Nokia Achieves 81% Survey Participation and Generates 70,000+ Open-Text Comments Across 78,000 Employees

What Was the Opportunity?

In early 2025, Nokia recognized that its existing approach to employee listening was insufficient for a rapidly transforming global organization. Feedback was collected through multiple disconnected channels and unscientific methodologies, including annual surveys, ad-hoc MS Forms, and one-off initiatives, each with different question sets. A quick turnaround from all stakeholders could not be ensured, impacting execution, timely communications, and fast issue resolution. This fragmentation created inconsistent data quality, slow follow-up, survey fatigue, and limited visibility into employee sentiment across their lifecycle.

Four core challenges made change urgent. First, teams used more than 10 different feedback tools, each producing insights that were difficult to consolidate. As a result, leaders lacked a clear view of trends, root causes, or follow-through. Second, although many teams collected employee feedback, actionable responses varied widely. Some units reached 40% action-plan completion, while others lacked consistent follow-up, creating an uneven employee experience across the company. Third, Nokia was entering a period of cultural, leadership, organizational and operational change in which employee engagement and co-creation were critical. Leadership needed more frequent, reliable, real-time signals to guide decisions and maintain trust. Fourth, feedback at important employee milestones, such as onboarding and exit, was inconsistent. These gaps prevented the organization from understanding key factors influencing employee satisfaction, retention and sustained engagement across the employee lifecycle.

Together, these challenges revealed a clear opportunity: a fundamental shift from episodic listening to a unified, continuous, lifecycle-based listening strategy that connects insight to action at scale.

What Was the Solution?

Nokia implemented a company-wide Employee Experience & Listening Program based on a single ambition: creating a culture and system of continuous listening to hear employees more clearly, act more consistently, and improve the experience at every level of the organization.

Unified Listening Architecture

A single platform now brings together the annual engagement survey, quarterly pulse checks, lifecycle touchpoints (candidate & hiring manager, onboarding, in ramp-up: manager transitions, return-to-work, exit), crowdsourcing and pilots real-time signals through MoodMeter. This eliminated fragmentation and gave all leaders access to one consistent, trackable version of employee sentiment across the lifecycle. The annual survey sets the baseline, quarterly pulses track progress, and lifecycle surveys trigger automatically at moments that matter.

Governance and Accountability Model

Nokia established a new governance model aligning leadership, People Partners, and a global Listening Network of Ambassadors and Champions. Their roles include interpreting insights, facilitating team discussions, supporting managers in designing realistic action plans, and ensuring feedback loops are consistently closed. Every manager received a personalized team report with suggested actions and was encouraged to participate in structured discussion routines with their employees, co-creating actionable, measurable steps.

Insights Translated into Action at Every Level

Employees identified collaboration, simplification, cultural alignment, and leadership clarity as their top improvement opportunities. These findings directly informed leadership communication, organizational design, and cultural priorities, including transparency and empowerment.

Units used organization- and team-level dashboards to address their specific drivers. Organizations with lower action-planning maturity received targeted training and analytics support to close the gap. Annual survey and quarterly listening insights drove targeted improvements in executive team alignment, culture messaging, and strategic decision-making. Leaders began integrating listening signals into their operational cadences.

Visible Feedback Loops

A global “Your Voice Matters” listening campaign promoted a cohesive employee listening strategy, centered by an intranet site highlighting progress, outcomes, and success stories. Leaders started to report back to employees on survey findings and what actions were taken and why. Teams documented actions directly in the platform, enabling transparency.

Quarterly pulse checks provided quick, real-time insight into sentiment, helping track progress and spot emerging issues between annual surveys. As a result, employees recognized their feedback leading to more transparency, acknowledgement, and tangible change.

What Was the Impact?

The transformation significantly strengthened transparency and consistency across the organization. By introducing more rigorous and psychology-backed measurement, it became possible to see a truer picture of employee sentiment with results highlighting emerging opportunities to strengthen employee engagement. This clarity now enables more focused interventions and meaningful change.

All-time high survey participation at 81%. The annual engagement survey achieved an 81% response rate, an all-time high in participation, outperforming global benchmarks and establishing a new enterprise baseline. The vision & purpose survey conducted in summer 2025 reached 42% response rate with 12,000–19,000 comments per open-ended question, indicating exceptional employee interest in contributing to strategic direction.

Action-plan completion improved significantly. Nearly 100% action-plan completion was achieved in leading units, while others showed strong improvement from approximately 60% upward, with some gaining more than 35 percentage points year-over-year. The number of managers completing team discussions and creating action plans grew rapidly across the organization. These results are based on annual engagement survey action-planning data.

70,000+ open-text comments per annual survey cycle. The annual engagement survey generated more than 70,000 open-text comments and quarterly pulses produced more than 3,000 per cycle. Qualitative analysis flagged recurring themes around transparency, trust, and fairness, providing leading indicators of culture transformation progress.

Quarterly pulses tracked progress on transparency and organizational priorities. Quarterly Pulse results indicated improvements in the perception of transparency and understanding of organizational priorities. Insights from listening were integrated into leadership sessions and initiated culture evolution.

Lifecycle listening surfaced actionable retention and onboarding gaps. Candidate and hiring manager experience as well as onboarding insights revealed key gaps in support, leading to tailored interventions during the recruiting process and new hire initiation. Exit surveys uncovered a consistent view of attrition drivers, supporting retention strategies.

Action-planning teams showed higher engagement in pulses. Teams whose managers logged action-planning commitments showed slightly higher overall engagement scores in the quarterly pulses, providing early evidence that the feedback-to-action chain influences engagement outcomes.

18,000+ comments on strategic priorities. The vision & purpose survey showed strong alignment with Nokia’s future direction, with more than 18,000 comments recommending strategic priorities including AI, network leadership, innovation, and responsible connectivity. This gave Nokia a crowdsourced strategic input channel at enterprise scale.