Employee surveys as a strategic management tool – The Dürr Group’s approach
With over 20,000 employees across 139 locations worldwide, the Dürr Group is a major force in mechanical and plant engineering—and a true global player. But it’s not just their technical expertise that stands out. Dürr has also built a modern, well-structured survey system that combines global surveys, pulse checks, and follow-ups, all rolled out regularly across the organization. Marina Neumeister, Project Manager for Change Management and HR Special Projects, explains how it works, why clear and multi-layered communication is key, and why every employee’s feedback matters, even at the executive level.
Founded in 1896 in Bad Cannstatt near Stuttgart, the Dürr Group operates across four divisions: Automotive, Industrial Automation, Woodworking, and Clean Technology Systems. This puts the organization at the heart of several key industries, including automotive, furniture and wood manufacturing, chemicals, medical technology, battery production, and electronics. Since 2019, Dürr has partnered with Effectory to build and evolve a continuous survey strategy—capable of reaching more than 20,000 employees across 139 sites at the same time, with a strong follow-up process in place.
Listening to 20,000 voices simultaneously across 139 locations worldwide and turning their feedback into real action is part of Marina Neumeister‘s daily work at Dürr. As Project Manager for Change Management and HR Special Projects, she leads the employee survey efforts with support from a dedicated project team.
“Employee surveys at Dürr started before my time, around 2013 or 2014. At first, we rolled out regional surveys limited to our German sites, but we quickly expanded globally. Of course, that also brought some challenges,” says Marina Neumeister.
Both the preparation and follow-up phases of the global surveys proved challenging:
“In an organization like Dürr, we’re dealing with a huge amount of data. Keeping employee records clean, current, and consistent across all sites worldwide is a massive task.”
Data management has always been one of the biggest hurdles. Additionally, more and more employees were telling us that not enough seemed to happen after the surveys, and that they weren’t hearing any updates. That’s what pushed us to redesign the entire survey process with Effectory and take a more strategic approach.
Marina Neumeister,
Project Manager Change Management and HR Special Projects, Dürr
“For a project of this scale, it’s essential to have a dedicated project team,” says Marina Neumeister. “Ours includes the Group’s Chief Human Resources Officer, two project managers – myself included – and a handful of colleagues who specifically focus on communication and employee data.”
To successfully roll out surveys across all global sites, Dürr also brought in around 100 local coordinators. “These are usually colleagues from local HR departments who handle communication and coordination at their site. As a project team, we’re in regular contact with them, which lets us roll out global surveys at all locations at the same time and in a coordinated way,” Marina explains.
In addition to building the project team, Dürr also refined its survey landscape. “We now use three types of surveys. Every three years, we conduct a global survey across all our sites. In the year after that, we follow up with surveys in specific units where critical issues were identified. And for strategic or organization-relevant topics, like transformation processes or spotting current trends, we use targeted pulse surveys. We introduced this survey system for the first time in 2019.”
To regularly assess performance and engagement across the organization, Dürr runs a global survey every three years using Effectory’s Strategic Fitness Model. It includes 22 scientifically developed questions and is supplemented with questions on psychosocial risk, ensuring compliance with legal requirements.
Once results are evaluated through the My Effectory platform, locations or departments with low or critical scores are flagged as “hotspots.” These areas are automatically included in Dürr’s follow-up process and receive a check-in survey the following year to monitor progress and improvements.
For key business topics, such as transformation projects or emerging trends, Dürr runs targeted pulse surveys. “One of our recent pulse surveys focused on the future of work. We included questions on digitization and remote work. The next one will focus on our current transformation project,” says Neumeister. “The pulse surveys are flexible and let us quickly and easily capture sentiment on specific topics or within specific units. That’s an important addition.”
To keep all 20,000 employees informed throughout the survey process, Dürr developed a two-track communication plan.
“First, there’s the overarching communication,” explains Marina Neumeister. “Together with our internal communications team, we create a key visual, posters, and written content, and we post updates on the intranet. There’s also an organization-wide video and a letter from the board addressed to all managing directors.”
The second communication track runs through Dürr’s network of local coordinators. “Our 100 coordinators at sites around the world are kept in the loop through regular calls once the survey schedule is set. We provide them with email templates, toolkits, and posters for local use. The coordinators are key multipliers—that’s the only way we can truly reach everyone across the organization.”
At the start of each survey cycle, Dürr works closely with Effectory’s project team. “The collaboration is very solution-oriented, the team responds quickly to challenges, and we always find good paths forward together. I really appreciate that,” says Marina Neumeister.
She also values Effectory’s Tech & Touch approach, especially during the follow-up phase. “As part of the follow-up process, Effectory conducts workshops with our managers worldwide to help them understand the survey results and their implications,” she explains. “This enablement is extremely important, since managers are ultimately responsible for implementing the measures. We roll out the workshops globally with Effectory in both German and English. The high registration numbers speak for themselves – a real added value for our organization.”
As part of the follow-up process, Effectory conducts workshops with our managers worldwide to help them understand the survey results and their implications […] The high registration numbers speak for themselves – a real added value for our organization.
— Marina Neumeister,
Project Manager Change Management and HR Special Projects, Dürr
With its new survey strategy, Dürr has seen steady improvements. The latest global survey achieved a participation rate of nearly 80% and an employee satisfaction score of 72%—strong numbers for an organization of this size.
In my view, the high satisfaction rate of 72% is particularly due to our targeted approach to hotspots and follow-up surveys,” says Neumeister. “With this strategy, we are now much closer to the employees. They can see that there’s a concrete action plan. That has a positive effect!
— Marina Neumeister,
Project Manager Change Management and HR Special Projects, Dürr
To make employee surveys more impactful across the organization, the results were tied to compensation structures. “The results achieved at Dürr are compared with the industry benchmark. This creates an additional incentive. It works very well for our organization.”
In 2023, Dürr included the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) in its global survey for the first time. The eNPS, which ranges from -100 to +100, measures how likely employees are to recommend their organization as an employer. “After the 2023 survey, we had an eNPS of 20. The industry benchmark is 9. That’s obviously encouraging, but we still aim to improve in the future,” says Neumeister, critically but with optimism.
Looking ahead, Dürr plans to continue developing the survey system. “With the current setup, we’ve created a solid foundation. It’s a strategic management tool that helps us identify both strengths and areas for improvement. That’s the foundation we want to build on as we keep evolving our survey system and strategy.”
