Engagement cycles
An engagement survey for the whole organization, bought once per cycle.
A cycle asks everyone in the organization the same questions, once, and reports what they said as group numbers with error bars — for the organization, for each unit, and for each manager. Groups too small to report are left out rather than quietly included, and so is any group that would give one away.
- ~10 minutes per person
- 40 questions + 2 open
- Reporting floor: 5 people
- From $999 per cycle
- Bought once, not monthly
Setting up costs nothing and needs no card. Everyone answers from a personal link; nobody but your admins signs in.
What people answer
The team you work in
The same 34 core statements the team survey uses, asked about the team somebody actually works in day to day. That is deliberate: it means a unit’s numbers mean the same thing whether they came from a cycle or from a team survey, and it lets every unit’s climate figure carry the same agreement test the team survey applies — the scorecard says when a group’s members do not describe the same team. A questionnaire that asked about “the organization” instead would produce a number nobody can act on.
Your own work
6 questions about effort, meaning, absorption, whether somebody expects to still be here in a year, and how likely they are to recommend the place. Then 2 optional open questions — one about what would make it better, one about what is working and should not change.
The items are ours, written to published definitions rather than licensed from anyone, and they are published: the instrument page shows each block’s first dimension to anyone, and one emailed link opens every question, the scoring rules and the thresholds before you buy.
And your own questions, kept separate
You can add up to 10 questions with a fixed answer — pick one, pick several, a rating on a scale you label, or options put in order — and up to 3 open ones, at no extra cost. Ask them once, or mark them to return every cycle and watch them move. They are asked after everything above, never before: a question about a new policy asked early colors every answer that follows it, and the blocks above are the half of the survey that has to stay comparable.
They come back under their own heading, never mixed into the scorecard and never described as validated — they mean what you wrote them to mean. Once a cycle carrying a question has opened, its wording is fixed: editing it makes a new question that starts its own trend, because two wordings are not two readings of one thing.
What comes back
Ask everyone once. Get numbers you can defend. Every mean comes with the number of people it came from and a 95% interval. A wide interval means the people in that group disagreed with each other, or that there were few of them — and either way it is a reason not to act on a difference of 0.3 between two teams of six. Most reporting shows you the average and stops.
A written summary of the numbers is produced for you by a language model that is given the published group figures and the themes, and never anybody’s individual answers. The numbers themselves are calculated, not generated.
Numbers with error bars
Groups too small to report are left out. So, sometimes, is a second group beside them: when a division publishes a number and all but one of its teams do too, the missing one is recoverable by subtraction, and holding back only the small team would be a promise we did not keep. That is the part that is easy to get wrong, and it is why a team you expected to see is occasionally absent.
The threshold is five by default. You can raise it. You cannot lower it below five, and we will not tell you it is a legal requirement, because as far as we can establish there isn’t one — the question regulators actually ask is whether somebody can be identified, which is not the same as counting to five. Nothing here is legal advice. How reporting thresholds work, and the subtraction problem.
What people write stays theirs
The open questions are optional, and what somebody writes is never shown to anyone at their organization. Not to an administrator, not in an export, not in a report. What is reported is themes — and only themes that at least three different people raised, written in our words rather than lifted from anyone’s.
Anonymity is an effort, never a guarantee. Answers are tied to a person so somebody can finish later and nobody can answer twice — which means keeping them private is something we do on purpose and can explain, rather than something that is impossible by accident. We tell participants that too, in those words, before they start.
A run is a team. A cycle is an organization.
| Dimension | Team survey (a run) | Engagement cycle |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | One team of 3–12, about each other and the team | Everyone in the organization, about their own team and their own work |
| What they rate | Named teammates' observable behavior + team climate | Team climate + their own engagement; nobody rates a person |
| What comes back | Team pack, a private note per person, a facilitator view, a 60-minute debrief agenda | Group numbers with intervals for the organization, each unit, each manager; themes from open text |
| Smallest reportable group | 3 raters for anything, 5 for question-level detail | 5 by default, raisable; subtraction-safe |
| Price unit | Per run, per team | Per cycle, for the whole organization, by headcount band |
| Debrief | Included, always | Not produced — a team that wants one runs a team survey |
The two share an instrument on purpose, so a unit’s climate numbers mean the same thing wherever they came from. The full comparison, including 360s.
What it costs
Bands
| Employees | First cycle in a year | Second cycle, same year (60%) | Top-up block |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 100 | $999 | $599 | 10 seats, $100 |
| 101–250 | $1,799 | $1,079 | 10 seats, $75 |
| 251–500 | $2,999 | $1,799 | 10 seats, $60 |
| 501–1,000 | $4,999 | $2,999 | 10 seats, $50 |
| 1,001–2,500 | $9,499 | $5,699 | 50 seats, $190 |
Practitioners — on the Practitioner plan or certified — pay 25% off list; the two discounts do not stack.
How top-up blocks work
Between bands you can add blocks of ten or fifty seats at the rate the band you are already in charges, so a boundary is a step of 1.09× rather than the 1.78× it would be without them. At 100 people a cycle works out around $9.99 a head, and at 101 it is around $10.88.
Blocks come in ten or fifty seats rather than ones on purpose. A per-person number would be a headcount we track and a bill that moves with it, which is exactly what this pricing exists to avoid. So one extra person buys a whole block — and you keep the rest of it. Above a thousand people a block is fifty seats rather than ten, because at that size ten-seat blocks stop being a purchase and start being an inventory. Past a point the next band up is simply cheaper, and you get that instead without having to work out which is which.
Above 2,500 people
An Enterprise agreement, with published prices from $25,000 a year. What changes at that size is not the arithmetic but the work — the questions in more than one language, a roster fed from your HR system rather than a spreadsheet, works councils consulted before anyone is asked anything, and a decision about how many units you actually want reported. None of that is something a checkout can do, which is why that size is quoted.
Who sees what
Workspace owners and admins
They run the cycle, because the roster is everyone. They see every reportable group’s numbers, the themes, and the written summary. Not the open-text answers — those are shown to nobody at the organization.
A manager
Appears in the report as a group: their unit’s numbers, once the unit clears the floor. Never an individual answer, never a name.
The people who answered
Their own answers, while the cycle is open. Nothing they wrote is ever shown to anyone at the organization.
Questions
How is this different from the team survey?
What do people actually answer?
Can we add our own questions?
Can a manager see who said what?
What happens to a small team?
Is the minimum group size a legal requirement?
Do you have benchmarks against other companies?
What does it cost to run twice a year?
We have 108 people. Do we pay the 101–250 price?
Can we run it for more than 2,500 people?
Set up a cycle
Upload a roster, pick the band, and everyone gets a link. Results by organization, unit and manager, with the small groups withheld — and nothing charged until you open the cycle.