Why I Built a Climate Assessment Instead of Another Engagement Survey

Every organization I have ever worked in or with has had an employee engagement survey.

Most of them had high response rates and low utility. The data came back, leadership reviewed it in a meeting, someone made a commitment to do better on recognition or communication, and six months later the same survey produced the same results. The turnover continued. The exits continued. The gap between what leadership believed was happening and what staff were experiencing continued.

I spent years trying to understand why and I eventually landed on something simple: engagement surveys measure outcomes. They tell you how employees feel about working somewhere after the conditions that produced those feelings have been operating for months. By the time someone scores low on an engagement survey they have usually already decided to leave. You are measuring the damage.

Conditions Produce Outcomes

Engagement is not a condition. It is a result. It is what happens when the conditions in an organization, the daily climate, are supportive, safe, purposeful, and invested. When those conditions are absent, disengagement is not a problem to solve. It is a signal to read.

Climate is the condition side of that equation. Climate is what leadership behavior produces. It is whether staff feel safe raising concerns before they become crises. Whether new employees arrive into a culture or just a role. Whether supervisors are developing people or managing tasks. Whether purpose is transmitted at the team level every week or only announced at all-staff meetings twice a year.

Those conditions are measurable. They are also addressable. A leader who knows their onboarding is functional but not cultural can do something about that. A leader who knows their supervisors are operating transactionally rather than developmentally can do something about that. A leader who discovers through their data that their self-awareness score is significantly lower than their organizational scores has the most important information they can have.

What I Built

The Organizational Climate Self-Assessment measures seven dimensions of organizational climate from the perspective of the leader taking it. Not how staff feel. Not what the culture espouses. What one leader, from their specific position, with their specific span of control, perceives about the conditions their organization is operating in.

That is a different unit of analysis than any engagement survey. The survey asks staff how they feel. The climate assessment asks the leader what they see. The gap between those two perspectives, measured on the same framework, is the most important diagnostic finding available.

I built it for behavioral health and human services leaders specifically because the existing tools were not built for this population. The questions, the domain selection, the narrative language, and the theoretical grounding all reflect the specific context of leading an organization where the work is emotionally demanding, the compensation is often not competitive, and purpose is frequently the only retention advantage available.

The Self-Awareness Domain

Domain 6 is the most important domain in the instrument. It measures leader self-awareness and perceived impact, specifically whether a leader has an accurate read on how their behavior lands on the people around them.

It is also the domain most likely to produce a gap flag. When a leader's self-awareness score falls significantly below the average of their other six domain scores, the instrument surfaces a clinical finding: the conditions you just rated may be more optimistic than accurate. A leader who is not reading their own impact cannot fully trust their read of the conditions they are creating.

That flag does not appear in any other organizational assessment tool I am aware of. It is original. And in the beta testing, it is one of the features that resonates most strongly with leaders who have done the honest work of sitting with what it is telling them.

The assessment is live at mycompanyculture.com. The free version takes ten minutes and gives you a snapshot across five domains. The full assessment covers all seven with complete narrative analysis and a 30/60/90 action framework. Start with the free version. See what the data says about where you actually are.