TL;DR
- WeRoad is a 216-person travel company with people in Milan, Paris, London, Madrid, Chiasso and Berlin.
- Francesca Bacciri joined as HR Business Partner in June 2026 and ran a company-wide engagement survey the following month.
- That cycle reached 90.5% participation, the highest WeRoad has recorded.
- Participation was driven deliberately: a stated target, differentiated Slack and email reminders, and direct progress updates to leadership.
- 63 managers were given their own team-level results, with a live walkthrough session rather than a guide left on a shelf.
- WeRoad is a tech company, and asked whether it could build an equivalent system in-house. The conclusion was that guaranteed anonymity and GDPR compliance made it impractical to replicate.
WeRoad organises group travel for young adults, running trips through a community of coordinators and a core team spread across Europe. That core team is 216 people working from Milan, Paris, London, Madrid, Chiasso and Berlin.
A distributed team of that size is the hard case for employee listening. There is no single office where a survey becomes the thing everyone is talking about, no canteen noticeboard, and no manager who can see the whole picture by walking around. Getting nine in ten people to answer anything, in six countries, is a deliberate act.
This is how WeRoad does it.
Challenges: a distributed team, and a new HR lead with one month on the clock
A company-wide survey in the first month
Francesca Bacciri joined WeRoad as HR Business Partner in June 2026. The company-wide engagement survey was already scheduled for the first of July. That left a month to onboard, learn the organisation, understand its structure, and take over the survey.
“I joined in June, and the first of July we wanted to hit the survey. So I had a month to onboard, get to know the company, and get to know the structure. It was a real trial by fire.”
The question of whether to build it themselves
WeRoad is a technology company, and the question came up internally: could this be built in-house? Francesca was asked to investigate, and looked at what could be done inside the company against what was available outside it. The conclusion was that the combination of anonymity guarantees, GDPR compliance and security standards was not practical to replicate.
“The question I was asked at the very beginning was: can we do this ourselves? Can we implement something internal? I went in with open ears, and investigated what can be done in house and outside. What CultureMonkey does, it's very difficult to replicate.”
Anonymity as the precondition, not a feature
For an engagement survey, and for any collection of sensitive data, the guarantee that responses stay secure is what makes honest answers possible at all. Employees needed to be confident they could say what they thought without any risk of it coming back to them.
Solutions: treating participation as something you drive, not something you hope for
A stated target, made public
Rather than launching quietly and watching the number, Francesca set a bold target and said so openly. Naming the number turned participation into a shared responsibility with a visible finish line, instead of an HR metric nobody outside HR could see.
“I wanted to go bold, and I stated simply that we need to do better. By stating that, it's already giving a kind of responsibility, and a mission, and a common purpose to the teams.”
Reminders that differ by channel, plus direct leadership updates
WeRoad runs on Slack, with email alongside it. The reminders were deliberately differentiated between the two rather than duplicated, and Francesca went directly to leadership with constant updates on how each team was tracking against the response rate. Progress was visible to the people who could do something about it while the survey was still open.
Granularity that holds anonymity
The same cycle has to serve two different readers: the leadership team looking at the company, and a manager looking at their own team. Reporting moves between company-level figures and team and location cuts, with response thresholds enforcing anonymity at every level, so a small team's results can be discussed without any individual becoming identifiable.
“You can go from very high level numbers and analysis at company level, but it can also give you very granular data, always with 100% anonymity and the thresholds. It helps us to contextualize and localize the sentiment.”
63 managers walked through their own results
Team-level reporting only matters if managers actually open it. WeRoad ran a live session, built with their CultureMonkey solution manager, in which managers went into the platform and looked at their own team's detail rather than receiving a summary. Francesca used the session to re-state why the exercise was not a box to tick.
“I wanted to make sure the managers were not only getting the guide, but really having someone walking them through the platform, to get into it, look into their own details, and do their own work and follow-ups.”
Publishing results without sugarcoating them
Results went to managers as they were. Francesca's view is that the shift in how people regard the survey comes from closing the loop in public: employees who can see what their answers produced treat the next cycle differently from employees who suspect the data went into a drawer.
“Not sugarcoat anything, but really putting the data out there to the managers. Transparency and communication really helped to shift the sentiment about one-way communication.”
Open comments as the part that carries the detail
The scored questions show where to look. The open-ended comments are where WeRoad gets the most out of a cycle, because people become specific: naming initiatives they want to see, and things they would change.
Run a listening cycle your distributed team actually answers
See how CultureMonkey supports engagement programmes across multiple countries, with anonymity thresholds and team-level reporting managers can use themselves.
Results: what the cycle produced
Purpose Alignment and Growth & Development are the two drivers where WeRoad currently sits above benchmark.
What transfers to another distributed team
State the target out loud
A participation number kept inside HR is an HR problem. A participation number announced to the company is a shared one, and teams respond to it.
Differentiate the reminder, not just the send
Slack and email reach people in different modes. Sending the same words through both is one reminder delivered twice, not two reminders.
Put managers in the platform, not in a summary
The live walkthrough is the step that converts a dashboard licence into a manager who has actually looked at their own team's results and knows what to do next.
Close the loop where everyone can see it
Publishing results without softening them is what tells people they were listened to, and it is the thing that carries into how the next cycle is answered.
“The most outstanding part was the partnership with the solution manager, one to one. Not only before the survey, during the survey, and post the survey. I felt like we could do this very successfully from day one.”