Hear from the plant floor, not just head office
How a worker with no email answers, what a plant manager sees, and what a site can fix by Friday.
4.7 / 5 on G2, Spring 2025
Trusted by teams at
Reach
Reach workers who have no company email
- No inbox needed. A QR code at the plant, WhatsApp and SMS for the floor, email for the office, tracked per channel. A missing mobile number is a silent skip.
- Every survey in the worker's own language. Each employee's set question language is used automatically when it is on their record; otherwise the survey offers a picker and saves the choice for next time.
- The languages follow your labor force, not your markets. Robertshaw runs a roughly 80% frontline workforce in nine languages across 14 locations on multilingual surveys.
Trust
Keep answers anonymous, even on small crews
- On a line of nine people, anonymity is arithmetic. And its audience is often a works council or a labor partner, so the math has to be publishable, not reassuring.
- Count submissions, not invitations. An account-wide setting bases the threshold on people who actually submitted, and it applies to exports too, so a downloaded file never reveals a group the screen would hide.
- Verifying at the door does not unmask anyone inside. The employee ID is checked against the audience list to stop outsiders and duplicates; on an anonymous survey it is never attached to the answers. More on anonymous surveys for plant workforces.
Sites
Give each plant manager only their own results
- A plant manager sees their site, not the one next door. Sub-admin scopes restrict a site lead to named locations, teams or attributes, with enterprise-grade role controls above. The one trap: an empty scope sees everyone.
- Two limits, stated plainly. Scopes stack as AND across dimensions, and an employee reports to at most one manager, so there is no dual roll-up to a plant manager and a functional lead.
- Small sites are suppressed, never excluded. Reports open at 3 responses, dashboard cuts hold a minimum group of 5 with a hard floor of 3, and nothing drops a site for low participation.
My plant · OverviewLive
Their reportees and no one else's, three tabs wide
4.2/5
Engagement
+32
Team eNPS
86%
Participation
Top theme in feedback this cycle: workload balance on the night shift.
Action
Turn feedback into fixes each plant can make
- The usual failure is not a bad survey. It is a report nobody could act on, and a next survey people skip because nothing changed. Managing engagement means shrinking the distance from comment to fix. Start with what drives engagement in manufacturing.
- Themes at site level, actions with owners. Open-text feedback is themed with sentiment per location, and actions carry owners and deadlines. Sometimes the answer is more abrasives ordered before Friday, not engagement activities.
- The line manager owns it, not HR. Managers get their own team metrics, strengths and action plans in the feedback platform, and admins preview exactly what a specific manager sees before rollout.
The score
Compare plants and benchmark against manufacturing
- The score is a flat average of every rating answer. Not the average of per-driver averages. Stored on 1 to 5; displayed out of 5, out of 10 by default, or as a percentage.
- Percent favorable, honestly. Every rating question shows its favorable, neutral and unfavorable split, but the headline score is a mean, so recalibrate how you measure engagement before comparing years.
- The comparison set has limits. Manufacturing is an explicit benchmark industry, by size band with an opt-in regional filter. Benchmarks are aggregated references, one industry per account, and there is no sub-sector benchmark. Keep the standard driver questions unchanged to stay comparable: manufacturing survey questions by driver.
How we compare
Per driver · plant vs org vs industry
Your plantOrg averageIndustry
Recognition
3.6 · 4.1 · 3.9
Safety
4.4 · 4.0 · 3.8
Communication
4.1 · 4.2 · 3.8
Setup
Sync plants and managers from your HRIS
- Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, ADP and UKG. Employees come across with their plant, team, business unit and reporting line, so every result rolls up the way your org chart does. Any other system connects through API or SFTP. See all integrations.
- Joiners, movers and leavers update themselves. The Workday sync runs on connect and then twice a week, so a supervisor who moves plants takes their reporting line with them. The same joining and leaving dates time feedback from hire to exit.
IT sign-off
What your IT team checks
- Single sign-on. SAML 2.0 through Okta, Microsoft Entra ID or OneLogin, for admins, site leads and managers.
- Certified. ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II and GDPR. Security and compliance.
Rollout
Roll out in two waves: office first, then the floor
- Days 1 to 30: connect and pilot. Connect the HRIS and build the model once: plants, lines, shifts and employment type, so every cut, from site comparisons to DEI, sits on one record. Your engagement committee agrees the anonymity threshold, and one pilot plant goes first.
- Days 31 to 60: office first. Most manufacturers start here, and it is legitimate. What stalls an engagement program is starting there with no second wave planned.
- Days 61 to 90: the whole floor. Wave two is its own survey, because the audience is fixed at launch. QR codes and SMS reach every plant, and lifecycle surveys then follow each worker from onboarding to exit, which is where work on hourly turnover starts.
Group CHRO
I need one number I can defend to the board.
One definitive number for the whole estate, benchmarked, with the driver story behind it.
Benchmarked scoreDriver storyProof vs last year
Head of People
I need the baseline wave one stands on.
The office-first read that sets the baseline and proves movement when the floor joins.
Every driver readOffice firstMovement proven
Plant HR lead
I need the floor rollout to run itself.
Setup, comms, channels, languages and reminders for wave two, run in a five-week window.
Five-week windowCodes on the wallReminders
First-time buyer
I have never run one of these before.
Never run one before? A Culture Coach designs it with you: goals, questions, comms plan and the readout.
Culture CoachQuestion designGuided readout
Decide
HRIS survey module, DIY tool or a dedicated platform?
- A module works when everyone has a login. If your whole workforce sits at a desk with a company email, the survey built into your HRIS can be enough.
- A plant floor needs more than a login. Employee ID access at a QR code, answers in each worker's own language, anonymity held per site, and actions a supervisor owns.
- You keep the HRIS either way. It stays the record; CultureMonkey reads from it.
Moving on from DIY
Outgrown SurveyMonkey or Google Forms?
- The signs are familiar. Results live in spreadsheets, no one can cut them by plant safely, and nothing tracks what happened after.
- Start from the questions you already ask. Reusing them keeps this year's read comparable with last year's spreadsheet.
- Buying through procurement? Start from the RFP template and the pricing guide.
Bring one plant's roster. We will map the two-wave rollout against it.
In their words
Hear it from people leaders
The problem CultureMonkey solves is getting to a mostly frontline workforce in nine different languages, half a dozen of which aren't common. It makes it really easy, so we can spend more of our time on the output that actually matters.
Heather KaneChange Management & Employee Engagement Lead
I am able to create things in English with the question sets and instructions. And CultureMonkey is able to translate that accordingly, not just a translation you might get on Google, but one that is actually utilized in each language, understood as the question is intended to be understood.
Elizabeth EganDirector of Talent Management & Organizational Development
In just seven days, CultureMonkey designed and launched our survey to 2,000 employees across multiple geographies and in five languages. A feat that would normally take 45 days. When at Aujan Group, we asked CultureMonkey to support us with our annual employment engagement survey. We gave them an impossible task and they delivered.
Susan GardnerCHRO
Proof
Rated by HR leaders, certified for IT
15
drivers in the research-backed framework your engagement surveys score against
12M+
employee data points behind the benchmarks and sentiment models
4.7/5
average rating from HR leaders on G2
Go deeper on our methodology, intelligence, and benchmarks, or start from the People Science overview.
FAQ
Employee engagement software for manufacturing: FAQs
Reaching the floor
The survey has to reach people who never open an inbox.
How do you survey factory workers who have no company email?
With a code on the wall instead of an inbox. A shared link or QR code at the plant opens a form asking for an employee ID rather than an email; the ID only needs to be unique within that site. Workers with mobile numbers on record can get the invitation by WhatsApp or SMS instead; office staff keep email.
Can workers use a shared terminal or tablet on the shop floor?
Yes. A shared device opens the same posted link, and each worker verifies with their own employee ID before their survey opens. Saved progress follows the survey link rather than the device, and no automatic session reset is documented, so open a fresh private window per worker and close it after they submit.
What languages can plant workers answer in?
Each employee's set question language is used automatically when it is on their record; otherwise the survey offers a language picker and saves the choice. Comment exports keep the original text beside an English translation. Robertshaw, a manufacturing customer, runs its program in nine languages across 14 locations.
Can workers who struggle with written scales still answer?
Question formats include image-based answer options, which replace a written rating scale with pictures a worker can tap. They are genuinely useful on lines where reading a five-point scale in a second language is the real barrier. Keep surveys short and concrete either way: the question text still needs to be read.
Rollout
Office first is a legitimate wave one, if wave two is designed in.
Should we survey office staff first and the plant floor later?
Many manufacturers do, and it is a reasonable first wave, not a failure. Design wave two in from the start: put every worker on the employee record even without an email, capture location and shift as attributes, and agree the anonymity threshold before anyone sees a number. The floor then slots into the same reporting model.
Can we add the plant floor to a survey after it has launched?
No. A survey's audience is fixed at launch, and people added afterwards are skipped for that cycle. The plant floor therefore joins as a new survey, not an extension of the office one, and the two are compared side by side. Plan wave two as its own launch with its own window.
Trust
On a crew of nine, anonymity is arithmetic.
How do you keep answers anonymous on a small crew or a single line?
With minimums, not reassurances. A survey report opens after a minimum number of responses, three by default, and dashboards hold every cut to a minimum group size, five by default with a hard floor of three. An account setting can count only people who actually submitted, and it applies to exports too.
Does entering an employee ID mean my answers are identified?
No. The ID is checked against the survey's audience list to confirm eligibility and stop duplicates; on an anonymous survey it is never attached to the answers. One trade to know: employee-ID mode sends no passcode, so where impersonation matters, keep the passcode verification step on.
Results
The number has to survive an engineer's scrutiny.
Can a plant manager see another plant's results?
Not when scoping is set. A sub-admin can be restricted to named locations, teams, business units or custom attributes, and no filter combination reaches outside that scope. Two documented cautions: a sub-admin with no scope selected sees all employees, and the switches that hide comments or heatmaps from managers apply account-wide, to every manager at once.
What happens to a small site with only a few responses?
It is suppressed, never excluded. Reporting hides a group only when too few people responded; no setting drops a site for a low participation percentage, and none force-includes one. Below the threshold the report says there are not enough responses, and shows nothing. A small site that responds fully is reported like any other.
How is the engagement score calculated?
As a flat average of every rating answer in scope, deliberately not the average of per-driver averages, so a small driver cannot move the total like a large one. Scores are stored on 1 to 5 and displayed out of 5, out of 10 by default, or as a percentage; open text and eNPS live in their own reports.
Can we see percent favorable?
Per question, yes: each rating question shows its favorable, neutral and unfavorable split. The headline score itself is always a mean, and the percentage display is that same mean rescaled, not a count of favorable responses. If your last vendor scored favorability, recalibrate against the mean before comparing years.
Your stack and rollout
What IT, procurement and the plant network ask before they sign.
Does CultureMonkey sync plants and managers from Workday or SAP SuccessFactors?
Yes. Workday syncs employees with their teams, sub-teams, locations, business units and reporting lines, first on connect and then twice a week. SAP SuccessFactors, ADP, UKG and other HR systems connect the same way or through API and SFTP, so each plant and its managers stay current without a spreadsheet.
Should we use our HRIS survey module or a dedicated engagement platform?
Use the module if everyone has a desk and a company login. Choose a dedicated platform when a large share of your people work on the floor: they need employee ID access without email, their own language, anonymity held per site and actions a supervisor owns. The HRIS stays your record either way. If you are moving off a DIY tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, start from the questions you already ask.
How long does rollout take for 3,000 people across several plants?
It depends on how clean your HRIS records are and how many plants go in the first wave. The implementation runs kickoff, HRIS connection and data load, survey and access setup, testing, then go live, with a dedicated account manager throughout. Aujan Coca-Cola launched to 2,000 employees in five languages in seven days.
Does it work for automotive, food and beverage or process manufacturers?
Yes. The model is the same and the attributes change: lines and shifts for automotive and electronics plants, seasonal and agency workers for food and beverage, rotating crews for continuous process sites. Capture them as employee attributes and every result cuts by them. Aujan Coca-Cola, a beverage manufacturer, and Robertshaw, a manufacturer of about 4,500 people, both run their programs on CultureMonkey.
See it with your own plant list
A working session on your estate: which sites are reachable today, how the two-wave rollout maps to your plants, and what a site lead will see on Monday.
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