How it works
Ask the people who were there. Then have the conversation.
Every survey Facets runs follows the same path, whether it is a team rating itself, a team describing its leader or a whole organization answering at once. The questions are about what people actually saw. Results appear only when enough people have answered, written comments are never quoted, and each report says how much weight its numbers can bear.
Invite your team. Complete the survey. Review the results. Agree next steps.
Invite your team
Choose the people to include. Each person gets a personal link by email or, where your organization chose it, as a Slack or Teams direct message, and nobody needs an account.Complete the survey
In a team survey, each person rates their teammates and themselves on behavior they could observe. That takes about 20 to 40 minutes per person, depending on team size.Review the results
Results appear once enough people have answered. The team sees a shared report, each person gets a note, and a named facilitator, if the team has one, reviews before anything is released.Agree next steps
A debrief is a meeting to discuss the results and choose actions. The team survey includes an agenda for it, built from your own results.
Four products
The team survey
Everyone on a team rates everyone, including themselves, and the results become a two-hour debrief. Sold per run, per team. It is the product the rest of this page walks through, because it is the one the other surveys borrow their machinery from.
The Leadership 360
The same confidentiality rules pointed upward: a team describes what it is like to work for one leader, and the leader gets a brief that compares what they expected with what was said. Sold per leader.
Engagement cycles
Everyone in an organization answers the same questions once, and the answers come back as group results — for the organization, each unit, and each manager — with the response count and a range showing uncertainty. Sold per cycle, for the whole organization.
The manager tools
A record you keep for the people you lead, whether you manage them or lead them on a project: goals, check-ins, 1:1s, growth and stay conversations and written assessments. Workload shows how full each person’s coming weeks are. It is a performance record, and the app says so wherever you type about someone. Facets does not add survey feedback to it. The one route is a leader choosing to share a summary of their own Leadership 360. The same plan carries idea boards and projects for your team, which are not part of that record. Sold per manager.
The team survey: what people are actually asked
First, a short calibration
Three to five minutes before any rating: the definition of each behavior with worked examples at the low, middle and high end, one practice judgment per behavior with the keyed answer, and a reminder of the three ways people usually get this wrong — rating someone you like higher on everything, giving everyone the same score, and rating potential instead of the last three months.
This is called frame-of-reference training. It is a standard way to make ratings more comparable between people.
Then, behavior — not personality
Every peer item has the same stem: in the last three months, how often did this person… followed by something you could have watched happen. Five frequency options from “rarely or never” to “almost always”, plus not enough opportunity to observe — which is treated as missing data, never quietly scored as a middle value.
Five core dimensions, two items each: dependable contribution, helping and backup, open communication and voice, constructive disagreement, and keeping the team on track.
3 further dimensions — raising standards, inclusive participation, respect under pressure — are switched on per team when you set it up. When they are on, everyone rates all 6 of those items, except on a team of exactly four, where the items are split so each item still reaches two raters without asking any one person to rate everything. On a team of three both raters see them all, because with only two raters per person there is nothing to split.
On a team of five that is somewhere around 52 to 76 individual judgments. The whole survey, calibration and the sections below included, takes about 25 minutes per person on a team of five, and about 40 at the largest team size.
Two written answers about each teammate
After the frequency items for a given person, two short free-text questions: what they should keep doing, and what would help. These are the only place in the survey you write prose about a named colleague.
Your name is dropped from them at scoring time, before anything is stored for analysis. They are never quoted back — not in the team pack, not in anyone’s individual note — and an automated check rejects any pack that reproduces a recognizable run of words from one. If a facilitator was named before anyone agreed to take part, the facilitator view includes a paraphrase of each written comment, without the writer’s name.
Three questions about working with them
On a seven-point agreement scale rather than a frequency scale, because they ask something different: whether you would want this person on a project like this one, whether you go to them, and whether you can rely on them. They feed two summary scores in your results; the reliance question is also pooled across every pair of teammates into one team-level trust figure, and is used for nothing else.
Then the team, the network, and yourself
34 questions on team climate — psychological safety, direction and role clarity, coordination, task cohesion, relationship conflict, information flow, team efficacy, reflexivity, viability, meetings and decisions, and respect and fairness — answered about the team rather than about individuals. Up to 6 more are asked only of teams that work apart or that depend on other teams.
A few short “who do you go to” questions that produce a picture of how work and influence actually flow, as opposed to the org chart.
Then your own ratings of yourself, and your prediction of how your teammates rated you. The report shows how that prediction compares with what they said.
The self module also asks 13 questions about how being on this team is going for you: whether you feel safe raising a concern, whether your workload is sustainable, whether you care about the work, whether you are learning, whether you belong, whether you are making progress on work that matters, and whether you expect to still be on this team in a year. That last one is about whether you plan to stay, and you are told it is being asked. All 13 are reported only as team averages, with a count of how many people answered below the midpoint, and only after 4 people have answered; no individual answer to any of them is shown to anyone.
How the scoring works
Raters differ in how generous they are, and that difference is large — a substantial majority of the variance in multisource ratings is about the rater rather than the person being rated. So scores are also reported perceiver-centered: each rater’s own average is subtracted before comparison, which removes most of that.
Every individual score carries a reliability band that depends on how many people rated you, because a mean of two ratings and a mean of six are not the same measurement. Climate scores are only reported as a team score when members actually agree enough to justify treating them as one; when they do not, the report says the team is divided instead of averaging the disagreement away.
Results appear only when enough people have answered
The minimum depends on the survey and the kind of result. Counts are completed responses, not team size. They are confidentiality conventions rather than statistical thresholds, and they are applied strictly. The full list, including the team trust figure, is on who can see what.
| Survey | Result | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Team survey | A person's peer scores | 3 raters, so teams of 4 or more |
| Team survey | Question-level detail | 5 raters |
| Team survey | Self-report summaries | 4 people |
| Team survey | Comment themes | 3 writers |
| Team pulse | A commitment's progress | 3 people |
| Leadership 360 | Scores and themes | 3 raters |
| Leadership 360 | Question-level detail and the overall questions | 5 raters |
| Engagement cycle | Each group | 5 respondents by default; an organization may raise it to 50. Groups whose answers could be worked out from other groups are hidden too. |
On a three-person team, individual peer scores are withheld entirely.
Three reports, three audiences
The team pack — everyone sees it
Climate scores with agreement and spread, the network picture, and a two-hour meeting agenda built from what your results actually say. No individual is named or ranked.Your own note — written for you
What your teammates see you doing well, one thing to work on, how your self-view compared with theirs, and how much weight the results can bear given how many people rated you. Managing you, leading your team or administering the workspace does not give anyone access to it. If an owner or admin names a facilitator for your team, that person can also read every member’s note, before and after release, for as long as they hold the role. A manager or an admin can be appointed.The facilitator view — if the team has named a facilitator
The facilitator view names raters beside patterns in how they rated, such as giving everyone the same score, and notes where one person rates another unusually. It never shows ratings or comments as written. If the facilitator was named before anyone agreed to take part, it also includes a paraphrase of each written comment, without the writer’s name. It lists anything the automated checks flagged for a human to review before release. Notes that trip a flag are held rather than published, and when a facilitator is attached, nothing reaches a person about themselves until that facilitator approves it. Only the facilitator can open this view. If no facilitator is named, there is no facilitator view.
The debrief: where the team agrees next steps
The agenda opens with what the team is already doing well, moves to two or three things worth changing, and, after a break, ends with two proposed commitments, which the team can add to. Each is meant to be specific enough that you could tell later whether it happened.
The written packs are constrained on purpose. No trait adjectives, no ranking language, no speculation about why someone behaves as they do, and no causal claim about your results — “teams higher on coordination tend to do better in published research” is allowed; “this is why your project slipped” is not.
Two further constraints are checks rather than instructions. Every score-like number in a pack is matched against the scored data before release, and any six-word run shared with somebody’s written answer is treated as a leak and rejected — with the survey’s own dimension names excluded, since those are our words and not anyone else’s. A pack that fails either check does not go out; a version written by fixed rules, with no model involved, goes out instead.
About six weeks later, a two-minute pulse
The debrief ends with commitments, and the lead records them with an owner and a check date. About six weeks after release, a team lead can open a two-minute pulse, once there is a commitment to ask about. For each commitment it asks how far it has happened, on a scale from “not at all” to “fully”; then the same two questions the run asked about feeling able to speak up and about workload, so the two figures sit side by side.
No peer ratings, deliberately: six weeks apart, ratings of colleagues measure how the raters recalibrated, not what changed. The pulse closes on the day the team set, the results go to everyone at the same moment, and a commitment’s figure is shown only once 3 people have answered. It is part of the run, not an extra.
The same questions, at organization scale
An engagement cycle asks everyone in the organization the same climate statements the team survey uses, about the team each person actually works in — so a unit’s numbers mean the same thing whether they came from a cycle or a team run — plus questions about their own work. Results come back for the organization, each unit, and each manager, each with its response count and a range showing uncertainty. Groups with too few responses are hidden to protect privacy.
A cycle’s invitations go by email or, if the organization connects Slack or Microsoft Teams, as a direct message carrying the person’s own link. An engagement cycle can be answered in English or Spanish, one language a cycle, chosen when you set it up. The results, themes and written summary are in English. Microsoft Entra ID or Okta can keep the list of who is invited. How people are invited.
What a cycle deliberately does not produce is this page’s debrief pack: no debrief agenda, no individual notes, and a written summary that proposes nothing of its own; beneath the summary, the organization is shown options from the same cited library the team conversation uses, for the measures where it stands lowest, to weigh; what the organization decides to try, it records beneath them itself, with an owner and a day to check. A cycle tells you where to look; a team that wants to work on itself runs a team survey. What a cycle does give a manager whose own group’s results were published is a 30-minute conversation with that group about one result, with options to try from a cited library, and options for the group’s lowest results, handed to them before the conversation; the team chooses one, or writes its own. That applies when the cycle let managers read their own group.
The Leadership 360, separately
The same confidentiality rules applied to upward feedback for one leader: 3 to 25 raters, 14 behavior items across 7 dimensions, and a brief that sets the leader’s own rating, and what they thought their team would say, beside what the team said, behavior by behavior. Results need at least 3 responses, and the overall questions and question-level detail need 5. Comments are grouped into themes and never quoted, and a facilitator can be given the brief first and decide whether it is released.
It is a different product from the team survey on this page, sold separately, and it has its own page.