Introduction
The Cultural Assessment is our principle survey at The Happiness Index. It’s the survey which we recommend all of our customers run on a regular basis to measure employee happiness and engagement over time. Traditionally, employee engagement models have overlooked employee happiness and in the process, failed to reflect how employees feel about their work.
By using our Cultural Assessment you'll be able to measure and understand the key engagement and happiness drivers which are impacting your organisation’s cultural health.
We sometimes receive requests from customers wanting to make changes to the survey. We recommend against making changes to the Cultural Assessment because it has been built by our expert team and mapped to neuroscience themes. By making changes to the survey it will impact your ability to effectively analyse your results - particularly your ability to benchmark your results against our global Cultural Assessment benchmark.
We’ve collated some of the frequent requests we receive below and outlined the potential impact of making these changes. Once you’ve understood the impact of any change you want to make, you can make an informed decision on whether these changes will be best for your organisation.
I want to add a few additional questions
At The Happiness Index, we received multiple requests to allow customers the ability to add their own questions to the Cultural Assessment. Often these are questions an organisation has been asking for a long time and they wish to continue asking them. Whilst we do not advise on customising the Cultural Assessment we do value and listen to customer feedback. As of the summer of 2023, we launched the ability for customers to add up to 5 questions to the Cultural Assessment (or any other Pre-built Survey). This enables customers to deliver a standard, and fully benchmarkable Cultural Assessment with the benefit of gathering additional insights into their custom questions.
Please note: Any additional questions added will only appear within the Cultural Assessment Organisational, Filter or Individual Reports if they have been tagged as ‘custom’. They will not be mapped to any neuroscience themes. They will not be included in any benchmarking.
I want to tweak the wording of a question
The questions in the Cultural Assessment are designed by experts to ensure they are easily understood, will get to the root of what the question is trying to ask and, most importantly, do not lead to any bias. We advise against making any changes to wording.
Please note: If you want to change the wording of a question or questions within the Cultural Assessment a personalised survey will need to be created and therefore it will be treated as a personalised survey and not a Cultural Assessment. Therefore you will not benefit from benchmarking, neuroscience themed analysis or have access to our Cultural Assessment Organisational, Filter or Individual Reports.
I want to remove the comment boxes at the end of each section and replace them within a catch-all comment box at the end of the survey
The Cultural Assessment looks at multiple areas of happiness and engagement at work. By only having one comment box at the end of the survey, it would make it very difficult and time consuming to analyse all the comments and identify what they’re in relation to. By having a comment box per section, it means the comments are easily identifiable in relation to the score for that section. Quantifiably, you can see which areas have scored lowest, then qualitatively, you can see the comments employees make in relation to that section to provide context.
Please note: If you want to remove the comment box at the end of each section and have a catch-all comment box at the end of the survey you will need to create a personalised survey and it will be treated as a personalised survey and not a Cultural Assessment. Therefore you will not benefit from benchmarking, neuroscience themed analysis or have access to our Cultural Assessment Organisational, Filter or Individual Reports.
I want to swap the comment boxes to be one per question rather than one per section
We advise against adding a comment box to every question because this would make the survey much longer and could lead to survey fatigue. Having a comment box per section enables employees to add context to their scores without time consumingly needing to comment on every score they input.
Please note: If you want to remove the comment box at the end of each section and have a comment box for each question the survey you will need to create a personalised survey and it will be treated as a personalised survey and not a Cultural Assessment. Therefore you will not benefit from benchmarking, neuroscience themed analysis or have access to our Cultural Assessment Organisational, Filter or Individual Reports.
I want to swap out a couple of questions for ones more appropriate to my organisation
The questions within the Cultural Assessment are designed as a set of questions. Behind the scenes, they are grouped into neuroscience themes and mapped against key drivers in Happiness & Engagement. By removing one or more questions, you would impact the accuracy of your post-survey analysis. Instead of swapping questions, we’d recommend leaving the existing question set as it is and if necessary, adding your additional questions via our survey builder.
Please note: If you want to swap questions for ones you feel are more appropriate to your organisation you will need to create a personalised survey and it will be treated as a personalised survey and not a Cultural Assessment. Therefore you will not benefit from benchmarking, neuroscience themed analysis or have access to our Cultural Assessment Organisational, Filter or Individual Reports.
I want to change the rating scale for answers from a 1-10 scale to a 1-5 scale
Our Cultural Assessment, the online insights and available reports have been designed to work with a 1-10 scale. We do not recommend changing the scale.
Please note: If you want to change the scale from a 1-10 scale to say a 1-5 scale you will need to create a personalised survey and it will be treated as a personalised survey and not a Cultural Assessment. Therefore you will not benefit from benchmarking, neuroscience themed analysis or have access to our Cultural Assessment Organisational, Filter or Individual Reports.