We also asked the people.
Documents tell you what a company writes down. People tell you what actually happens. HEWEN talks to both.
HEWEN runs short conversations with people across the company. Ten to fifteen minutes. In their own words, in their own language.
Nobody is graded. Nobody is named. We look for patterns that show up again and again, not for individual opinions.
Then we put what people said next to what the documents say. Where the two disagree, something interesting is usually hiding.
People invited
2,140
Across all seven businesses and 19 countries.
People who answered
1,673
78%. Most finished in under 12 minutes.
Time it took
6 days
Start to finished analysis. No workshops, no travel.
Themes that repeated
23
Said by at least 30 people in more than one business.
Listen in
This is what one conversation looks like.
Real length, real tone. Names are removed before anyone sees it.
Service engineer, 9 years at the company
Logistics Systems · Rotterdam · 11 minutes · name removed
HEWEN
Thanks for the time. What takes longer than it should in your week?
Person
Honestly? Waiting on breakdown data. We find out a truck has a problem when it's already parked.
8 more lines
The questions
We ask six things. Everything else follows from the answers.
01
What does your team know that other parts of the company could benefit from?
02
What work do you do regularly that feels like it should not be necessary?
03
What works unusually well in your team that other teams probably don't know about?
04
If you were CEO tomorrow: what would you look at first?
05
What takes longer in your week than it should?
06
Who should you be talking to, and aren't?
Not like this
We do not ask how satisfied people are.
How satisfied are you, from 1 to 10?
A number hides the reason. We want the reason.
Would you recommend this company as an employer?
That measures a general mood, not a specific thing we can act on.
What do you think of the leadership?
People answer carefully when they are named. We need them to answer honestly.
How it works
Four steps. No workshops.
01
We ask a few good questions
Short, open, human. "What slows your week down?" No forms, no scales from 1 to 5.
02
We follow up like a person would
If someone says something interesting, HEWEN asks one more question. That's where the detail comes from.
03
We look for what repeats
One person is an opinion. Forty people in five teams is a pattern worth your attention.
04
We check it against the documents
Every theme is put next to the reports, plans and numbers. Agreement is useful. Disagreement is more useful.
What we heard
Five things people said again and again.
A theme only appears here when many people, in more than one business, said something similar.
TH-01
148 people · 5 businesses
People buy outside what the company already owns
"I'd stop buying things we own."
TH-02
61 people · 3 businesses
Customers keep asking for something nobody sells
"They ask. We say no. Then it goes quiet."
TH-03
94 people · 3 businesses
Three teams believe they are the ones building it
"I thought we were the data platform."
TH-04
112 people · 6 businesses
The strategy is known. The budget doesn't follow it
"We all read the strategy. Then we do last year again."
TH-05
203 people · 7 businesses
People who could help are one call away, and nobody calls
"It's not anyone's job to connect us."
How it felt
People don't mind being asked. They mind not being heard.
We ask everyone one last question at the end of the conversation: was this worth your time?
Finished the conversation
94%
Once people start, they almost always finish.
Would speak to us again
9.1
Out of 10, asked right after the call.
Average length
14 min
Short enough to say yes to.
To reach everyone
12 h
All conversations run at the same time.
“I could just talk. And it understood what I actually meant.”
“It asked the second question. Nobody here ever asks the second question.”
“First time in nine years somebody asked me how my day actually works.”
Nobody is being graded
People answer honestly when they know it can't be used against them.
- Answers are never shown to managers as individual responses.
- Names are removed before anything reaches an analysis.
- A theme is only reported when at least 12 people said something similar.
- Anyone can skip a question, or stop at any point.