Glossary of terms
Definitions for all commonly used terms across the Culture Amp platform
Account
Customer instance of Culture Amp, each customer usually has one account.
Account status
Within Culture Amp, is a way of preventing access for churned customers, or accounts that have been paused due to non-payment of subscription.
Actions
Activities that are committed to by managers and employees as a result of viewing survey results. Generated from reading inspirations or can be created from scratch.
Action Framework
A set of tools within the Culture Amp platform that helps managers act on employee feedback. This includes:
- Report sharing with managers
- The Focus Agent which suggests questions or demographics to focus on based on IO Psychology.
- The inspiration engine
- Action feedback to measure the effectiveness of their chosen action
All others
A group of survey responses that fall below the minimum reporting group threshold, so demographic names cannot be shown for confidentiality reasons.
Attributed
Culture Amp-specific term for a setting of a survey that controls whether the survey responses can be tied back (or attributed) to an employee record. Opposite of unattributed.
Camper
What employees of Culture Amp call themselves.
Change confidence
A belief or feeling of trust that a company's change effort - for example, a reorganization, merger or acquisition - will have a positive impact.
Collective Intelligence
The shared intelligence of our customer and People Geek community.
Company confidence
The confidence that an employee has in the company.
Culture First conference
Our global conference designed to get people the skills they need to build a better workplace. We provide inspiration from expert speakers, specific content in break-out sessions, and a space to create lasting connections with peers.
Culture First Forum
New in 2019. The Culture First Forum is a curated community for senior HR leaders and executives. People join to build a connection with peers, share challenges and successes, and collaborate on solutions. They leave with a support group to continue creating positive change at their organization.
Dashboard
Product-specific term for the home page in the platform, displays survey results, active surveys and insights.
Demographics
Classification of traits of a person used for analysis purposes, such as gender or business unit. Within the product, used for employee data and as a filter in the reports. Different from personal details in the product.
Direct reports
People who report to a supervisor, manager or leader.
Driver
Industry term for the item or question that is highly correlated to a surveys’ outcome (usually Engagement). Is the result of Driver Analysis, known as Impact in the product.
Engagement
Industry term. A measure of how proud, committed and motivated employees feel about their organization.
Product term. A module name representing survey templates that measure engagement. Also referred to as Employee Engagement module.
Enterprise
A tier of Culture Amp customers with over 2000 employees.
Effectiveness
Product term currently being phased out. A module name representing survey templates that measure development status (strengths and opportunities) of individuals, managers, teams and leadership. Also referred to as Employee Effectiveness module.
Factor
A dimension or theme in survey reports that is made up of a group of questions that are measuring a similar topic.
Feedback
Information given to an employee about their performance or behaviour, used as a basis for improvement.
Filter
Usually a demographic used to analyze the results in a report. Some reports can also be filtered by dates, employee names or status.
Focus
A survey question that has been selected from the survey results as an item to focus on, in order to improve future scores.
Focus Agent
Product-specific term. Culture Amp’s algorithm for suggesting questions as potential focus areas.
Hierarchy
A cascading data structure where each item belongs to a group, and groups belong to other larger groups. Referred to as reporting lines, but can be applied to employees, or locations or departments.
HRIS
Human Resources Information System. A system or database used to store a customer’s employee data, often used as a source of data imported into Culture Amp. Examples are Workday, Peoplesoft, SAP SuccessFactors, Ultipro, BambooHR, etc. Also referred to as a HCM (Human Capital Management) system.
Impact
Product-specific term for displaying results of driver analysis calculation in platform reports.
Also referred to as Driver Analysis when referring to the statistical technique used, or the industry term.
Integrations
General term for joining two systems together.
Product-specific term referring to HRIS connections we support in the product. Different from our Slack integration referred to as ‘Notifications’.
Intersectional/intersectionality/intersectional identities
A theory or school of thought for understanding how aspects of one's social and political identities might combine to create unique experiences and/or discrimination.
Inspirations
Suggestions and ideas on how to improve scores for survey questions that are part of Culture Amp’s templates. Inspirations are converted into ‘Actions’ in the product.
Inspiration Engine
Collective intelligence powers the Inspiration Engine by providing “Inspirations” real-world examples of how companies have taken action on different survey questions and factors. Inspirations also include contributed content from our partners like Life Labs and Vega Factor.
Lifecycle
A collective term for onboarding and exit surveys.
Masterclass
In-person or virtual interactive workshop on a topic offered to customers only. Also referred to a ‘class’.
Module
A part of the Culture Amp platform that a customer can purchase, covering a group of templates and reports.
Notifications
Product-specific term to mean Slack notifications from the platform.
Not Specified
The demographic value for a person was never imported, or is not known. In the reports they are categorized as ‘Not Specified’ which means ‘Unknown’.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
A tool used to measure and gauge the loyalty and satisfaction of customers.
Observer
A person who is excluded from participating in any surveys.
Onboarding
The process of integrating a new employee into an organization.
Out of draft
Once a survey, that was previously in a draft state, has been sent it’s now “out of draft”
Participant
A person invited to take a survey.
Personal details
Core employee information such as name, email, date of birth, etc. Different from demographics in the product.
People Geek
Someone who is dedicated to enabling people and is passionate about the power of employee feedback.
People Geeks can work in people ops, recruitment, HR, or as CEOs at fast-growing companies. It’s not about the title, it’s about the spirit.
People Geekup
An event focused on bringing People Geeks together to share, learn, and grow. Often, our People Geekups are produced in partnership with another company, author, or notable person.
Platform
The SaaS product customers subscribe to. Also referred to as ‘Culture Amp’ as a noun.
Plan
The subscription level a customer has paid for to use the platform. Also referred to as a ‘package’, ‘contract’ or ‘subscription’ externally. Referred to as a ‘Tier’ internally only based on Zendesk and Salesforce field names.
Process
Product-specific term. A workflow within a survey for an individual, such as an Onboard Survey sent to a new employee or several survey responses sent to reviewers of a 360 to give feedback to a person. Multiple processes exist within some surveys like Onboard/Exit and 360s.
Reports
An individual’s access to survey results in the platform.
Report View
Part of the setup of a person’s report which controls whether they have the participation view, standard view or advanced view of the results.
Response
An employee’s answers to the survey.
Trainings
Virtual group sessions offered to customers on how to use the platform.
Unattributed
Product-specific term for a setting of a survey that controls whether the survey responses can be tied back (or attributed) to an employee record. An unattributed survey has no tie back to the person who submitted the survey, it is an anonymous survey. Opposite of attributed.
User
Product-specific term. A person who can be a participant in attributed surveys from the platform, or can sign in to view reports. Usually an employee.
Webinar
Virtual session for non-customers and customers on a people science topic.
Workshop
See masterclass.