Frequently Asked Questions

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About climate and culture
 

What is organizational climate?
 

Climate is what it feels like to work at your organization right now. It is the accumulated daily experience of communication, supervision, workload, safety, and clarity. Unlike culture, climate is measurable and it responds to intervention within a single fiscal year.
 

How is climate different from culture?
 

Culture is the set of shared assumptions an organization has built over years. It is deep, slow, and largely invisible to the people inside it. Climate is the current conditions. Culture is the geology. Climate is the weather.
 

The practical difference is what you can change. Culture change is a multi-year project with uncertain results. Climate change is achievable in months, and it is what drives retention.
 

Is climate work the same as employee engagement?
 

No. Engagement measures how people feel about the organization. Climate measures the conditions producing those feelings. Engagement scores tell you something is wrong. Climate data tells you what and where.
 

Does improving climate actually reduce turnover?
 

Climate conditions, particularly supervision quality and role clarity, are consistently stronger predictors of early voluntary departure than compensation in human services settings. Improving them does not eliminate turnover. It reduces the share of it that was preventable, which in a first-year turnover rate above forty percent is most of it.
 

About the assessment
 

What does the assessment measure?
 

Ten domains: leadership presence and accountability, psychological safety and communication, onboarding and belonging, supervision and development, retention signals and climate health, leader self-awareness and perceived impact, mission alignment and purpose transmission, capacity and sustainability, equity and fairness, and organizational communication and transparency.
 

Each is measured independently and administered to both leadership and staff. The two communication domains are deliberately separate: one measures whether you can speak up to the person in front of you, the other whether the organization tells you things and explains its decisions. Organizations frequently score well on one and poorly on the other.
 

Why survey leadership and staff separately?
 

Because the difference is the finding. An executive team that accurately understands a problem and has not solved it has a capacity problem. An executive team unaware the problem exists has an information problem. Those require different interventions, and you cannot tell them apart by surveying one population.
 

One of the ten domains, leader self-awareness and perceived impact, exists only because both instruments are administered. It measures whether leaders' sense of their own effect on the organization corresponds to what staff actually experience, which is not a question a single-population survey can ask.
 

What does a gap in results mean?
 

It means your organization's internal information system has broken down in a specific place. A large divergence on psychological safety usually means staff are not raising concerns and leadership has read the silence as absence of problems.
 

It does not mean leadership is dishonest. Information degrades as it travels upward, and bad news degrades faster than good news. Every organization has gaps. The question is where they concentrate.
 

How long does the assessment take?
 

Eight to twelve weeks for a single-site organization. Multi-site engagements run longer, and the site-level comparison is usually one of the more valuable outputs.
 

How much staff time does it require?
 

Survey completion is roughly fifteen minutes per person. Interview and focus group participation is ninety minutes for a subset of staff. The executive team commits to a scoping call, a mid-process check-in, and a half-day findings session.
 

What do we receive at the end?
 

A findings report organized by domain with leadership and staff results presented against each other, a gap analysis, segmentation by site and department where size supports it, an intervention plan with named owners, and a re-measurement protocol.
 

Do you help with implementation or only diagnosis?
 

Both are available. The findings session and intervention plan are included in every engagement. Ongoing implementation support is scoped separately.
 

About confidentiality
 

Will staff responses be confidential?
 

Yes. Individual responses are never reported to the organization. Results are reported in aggregate and by segment, and segments are suppressed below a minimum threshold to prevent identification.
 

What if staff do not believe the confidentiality assurance?
 

Some will not, particularly in organizations where trust is already low. This is why the connection phase precedes measurement. Confidentiality gets explained in person, by me, in rooms where people can ask questions. Response rate is itself a finding, and a low one tells you something worth knowing.
 

What happens if something serious surfaces during interviews?
 

Disclosures involving harassment, safety, or legal exposure are handled according to a protocol agreed to before the engagement begins and communicated to staff in advance, so nobody is surprised by what does and does not stay in the room.

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Do we have to share the results with staff?
 

Yes, and I ask for that commitment before starting. Asking people to be candid and then withholding the findings does more damage than never asking.
 

About fit
 

How large does our organization need to be?
 

Generally forty employees or more. Below that, segmentation stops producing usable findings and structured conversations serve you better than an instrument.
 

Do you only work with nonprofits?
 

Nonprofit and mission-driven human services organizations. Behavioral health, homeless services, housing, youth development, reentry, and community-based organizations. The framework would transfer to corporate settings. The pattern recognition would not, and that is most of what you are paying for.
 

We already run an annual engagement survey. Why would we do this?
 

If your engagement survey is telling you what to change and where, you may not need this. Most do not. They produce a score, a year-over-year comparison, and a leadership discussion that ends without a decision. If that describes yours, the missing piece is the leadership instrument and the qualitative work that explains the numbers.
 

We already know we have a problem. Why measure it?
 

Because organizations are usually right that something is wrong and frequently wrong about what. The most common version I encounter is a supervision problem that is actually a workload problem, where supervisors have no time to supervise. Intervening on the wrong one costs a year.
 

What if the results reflect badly on our executive team?
 

They may. That is the risk of asking. What I can commit to is that the report is written to be actionable rather than accusatory, and that findings are presented to leadership before anyone else sees them.
 

When is this not the right engagement?
 

If you need a neutral investigator for active litigation, if you want documentation supporting a decision already made, or if you are looking for a values statement or a culture day. I will tell you on the scoping call if I think you need something else.
 

About the process

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How do we start?
 

A scoping call at no cost. What has been tried, what data exists, and whether this is the right instrument for what you are facing.
 

CONTACT
 

Who does the work?

I do. Site visits, interviews, analysis, and the findings session are all conducted by me rather than delegated. That constrains how many engagements run at once and is the main reason scheduling is discussed early.

About the practice
 

Who is Leah Schneider?

Founder of My Company Culture. Previously CEO of a residential treatment center for seven years, currently Director of Human Resources for a homeless services organization with approximately nine hundred employees across more than thirty sites. MS in Applied Psychology from USC, with thesis work on onboarding in behavioral healthcare. Adjunct faculty and advisory board member at Faces and Voices of Recovery.
 

What is the framework based on?
 

Three movements: connection, sensemaking, and climate, in that order. The theoretical grounding comes from Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, which determines the level at which intervention is aimed, Weick's work on sensemaking, which explains how organizations construct the accounts they act on, and Boje's research on organizational storytelling, which is why the fragments circulating in break rooms get treated as data.
 

Do you speak or train?

Yes. Conference sessions, executive team workshops, and board presentations on organizational climate, retention in human services, and the leadership-staff perception gap.
 

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