The inside-out perspective of the organization
Culture is the connective tissue of the organisation: it holds people together and provides the architecture for behaviour, shaping how decisions are made, relationships are built, and work gets done
Cultural assessment in Synethos operates on a fundamentally different logic from individual talent assessment. The unit of analysis is the collective: the team, the service, the department, the business line, or the entire organisation. Individual responses are the raw material, but they are never the output.
What emerges from a cultural survey is a shared picture of how things actually work, not a ranking of people, but a diagnosis of a system.
In any meaningful cultural measure, a relatively small portion of respondents sits at the average value. The average compresses the real picture — it erases the pockets of disengagement hiding in an otherwise satisfied population, the isolated teams bucking a systemic trend, or the bimodal split that signals an organisation at a crossroads.
Synethos reports on the full distribution of responses — not just the central tendency. This reveals whether a score of 3.8 out of 5 reflects broad moderate satisfaction or a sharp split between enthusiastic and deeply disengaged groups. Those two populations require entirely different interventions.
Ready-to-deploy cultural assessment instruments
Synethos comes pre-integrated with validated cultural instruments covering the most strategically important dimensions of organisational life, from employee value proposition to change adoption and systemic agility. Each can be deployed independently or combined into a tailored cultural diagnostic.
Measures the degree to which the organisation delivers on the motivational factors that make people join, stay, and engage. Based on a peer-reviewed Swiss study identifying the factors that drive employer attractiveness across generations and professional profiles. Provides a collective diagnostic of where the EVP is strong and where it is eroding — visible at team, department, or organisational level.
A validated scale developed by Xavier Bronlet measuring the collective positioning of an organisation along the spectrum from Modern (control-based, hierarchical, siloed) to Postmodern (trust-based, adaptive, purpose-driven) organisational practices. Uses polar items to capture where the real organisational experience sits, not where the official culture deck says it should. Also includes Likert-based modules for environmental turbulence (VUCAness), global performance, and organisational climate.
An integrated engagement instrument designed to measure the full spectrum of employee engagement at the collective level — going beyond satisfaction to capture the emotional, cognitive, and behavioural dimensions of how employees relate to their work, their team, and their organisation. Produces a distribution map of engagement levels across any organisational unit, identifying pockets of disengagement that aggregate measures systematically conceal.
An integrated scale combining the ADKAR change management framework (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) with McKinsey's Influence Model to measure where employees genuinely are in their adoption journey — and the degree to which managers and peers are actively enabling or impeding change. Designed to pilot transformation programmes in real time, identify adoption barriers by team, and distinguish between employees who understand a change and those who are truly committed to it.
A particularly powerful diagnostic for organisations undergoing deliberate cultural transformation. Rather than measuring abstract cultural traits in isolation, this instrument presents employees with polar pairs — a description of the old culture on one end and the new, target culture on the other — and asks them to mark where they perceive the organisation to actually sit today.
The result is a collective positioning map: not where leadership believes the organisation has arrived, but where the people doing the work experience it. Gaps between the stated transformation goal and the perceived reality become immediately visible — and comparable across teams, levels, and locations.
The Synethos questionnaire builder is open. If your organisation uses a proprietary cultural survey, a framework developed with an external consultant, or a validated instrument not listed here, it can be integrated directly — with the same anonymised distribution reporting, cross-unit comparisons, and psychometric quality checks. The platform adapts to your measurement agenda, not the other way around.
Systemic Agility Scale — inside the instrument
The Systemic Agility Scale is a validated psychometric instrument measuring the collective positioning of an organisation on the spectrum from traditional, control-based (Modern) operating logics to adaptive, trust-based (Postmodern) ones. Each of the six polar dimensions captures a distinct facet of how the organisation actually operates, not how it aspires to operate. The scale uses polar items so that responses are grounded in observable, concrete experience rather than abstract values statements.