Participation matters. A score built on responses from 30% of your organisation tells a different story to one built on 80%. The higher the participation rate, the more confident you can be that the score reflects how your people broadly feel about working there.
But chasing participation - sending reminders, setting targets, making announcements - tends to produce the wrong kind of participation. People respond because they feel they are supposed to, not because they feel genuinely safe and motivated to share honestly.
The biggest driver of low participation in early cycles is usually uncertainty. People are not sure what the check-in is, whether it is really anonymous, or what will happen as a result of their response. Campaigns and reminders do not address that uncertainty - they add noise on top of it.
A straightforward explanation of what the check-in is, what anonymity means specifically, and what will happen with the results tends to improve participation more than any reminder.
First-cycle participation is almost never representative of where you will settle. Some people wait to see what happens after the first cycle before they decide whether to engage.
The most common pattern is gradual improvement - as people see that nothing bad happens as a result of honest responses, and as the process becomes a familiar part of how the organisation operates, participation tends to increase naturally.
Friction reduces participation. A single question, delivered by the channel people already use, completable in under thirty seconds, has almost no friction. Keeping the process that simple is itself a participation strategy.
If participation is consistently low in a specific team or location, the most useful first question is whether the channel is right. Matching the channel to how each part of your organisation actually communicates is often more effective than any amount of encouragement.
Participation builds through trust and clarity, not through pressure and reminders. Explain the process clearly, keep the check-in simple, match the channel to the team, and let the habit develop naturally over cycles. Genuine participation produces a more reliable signal than inflated participation produced by chasing.
Ready to see how your people feel about working at your company? Start your free cycle - no card, no commitment.
Also worth reading: How to get your team ready for their first check-in