Culture Amp

I've taken my company's employee engagement survey twice now, and it's very easy to complete. Our HR department crafts the survey, and we receive an email invitation with a unique link to take the survey. It's very simple and easy to complete. Once everyone responds, we can see the overall feedback and company-wide scores. I think this is a great tool to collect and collate employee feedback so we can act on it. It's also nice to be able to track our progress and responses over time.

I don't have any major painpoints. I believe the survey says our responses are anonymous, but since I have a unique personal link I don't feel that my responses are completely anonymous.

I believe in Culture Amp's purpose of brining together functionality around employee engagement, goal setting, performance management and improving organizational culture into one comprehensive development zone. From a high level view, it seems to integrate the right components in a reasonably intuitive structure There is ample room for customization.

However the features themselves turn out to feel rather clunky and disjointed. Perhaps if you can dedicate a brilliant team of visionaries and administrators to fully realize Culture Amp's potential, this can be overcome in your implementation. But I find the many limitations imposed by our configuration to make the application more frustrating than propulsive.

Limitations include inscrutably opaque scheduling functions (first of all an administrator has to manage all the schedules, then the only way to look up when something should occur is to find the group of that functionality (say Performance>Self Assessments>Direct Reports Self-Assessments) then drill down into individual months (say May 2024) to see who is scheduled in that month - and only past and current months can be seen. So effectively you cannot see an annual schedule and you cannot see your own obligations in the same frame that you can see your direct reports' obligations.

When completing such functions as performance reviews and self-assessments, there is an arcane methodology for submitting documents for review and sharing them, along with deadlines set by an administrator that close documents for completion or editing, and require adminsitrator interventions to enable sharing. All of these may serve some purpose but they really serve to make it seem hard, sometimes impossible, to do what you're supposed to do. And trying to understand what is working for you or against you to complete these tasks is difiicult. I feel like the developers may have had some brilliant ideas but then let themselves get so bogged down in controlling every detail that they don't see the oppressive cloud hovering over the product.

A particular detail that I found very frustrating involved the in-app support features. There are several places you can seek explanations or instructions. Upon doing so, a little bot survey asks about your experience with the help and whether you have any feedback for Culture Amp on your issue. It then asks if Culture Amp can contact you about your feedback. On several occasions I wrote some very detailed observations and suggestions, and actually did hope that I would be able to talk to someone at the company about these. After a few times, I decided to send one of these responses in to the support team at Contact Us to see if I could get any traction. I explained that I had submitted these and similar details to the survey bot. First, the reps several times over tried to steer me into an explanation of why our site administrator, not Culture Amp staff would be the person to talk to about changing our survey questions. When I finally convinced someone familiar with the survey bot that I was not talking about any custom survey of our own, they explained that the survey bot responses are not captured with a link to any individual user who submits respoinses - they are only catured and analyzed in aggregate. I naturally suggested that in that case it might be prudent of them to remove the question about whether Culture Amp can contact us about that response, since they appear to have neither the intention nor the means. They disagreed and the issue sort of dissolved into the overall cloud of opacity under which I use, but don't reallu understand the inner workings of this application.