Wayne-Sanderson Farms Achieves 87% Participation in First All-Employee Survey and 99% Manager Action Plan Completion
- 87% participation rate in first-year survey, exceeding 70% goal by 17 points
- 99% of eligible leaders submitted action plans by deadline
- Outperformed manufacturing benchmarks in 20 of 33 survey items
When CEOs talk about cultural compatibility during mergers, it can often be overstated. There are invariably going to be differences in cultures, regardless of similarity.
What Was the Opportunity?
Wayne-Sanderson Farms merged in June 2022, bringing together two established poultry companies under joint ownership by Cargill and Continental Grain. During the integration period, the organization conducted culture surveys limited to its salaried employee population.
By 2025 — three years post-merger — leadership recognized it was time to shift from navigating the merger to becoming a thriving organization. That transition required hearing from everyone, not just salaried staff.
The company identified the need to reach all 27,000 employees to guide strategy, measuring overall engagement, manager relationships, trust in the company, and key experience drivers. For a poultry processing operation with employees spread across 23 facilities in seven states — many working production floor roles with limited computer access — achieving meaningful participation would require deliberate planning.
What Was the Solution?
In April 2025, Wayne-Sanderson Farms assembled a cross-functional team to plan and execute its first enterprise-wide employee experience survey. The team focused on change management and communication strategy, recognizing that participation in a manufacturing environment depends heavily on operational leader buy-in and accessible survey delivery.
In August 2025, the company launched its all-employee survey to 26,259 employees with a participation goal of 70%, which was extremely ambitious for a first-year program in poultry processing.
After the two-week survey period, 22,868 employees responded, representing an 87% participation rate that exceeded the goal by 17 percentage points. The team attributes this result to their change management approach and complete buy-in from operational leaders across the business.
Following the survey close, Wayne-Sanderson Farms launched a transparency campaign to drive awareness of company and team-level results. Team leaders were encouraged to work directly with employees to craft meaningful action plans and load them into the Perceptyx platform by December.
What Was the Impact?
Wayne-Sanderson Farms' first-year survey program delivered results that set a strong foundation for ongoing listening.
Exceptional participation. The 87% response rate exceeded the 70% goal and represents remarkable engagement for a poultry processing company where most employees work production floor roles. This level of participation ensures leadership can make decisions based on representative feedback rather than partial data.
Near-universal action plan completion. After the survey closed, 99% of all eligible leaders submitted at least one action plan to the platform by the December deadline. Managers averaged 1.6 plans per user, and 99% of all plans included specific commitments, which indicates genuine engagement with the process rather than checkbox compliance.
Strong benchmark performance. Despite being a first-year program, Wayne-Sanderson Farms beat all four comparison benchmarks in 14 of 33 categories and outperformed manufacturing-specific benchmarks in 20 of 33 items.
Clear strategic priorities identified. The survey revealed three key opportunity areas now shaping enterprise employee experience strategy: cross-functional communication, recognition, and belonging.
Visible action driving accountability. To help employees see the connection between survey results and organizational response, Wayne-Sanderson Farms embedded "EX Action Plan Highlights" in company-wide newsletters and town halls. EX action plan progress updates were added to functional, departmental, and team-level meeting agendas, thus making follow-through visible at every level.
The company is now preparing a pulse survey to measure whether action planning efforts have improved employee sentiment, with a primary focus on the item "Feedback from this survey will be used to make improvements."
By employing a listening strategy and leveraging a platform that gives you objective data, it’s invaluable to informing your people strategy,” says Miller.
The Impact
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The employee listening strategy delivered significant benefits:
Discovery of Engagement Hotspots: The data revealed previously unanticipated issues across different business units that leadership had assumed would be more insulated from M&A activity. “We thought our people challenges, such as retention, were only in our wholesale banks, but the reality is they were in our frontline and branches as well,” notes Miller. This insight allowed for more targeted action planning and interventions.
Identification of Cultural Misalignments: The surveys exposed important differences in how each organization interpreted the bank’s core values. While both banks considered themselves people-centric, their practical approaches differed significantly. “[Some of the people from American National Bank] perceived us to be more process-oriented... they really didn’t understand why we had all these ‘hoops’ to jump through,” explains Miller. “They saw that as an example of, ‘Hey, we can be flexible and nimble when we need to service a customer.’ But for us, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really risky proposition.’ We leveraged the data and insights to then go and have conversations with those leaders and action plan around it.” Subsequent surveying showed that this “values gap” had indeed narrowed.
Acceleration of Technology Investments: Insights from the survey revealed significant technology gaps that negatively impacted productivity and employee experience. For example, American National Bank, the acquired institution, had implemented innovative tools like DocuSign to streamline loan administration. However, these capabilities were lost during the transition to Atlantic Union Bank, creating frustration among employees. “For your job to be easy, and then to come to Atlantic Union Bank and have the thing that makes it easy go away... that degrades the experience all the more,” explains Miller. This degradation in the employee experience also risked reduced productivity and retention.
Recognizing this as an acute pain point, Atlantic Union Bank acted swiftly. They worked cross-functionally with their technology and operations teams to reprioritize the DocuSign project within their existing roadmap. This decision was driven by the understanding that reinstating such tools was essential for retaining talent and improving engagement. The initiative had a meaningful impact on teammate work experience, engagement, and retention. “The most powerful thing we heard is, ‘You listened. You leveraged this information and did something with it. That reaffirmed the commitment to the combined organization and retention in the long term,’” says Miller.
Expansion of Leadership Visibility: Listening data showed that new markets without an existing Atlantic Union leadership presence struggled more during the transition. “It felt like the blind were leading the blind,” says Miller. This led to a strategic change in their integration approach, ensuring the physical presence and accessibility of legacy leadership in new markets.
Lessons for the Future
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The insights gained have now become part of Atlantic Union Bank’s M&A playbook, directly informing their approach to future growth. “The lessons learned from our listening strategy have literally been written into our playbook for future state M&A,” Miller explains.
The impact extends beyond immediate integration concerns. The data now informs executive goal-setting and accountability measures as well, with leaders being evaluated on their contribution to successful integration outcomes. “Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.”
Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.
Looking ahead, Atlantic Union Bank continues to refine its employee listening strategy, particularly as it manages the challenges of back-to-back acquisitions. “Merger fatigue is real,” acknowledges Miller. “We have to prioritize our investment in time to ensure that we are not losing momentum around teammate engagement and actioning on the insights we had, amid a lot of different distractions. In the instance of back-to-back mergers, we have to be mindful of the future integration but also continue attending to the teammates who have joined in the not-so-distant past.”
Objective data has been instrumental in helping the company interpret feedback and insights, explains Miller: “It is imperative to run pulse surveys during a merger and respond to that data before going into the next merger.” This approach provides valuable lessons learned as they prepare for their next acquisition. Another focus area for Atlantic Union Bank moving forward is leveraging features that support action planning: “[Perceptyx has] made [action planning] so easy, it’s so seamless.”