CASE
Cotes keeps a close eye on employee well-being across countries and locations
How do employees feel when much of their collaboration happens remotely? At Cotes, GAIS provides insight into everyday working life across the organization. Running several surveys a year helps the company follow up on initiatives and recognize the strengths worth celebrating.
Employee survey results at Cotes
Aarhus, Slagelse, Szczecin in Poland, and Hamburg in Germany. At Cotes, colleagues are often far apart, and much of their collaboration takes place online. This makes it important for HR and management to understand how employees are doing in different parts of the company.
“Because we are a geographically spread organization, GAIS is a great tool for us to both get the big picture, but also get local insights,” says Caroline Wesselhoff Jensen, Human Resource Partner at Cotes.
The employee well-being surveys give employees a chance to share how they experience their working lives. Their responses provide a shared starting point for discussing well-being and deciding which areas to focus on.
“As CEO and management in general, we can have a feeling on how it’s going in Cotes, but feelings are not enough. We want to focus on facts,” says Martin Brøchner-Mortensen, CEO of Cotes.
Strong relationships with colleagues, despite the distance
Cotes uses GAIS for both employee well-being surveys and workplace assessments (WRA). The company surveys employee well-being several times a year, regularly gathering employees’ perspectives on how their day-to-day work is evolving.
“A single yearly survey is not enough for us to really understand how things are evolving in also the smallest departments,” explains Caroline Wesselhoff Jensen.
Cotes has been particularly pleased with its high scores in the Colleagues and Leadership factors. In an organization where hybrid work and daily online meetings are part of everyday life, it is valuable to see that employees experience strong relationships with colleagues and good leadership.
The results also offer an opportunity to pause and recognize what is going well. Celebrating strengths matters at Cotes, and the surveys help make those strengths visible. Positive results become part of the conversation about well-being, alongside the work on areas that need more attention.
About Cotes
Cotes is a Danish company founded in 1986 that develops, manufactures, and sells dehumidification solutions for industries including wind energy and battery manufacturing. The company is headquartered in Aarhus, with locations in Slagelse, Szczecin in Poland, and Hamburg in Germany.
Are the initiatives making a difference?
When Cotes launches an initiative in response to a survey, it uses subsequent surveys to track progress.
“And most importantly, it allows us to keep track of the actions and if they are actually making a difference,” says Martin Brøchner-Mortensen.
Following up also means identifying new needs. Cotes uses the insights to consider which initiatives to introduce across the company and where to act before an issue grows.
For managers, this work needs to be manageable in practice. Caroline Wesselhoff Jensen finds that GAIS supports exactly that:
“The process makes sure that we do not just collect the data, but we actually use it in a structured way to open a dialog and take actions.”
Employee feedback comes with a responsibility to act
Being a great place to work is an important ambition for Cotes. That is why both HR and management focus on what happens between surveys, when employee input needs to translate into action in everyday working life.
For Martin Brøchner-Mortensen, this is a fundamental part of asking employees to contribute:
“And finally, for me, it’s very important that when we ask people in the organization, we should also listen and take action. Because if we don’t do that, then we shouldn’t ask at all.”
