I don't think HR reading the answer they want to take away from the survey is necessarily limited to DEI either. My previous company had been formed by the merg

I don't think HR reading the answer they want to take away from the survey is necessarily limited to DEI either. My previous company had been formed by the merger of many acquisitions, and had a big company wide strategy around a product that only really mattered to the biggest unit. Imagine being at Beats' hardware division and being told that the important strategy for Apple is app store installation counts. (The example company wasn't Apple, but it was a similar example for the company). Sure, you could focus the entire business unit's work on an app to control the headphones and everyone could say they were focused on the company's primary objective, but it hardly seems the most important thing for Beats to do with their products. They then included in their quarterly survey questions how connected people feel with that strategy. When the unrelated units scored quite poorly on this subject, they decided the reason was that the line managers had failed to educate their reports on the importance of this strategy enough, so started marking them all on how connected their reports felt and giving out educational material so people could understand the strategy, missing that people understood the strategy well enough, it just there was no meaningful connection to their business unit to understand.