Running an AI survey on a multilingual factory floor in Israel
A northern-Israel plant floor is not Hebrew-only. Hebrew, Arabic and Russian speakers do the machining, assembly and cleanroom work — and a Hebrew-only survey quietly excludes them.
Industrial employers in northern Israel — the Bar-Lev park, the Western Galilee, the Haifa bay — run floors where Hebrew, Arabic and Russian are all first languages. A survey written only in Hebrew does not get a lower response rate evenly. It loses specific departments almost entirely.
Who you lose
Machining, assembly, warehouse and cleanroom teams are exactly where Arabic and Russian speakers concentrate, and exactly where the undocumented bottlenecks live. Lose them and you survey the office, then present it as the organisation.
Four languages, or it is not a floor survey
Translate every question and every answer option, not the introduction. A Hebrew form with an English button is not a multilingual survey. Hebrew and Arabic also need genuine right-to-left layout — mirrored progress, mirrored navigation — not a left-to-right form with the text pushed right.
The floor will not open a laptop
Assume a phone, on cellular, inside a metal building, possibly with gloves on. That means a QR code at the entrance and the break room, no login, large touch targets, one question per screen, and a visible finish line. Any authentication step costs roughly a third of the floor.
Three minutes, and mean it
Twelve questions answered with a single tap each feels like nothing. The same twelve as a scrolling form feels like homework. Make free text optional — requiring paragraphs from production staff is the fastest way to end up with data from managers only.
Anonymous, and say so on the first screen
Anonymity is what makes the free-text answers worth reading. If people believe an answer can be traced, "what slows you down?" returns "nothing, it is fine". Say plainly that the survey is anonymous, and make sure it actually is — an optional name field for volunteers must not be attached to the answers.
Check the language mix before printing posters
Ask HR for the real distribution rather than assuming. If there is a meaningful Amharic or Thai population, adding a language is cheap; discovering afterwards that a whole shift could not read the form is not.