what is this business
ACTUALLY TRYING TO CREATE HERE?
You decide how this business runs – the hours, the structure, what gets rewarded. The Compass tells you how that lands with the people doing the work, and what they’d change first.
For organisations, leaders, teams and programmes looking at how people experience work, leadership and working life.
why this matters
You know your numbers. Headcount, turnover, absence, the engagement score. None of them tell you whether the people behind them are doing well, or what they would change if asked.
That is not a soft question. It decides who stays, how hard they try, and what the place is like to be in.
what it is and what you get
The Compass asks your people how they experience working life as a human being, not as a job title. They mark two points on each of the seventeen living goals: where a good life would be, and where they are now.
The distance between them is what is shown in the canvas. A written read of where your people stand and where to begin, at group and team level, drawn from what they actually said.
It’s an online questionnaire, about ten minutes each, anonymously, over a two-week window.
Example – partly – read
Click image to enlarge
Try it on yourself first. It’s the same one your people would use.
when you’d reach for the compass
You’ve grown fast.
Forty new people in a year and the place doesn’t feel the way it used to. Find out what got lost while you can still put it back.
Good people are leaving.
Exit interviews come too late, and from people who’ve already made their minds up. This asks while they’re still deciding.
You’ve just taken over.
New role, new owner, new mandate. You’ve inherited a culture nobody can describe to you. This describes it.
You’re measuring engagement and nothing changes.
Same questions every year, same scores, and a 6.4 doesn’t tell you what to do on Monday. The Compass asks people what a good working life would look like first, then which parts of it they’re missing.
Before a big move.
A reorganisation, a new strategy, a change of direction. Find out what people want kept before you decide what to change. Reorganisations tend to throw out the good bits by accident.
Different departments feel different.
One average for the whole company tells you nothing. Read it team by team and you see who’s doing fine and who isn’t.
why this is different
It starts with the ideal, not the complaint.
Most surveys ask people to rate what they’ve got. The Compass asks what good looks like first, then where things stand today. Two marks on each of the seventeen living goals. The gap between them tells you what to defend and where to go.
It reads a life, not a job.
Work is one part of how someone’s doing. Ask only about work and work is the only problem you’ll ever find. This asks about the whole picture, so you can see whether the job is what needs fixing.
You get something written.
Not a template with your numbers dropped in. A canvas written for your business, saying where your people stand and what to look at first.
Your people get something back.
Everyone who takes the Compass gets their own results — personal, theirs to keep. A read on their own answers, written for them. That’s also why the answers come back honest: people reflect differently when the reflection is their own.
Businesses measure what they can report. People work on what they can’t.
what it costs
One number, set by one question: how big is the read?
Slide to the number of people you’d cover.
The canvas
Where your people stand.
written fresh for you
Want it read with you.
The canvas tells you where you stand. If you want to know what it means, and what to move first, we sit down together. I work through it properly beforehand, then we set a direction. Two days, €2,000 a day. Bigger organisations usually want more time and more people round the table – we’ll size that when we talk.
Read it twice.
One read tells you where your people stand and what to move first. Two reads, six or twelve months apart, tell you whether it worked. Same seventeen goals, same question, so the movement is real rather than a feeling. Booked together, the pair costs a quarter less than two separate reads.
how it works, start to finish
- You get a join code.
- You share the code with your people, through your channels.
- They each spend about ten minutes on the Compass.
- I send you the anonymous group-level results.
- If you want it read with you, we go through it together and set a direction.
Start to finish, about four weeks from the day the code goes out. Two weeks the Compass is open, and two weeks while I work through the answers.
anonymous by design
No one sees what a single person answered. Not you. Not me. Answers go straight into the totals.
Results are only shown once enough people in a group have answered, so no single person can be picked out.
Honest answers are the only ones worth paying for. This is how you get them.
after the reading
You’ll have a reading and a direction. Acting on it is a different kind of work – developing solutions, concepts, business cases, to take it to daily reality. That’s QOL creations.
I’ve been writing about this for years.
The pieces that look at a business: your business.