people work there, roughly 120 of them managers.
Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and that shapes how Fennia handles employee data. Anonymity in a survey is not a reassurance offered to staff. It is the condition on which an honest answer depends.
The problem
Response rates were falling, and Fennia set out to fix it
Fennia had been running employee surveys for years, and participation was sliding.
The gap was in what happened after the survey closed. Employees answered, but they did not always see where their answers went. How many people had taken part was not widely visible either, and the feedback did not consistently lead to a discussion inside the team or to anything concrete afterwards. Some employees were also unsure how anonymity worked in practice.
The response rate was going lower and lower all the time. People were saying, I don't want to use my time answering the survey if there is no impact.
Virve TaskinenDirector, People Development, Fennia
Results arrived after the moment had passed
Processing was manual, built on external exports and Excel. Weeks passed between a survey closing and anything reaching a team. "Usually, employees forget that they answered some kind of survey," Taskinen says. "Then after a couple of weeks they are surprised: ah, okay, I answered this way."
Most of HR's energy went into producing a report that arrived too late to change anything. Across roughly 120 managers, that meant 120 conversations that either happened late or didn't happen at all.
The stakes
This was never just an HR problem
Fennia's strategy makes an explicit link between two things many companies keep separate. "In our strategy, we believe that a winning customer experience requires a winning employee experience," Taskinen says.
A survey nobody acts on is not a soft problem in that context. Survey results feed strategy monitoring at Fennia and are used as KPIs in several reporting frameworks, including ESG reporting.
Fennia's written answers state that Teamspective addressed all of the challenges identified during the selection process. Two things stood out. The platform runs inside Microsoft Teams, where Fennia already works, so taking part didn't require going anywhere else. And the scope covered onboarding and exit surveys, not the annual engagement survey alone.
There was also the question of size. Teamspective was a young company at the time. Fennia is well known for supporting entrepreneurship in Finland, their written answers note, and although Teamspective was "still a relatively new company, choosing them felt natural and aligned well with the way Fennia operates."
The decision
Fennia decided to show everyone the results, immediately
Fennia implemented Teamspective in spring 2025. The rollout was uneventful. The decision underneath it was not.
Opening results to everyone the moment a survey closes removes the buffer leaders used to have. It "requires the leaders to go into the tool, really be open to the results, and start the discussion immediately with the team members," Taskinen says. She is clear about what that asked of the organization: "It required quite a lot of transparency and openness."
The choice was deliberate. Transparency was the mechanism for rebuilding trust, not a value bolted onto the project afterwards. "It comes down to trust," Taskinen says. "We want to create a feeling and culture in Fennia where everyone belongs, every opinion matters, and we really transparently work together. That's one of our values also: work together."
Managers were trained for the conversation, not the software
"We have used some time to train our leaders, not with the tool itself, but on the process after the survey, on how they facilitate the discussion," Taskinen says.
HR offers support. The responsibility to return to the results and build the development plan sits with the manager.
Spring 2026
15
hours
Fennia Fiilis, the company-wide survey, closed on a Monday at 6 p.m.
Monday, 6 p.m.
Survey closes
Tuesday, 9 a.m.
Leadership reviewing results
The next day, Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., we were already discussing the results with our leadership team, reviewing them together and creating the first notes on what the main development topics are at company level and what our strengths are. Within 24 hours we were able to come back to the employees as well: results are available, thank you for answering.
Virve Taskinen
The leadership team were, in Taskinen's words, “really super, super happy, because of course they are also eager to go and see the results.” They picked out the main topics quickly and talked them through together.
The speed matters less than what it let Fennia say. Employees could be told, immediately and truthfully, that their answers were already being discussed at every level from the Board down to individual teams.
That gap is where trust used to leak away. It is now fifteen hours wide.
The process today
How a survey cycle works now
Communication first
Fennia builds a communication plan around every round, explaining why the survey is running, how anonymity is protected, and what will happen with the answers. It also shows what came out of the last round, with concrete examples of actions taken across the organization.
Kept visible
HR monitors response rates and keeps employees updated on progress.
Everyone sees it
Results become available within minutes. An employee gets a notification telling them the results are ready. The response rate goes up on the intranet with an explanation of what happens next. Then their manager books the team discussion.
No waiting to find out whether anyone read it.
The conversation
Some managers facilitate the discussion themselves. Others bring in an HR Business Partner to run it, so the manager can take part as a member of the team rather than its chair. Every team writes a development plan and names its strengths, the things worth protecting.
What changed
Four things work differently now
- Results reached teams in weeks
- HR built reports in Excel
- Managers waited to be briefed
- Actions agreed and forgotten
- Results available within minutes
- HR analyzes and develops
- Managers get their results directly
- Actions documented and tracked
The results
Participation rose in the first cycle and stayed
From around 60% to 89%, reached in the very first cycle after implementation, held across three consecutive cycles.
Fennia is precise about why, and the platform is only part of the answer.
Most importantly, we focused on what happens after the survey. We made the follow-up process highly visible by showing how the results were discussed and what actions were taken. When employees see that their feedback leads to meaningful conversations and concrete improvements, they're much more motivated to participate in future surveys.
Virve TaskinenDirector, People Development, Fennia
HR's energy moved from producing results to using them
"In the past we used most of the time creating the survey and doing a lot of manual work around that," Taskinen says. "Nowadays we don't use that much energy for the survey itself. We use this energy to develop our way of working more." She puts a number on it: if the split was 90/10 before, now it is 10/90.
Managers became more independent, and HR got the harder questions
The adoption caught Taskinen off guard. "It was surprisingly high, how much our leaders started to use the AI during the first days when the results were available," she says. Fennia's managers get a summary and recommended development actions automatically. The ones who want to go further can put questions to the data themselves.
What changed is the order of operations. "They haven't asked that many questions from HR anymore, because they first go to the AI," Taskinen says. "If they don't understand the answer, or want to brainstorm the results, then they connect HR."
Taskinen is careful not to overstate it. Some managers remain cautious and don't yet trust an analysis they didn't build themselves. And getting a useful answer still depends on asking a good question, the same as with any tool of its kind.
The results outlive the cycle
They now show up in places that are not obviously survey territory. Fennia is rebuilding an onboarding course on culture and ways of working using what employees said about how the culture actually feels, quoting their own words back to them.
Onboarding and exit surveys come next, extending listening across the full length of employment. The next company-wide survey runs in Q4, with a specific purpose: to find out whether the actions agreed in the spring have started to show up in the employee experience.
In Fennia's words
What Fennia would tell another HR leader
Trust takes time
"Building employees' trust in surveys takes time, and it requires a systematic, consistent approach," Fennia's written answers state. No single cycle fixes it.
Connect the survey to the strategy
Fennia links its surveys explicitly to continuous improvement and strategy execution rather than presenting them as a standalone annual measurement.
Be honest about whether you're ready
Fennia recommends Teamspective to organizations looking for more than a technical survey tool, and notes that open comments may initially feel like too much for some cultures.
“Our goal is for employees to clearly see: we asked, we listened, we acted, and we're following up.”
Virve Taskinen
Director, People Development, Fennia
Keep reading
Related resources
How to Interpret Employee Engagement Survey Results
What to do once the results land, and how to turn them into actions a team can see.
How Do You Prevent Survey Fatigue?
Why participation falls cycle after cycle, and what keeps people answering.
How other organisations work with employee feedback
More stories from HR teams who moved from collecting results to acting on them.
What happens in your organization between the survey closing and the first team conversation?
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