Control what managers can see

Managers are often the people closest to a team's day-to-day experience, so giving them their own view of engagement results is one of the most powerful things you can do with CultureMonkey. It's also one of the most sensitive. A manager sees results for their own reportees, which means the anonymity math is tighter and the risk of a comment being traced back to one person is higher than it is on the org-wide admin view.

This guide walks through the account settings an Account Admin uses to control exactly what managers can and cannot see: hiding free-text responses and comments, gating the internal benchmark, controlling report downloads, hiding action and conversation buttons on feedback, and raising the anonymity threshold that protects small teams on the manager dashboard.

Who "manager" means here

In CultureMonkey a manager is a logged-in user whose access is scoped to the people who report to them. That scope is what makes these settings matter: unlike an Account Admin, who sees the whole organization, a manager only ever sees results rolled up from their own reportees. On smaller teams that rollup can involve very few people, which is precisely why the visibility controls below exist.

The settings in this article are distinct from role assignment (who becomes a manager in the first place) and from view-as-manager (an admin previewing what a manager sees). Here we're only concerned with the account-wide rules that shape a manager's own experience once they log in. For the full picture of which roles see what, read Who can see survey responses?.

Where these settings live

All of the controls in this guide are account settings, managed centrally rather than survey by survey. In the settings area they're grouped so the manager-facing ones sit together under a Manager Access panel, alongside the parallel controls for sub-admins.

Because a few of these flags are still configured with help from your CultureMonkey contact, the safest approach is to decide the policy you want first, then confirm which toggles you can flip yourself and which need a quick request. The behavior each one produces, described below, is the same either way.

Hide free-text responses and comments

The single most impactful control is whether managers can read open-ended answers. Scores are aggregated numbers, but a comment is written in a person's own words, so it carries more risk of identifying the author, especially on a small team.

Turning on Hide free-text responses from managers hides free-text responses and comments from managers everywhere they'd normally appear: the feedback view and the text-response sections of reports. Scores, trends, and quantitative breakdowns stay visible; only the words disappear.

Reach for this when your management layer is new to acting on feedback, when teams are small enough that verbatim comments could out an individual, or when your privacy policy commits to keeping open text at the admin level. Many organizations leave comments visible to managers but pair that with a higher anonymity threshold (covered below) so that comments only surface once enough people have responded.

Hide the heatmap and the strengths and weaknesses view

Two more flags let you trim what a manager sees inside reports:

• Hide heatmap from managers hides the heatmap on the reports page for managers. The heatmap slices scores across demographics at a glance, which is useful but can feel exposing on small teams where a single cell represents very few people.
• Hide Strength and Weakness from managers hides the Strength and Weakness section for managers. This is the block that automatically calls out a team's highest and lowest scoring drivers. Some organizations prefer managers to discuss these framings in a coaching conversation rather than read them as a verdict on the screen.

Both are off by default, meaning managers do see the heatmap and the strengths and weaknesses section. Turn them on only if you have a specific reason to narrow the manager view; for most accounts, leaving managers with the full analytical picture is what makes the dashboard valuable in the first place.

Control feedback actions and conversations

Beyond reading feedback, managers can normally act on it directly from a feedback card. Two settings govern those buttons:

• Hide Create Action for managers hides the Create Action button on the feedback card for managers, so they can read a piece of feedback but not spin up an action plan straight from it.
• Hide Initiate conversation for managers hides the Initiate conversation link on the feedback card for managers, removing the ability to open an anonymous back-and-forth with the respondent.

These are worth thinking about carefully. Initiating a conversation is one of the most powerful ways to close the loop with an employee, but it's also a direct channel to an anonymous respondent, so some organizations prefer to route it through admins or trained facilitators. If you hide the conversation link, make sure managers know who does own follow-up so feedback doesn't fall into a gap.

Gate the internal benchmark

The internal benchmark lets a manager compare their team's driver scores against the wider organization: their score, the org average, and the org's highest score for each driver. It's genuinely motivating for managers who want to know where they stand, but it also surfaces org-level numbers, so you may want to control the export of it.

Allow managers to export the internal benchmark lets managers export their internal benchmark from the dashboard. With it off, managers can still see the benchmark on screen but can't download it to a file. A related setting, Show Org Score in manager benchmark reports, adds the Org Score column to the benchmark reports page for managers, letting you decide whether the organization-wide comparison appears at all.

Whatever you choose, the internal benchmark obeys the same anonymity gate as the rest of the manager dashboard: if the manager's team doesn't clear the threshold, the benchmark simply doesn't compute. That guard is described in the next two sections.

Control report downloads

Anything a manager can download leaves the safety of the in-app anonymity checks and becomes a file on someone's laptop, so download permissions deserve their own attention. Two account settings turn the export options on the report page on or off:

Both are restricted to ended surveys, so no one can export mid-collection. If you've hidden free-text from managers, you'll almost certainly want these download options off too, otherwise you'd be blocking comments on screen while allowing them to be exported.

For the exports that are enabled, CultureMonkey can still apply combinational-anonymity rules to the columns included in the file, so that combinations of demographics can't be used to re-identify a respondent. That's a deeper topic covered in the anonymity guides; the key point here is that the two flags above decide whether the download button appears for managers at all.

The anonymity threshold on the manager dashboard

This is the most important privacy control in the whole guide, because it protects every card on the manager dashboard at once.

By default, results appear once a group clears the standard response threshold (a minimum of 3 respondents). The manager dashboard can enforce a higher floor. Turning on the manager dashboard anonymity check tells CultureMonkey to count the unique respondents behind a manager's dashboard and only render the cards, the overall metrics, scores over time, strengths and weaknesses, the feedback distribution, and the internal benchmark, if that count is at or above your configured threshold.

That threshold is the dashboard anonymity threshold value. It must be 3 or higher, and when you haven't set it, CultureMonkey falls back to a default of 5. In other words, out of the box the manager dashboard applies a slightly more protective floor than an individual survey does.

Here's how the two settings work together:

1. 1Decide your floor - pick a minimum team size at which you're comfortable showing a manager any results. Five is a common, conservative starting point.
2. 2Enter it as the threshold - set the dashboard anonymity threshold to that number (it must be at least 3).
3. 3Turn the guard on - enable the manager dashboard anonymity check so the dashboard actually enforces the count. Without it, the threshold value isn't applied to the manager dashboard's cards.
4. 4Confirm the behavior - a manager whose team is below the floor will see the dashboard cards stay empty rather than reveal thin, potentially identifying data.

Putting a policy together

These settings are most effective as a deliberate policy rather than a scatter of individual toggles. A sensible, privacy-forward baseline for many organizations looks like this:

A more open, coaching-led culture might leave comments and the benchmark fully visible and lean entirely on the anonymity threshold to do the protecting. Both are valid; what matters is that the policy is intentional and communicated to your managers so they understand why they see what they see.

Frequently asked questions

Do these settings apply to one manager or all of them?

All of them. Every flag here is an account-level setting that applies to every manager at once. There's no per-manager or per-team switch, so treat each one as a company-wide policy decision.

If I hide free-text from managers, do admins lose it too?

No. Hiding free-text responses from managers targets the manager role specifically. Account Admins keep full access to comments, and a parallel setting covers sub-admins separately.

What's the difference between the survey response threshold and the dashboard anonymity threshold?

The survey response threshold (minimum 3) gates whether a group's results show anywhere. The dashboard anonymity threshold (minimum 3, default 5) is an additional, usually higher floor applied specifically to the manager dashboard when the manager dashboard anonymity check is on. The manager floor is meant to be stricter because a manager's view is the narrowest.

Can a manager still export comments if I've hidden them on screen?

Not if you've configured it consistently. Hiding free-text on screen and leaving the comment or free-text download enabled would be contradictory, so when you hide free-text responses from managers, also confirm the comment export and free-text export options are off.

Will these settings hide results retroactively?

Visibility rules are applied when a manager loads a report or dashboard, so turning a flag on takes effect immediately for what managers see going forward, including past surveys. Files already downloaded before you changed a setting are, of course, out of the app's control.

Where to go next

• See the whole role-by-role picture: Who can see survey responses?
• Understand what managers see by default: A tour of the manager dashboard
• Learn the anonymity foundations these settings build on: How anonymity keeps your feedback safe