What you said,
what we read,
what we'll do.

Forty-two of you took the time to fill out this survey. Thirty-eight of you wrote long, articulate, well-thought-out open answers — in many cases three or four full paragraphs. In comparable surveys, the response rate to open questions rarely exceeds 40–50%. You reached 90%. Before any number, this is the first thing to say.

We read every single answer. One by one. First Luciano, then together with Renata Lovallo (Talent & Culture Strategist) and Maria Antonietta Parrella (HR Lead). Some answers surprised us. Some hurt. Some gave us tools we didn't have. All taught us something.

This document does not include every single answer. But it tells faithfully what emerged from them: the aggregated data, the main themes, some representative voices (paraphrased where needed to protect anonymity), and — above all — the five actions we commit to take from today on, with the people responsible, the timing, and how the result will be measured.

The pact we propose is simple: you gave us truthful information; we give you back verifiable actions. We will measure the same indicators again in July and December 2026. If the commitments are not kept, you will see it with your own eyes.

The ETN Quick Climate Check 2026 survey was administered through Google Forms in a bilingual Italian/English version, with anonymity guaranteed, in the first ten days of April. Nine items on a 1–5 Likert scale (from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree"), one main open question ("If you were CEO, what would be the first thing you'd change?"), and a free space to add any further comments.

Sample distribution

The sample is well balanced between HQ and Agencies — and that allows for meaningful comparisons. It is, however, strongly skewed toward those who have been in ETN for more than three years. This is also the data point that struck us most: the absolute majority of respondents is the voice of those who know ETN from inside and over time.

The overall climate index is 2.75 out of 5. It's the average of eight of the nine quantitative metrics. It's not a disaster, but it is below median — meaning, on a scale where 3 would be neutral, we are below the starting point.

The overall eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score, i.e. "would you recommend ETN as a workplace?") is +5. For benchmark: companies with a healthy climate sit between +20 and +50. Companies in serious trouble sit below zero. We are in the neutral zone — we are not losing people, but we don't have spontaneous ambassadors either.

The eNPS of long-tenured colleagues (those with more than 3 years at ETN) is −13. Of all the data points, this is the most important one. It means that the longer a person has known ETN, the less they would recommend it today as a workplace. We come back to this in section 05, because it deserves its own discussion.

What stands out · and what's fair to say

The four critical levers — communication, internal fairness, handling of urgencies, training — are all below median. They are not unrelated: lack of institutional communication generates opacity on criteria, which generates cascading urgencies, which generate stress, which erodes trust in training. They are four faces of the same organizational problem.

The two levers that hold — collaboration among colleagues (3.57) and openness to change (3.88) — matter, because they tell us the problem is not horizontal and is not about cultural resistance. People work well with each other. People are willing to change. So the conditions to do something exist.

The three groups in the sample — those who have been here less than a year, between one and three years, and more than three years — answer the same questions in very different ways. And the trend is clear: on almost every metric, the score gets worse as tenure increases.

What it means · and how we read it

Recent joiners see ETN as a place where collaboration works (4.5/5), with growth prospects (4.0/5), where people are willing to change. This is the story you walk into when joining ETN. And it is rightfully positive — it means that when a person arrives, the welcome works.

Those who have been in ETN for more than three years, instead, see an organization where internal fairness is 2.07/5, career prospects are 2.87/5, and collaboration — though still above median — has dropped to 3.33. This is the story of those who actually live ETN, over the long term.

The difference between the two stories is neither surprising nor dramatic in itself — many organizations have a similar gradient. But in our case it is particularly accentuated, and especially, it concerns 71% of our team. In other words: our daily reality is the one seen by long-tenured colleagues, not the one seen by new joiners.

The strongest difference is on Q5 · Collaboration among colleagues: agencies at 4.00, HQ at 3.10. Almost a full point gap. It is the largest gap in the entire survey.

This tells us something important: agencies have more cohesive teams, with more internal complicity. They operate as local nuclei with a strong sense of belonging. HQ, on this specific indicator, shows signs of fragmentation among peers.

Other metrics are more aligned. Both worlds critically rate internal communication (2.09 and 2.30), both have the same data on handling urgencies (2.50), both have substantially equivalent eNPS. So on these aspects, the two worlds live the same problem.

Some representative voices

The open answers are the most dense asset of this survey. We report some of them here, selected because they represent recurring clusters of thought. They have been reformulated where necessary to protect anonymity — preserving the original thought but changing the specific language used.

Each of these voices, in their original form, is more articulate than how it appears here. We cite them in summary form to make this report-back readable — but the original answers were read in full, more than once.

And the quantitative targets · for July and December

To make all of this measurable, we commit to the following targets. They are realistic, not ambitious — the bigger jump in quality is expected by the end of the year, when the org chart will have settled in and the fairness framework will be in operation. For July we just need to see we're heading in the right direction.

In some open answers, more sensitive signals emerged — concerning specific relational dynamics: reports of behaviors experienced as aggressive, of collective communications perceived as accusatory, of perceptions related to individual situations or specific locations. We did not report these in this document.

The reason is one only: publishing them in aggregate form would have been unfair both to those who wrote them (too exposed even if anonymous) and to those who could have recognized themselves as the target of those comments (publicly accused without the chance to respond). Surveys are the right tool to measure climate — they are not the right tool to address specific interpersonal dynamics.

Those signals, which we read carefully, will be addressed through a different and more appropriate channel: in the coming weeks we will activate an individual listening space, with an external, competent and independent figure that anyone can access in confidence and on a voluntary basis if they feel they have experienced situations of this kind. It is not a formal complaints mechanism nor an internal investigation — it is a space for protected, safe conversation. The operational details will be communicated to the whole organization by W20.

We say this openly because transparency is one of the commitments we have made to you. Not reporting everything that was said does not mean it was not heard. It means that some things require channels different from the public report-back.

Reading your 38 open answers — some of them three, four, five paragraphs long — what struck us most was not the harshness of some judgments, nor the bluntness of some sentences. It was the quality of the proposals.

Those who criticized most strongly also wrote the most detailed solutions. Those who said "communication isn't working" added how it could work. Those who said "the criteria for growth are opaque" proposed which criteria there could be. Those who said "we need more meritocracy" wrote what kind of evaluation system they would expect.

This tells us something important: the team is not in a complaint mode. It is in a proposal mode. Our job, in the next ninety days, is much simpler than it might have seemed at first: we don't have to invent solutions. We have to listen to those you've already written, decide which ones to take on, and make them happen visibly.

We will see each other again with the data in July. In the meantime, the actions begin. The first one — the ETN NEXT Update newsletter — arrives in your inbox next week. The others will follow in the weeks after, in their own time.

If anything in this report-back stays with you — a correction, an objection, something we didn't get right, a question on the actions we've announced — write to us. Every message will receive a reply within seven days.