Several times per year everyone fills out a survey to collect feedback about the company. We call this our “employee engagement survey”, and it helps us together decide which aspect of our operating system we’d like to improve next and then track our progress.

This survey is transparent. Everyone in the company can see the full results. We debated this in 2025 and made that decision. This obviously requires a certain amount of bravery and honesty from everyone, and we think that’s reasonable to expect.

Mechanics of how it works:

• Google Calendar sends the email to everyone asking them to fill out the survey. It asks about 40 questions about areas such as compensation and performance management, our collaboration space, and many other areas. It’s not really meant to be about any one individual. That’s covered by other surveys to collect peer and manager feedback. Most questions are quantitative, and then there are a few places to write free-form text as needed.
• Results go from a Google Form into a Spreadsheet.
• A dashboard visualises the results to help us answer questions such as:
  • How’s NPS trending over time? (meaning promoters minus detractors scaled to -100 to +100)
  • Why might that be?
    • Which areas are scoring low?
    • Which areas are scoring high?
• We then discuss and decide what to do. In the screenshot below, for example, clearly there’s room for improvement in our compensation management system, so we might decide to set a goal form a team around that.

For example, here’s a small subset of recent questions: