Glossary of CultureMonkey terms

CultureMonkey has its own vocabulary - some of it borrowed from the wider world of employee engagement, some of it specific to how the platform is built. This glossary gathers the terms you'll run into most often, each with a clear definition and, where it helps, a link to a fuller article.

Use it as a reference, not a reading list. Skim to the letter you need, or search the page for a word. If you're brand new, the best starting points are Key concepts and What is CultureMonkey? - this page fills in the details around them.

A quick word on structure before you dive in: almost everything in CultureMonkey follows one loop - Listen (build and send surveys), Analyse (read the results), and Act (turn insight into change). Many of the terms below are simply the pieces that make that loop work.

A

Action plan (Action)

A trackable task you create to respond to what a survey surfaced - for example, "Run a manager 1:1 refresh" in response to a low Manager Support driver. Each action can be tied to a driver, assigned an owner and collaborators, given a deadline, and moved through a status workflow (to-do → in progress → completed, with on-hold and cancelled options). Actions live in the Act area of the product and are how insight becomes follow-through. See Create an action.

Anonymity threshold

The minimum number of responses a group must have before CultureMonkey will show that group's results. Below the threshold, scores are suppressed so no individual's answers can be inferred - this is what makes a small team's or a narrow filter's data go blank. The default is a small number of responses and it's set at the account level. This is expected behavior, not an error. See How anonymity works and Why can't I see results yet?.

Autopilot

CultureMonkey's automation engine for surveys that run themselves. It covers two things: lifecycle surveys (triggered at employee milestones like onboarding or exit) and scheduled segment sends (surveys pushed to a defined cohort on set dates). Once configured, Autopilot fires surveys without anyone pressing "send." See What are lifecycle (autopilot) surveys?.

B

Benchmark

A reference point you compare your scores against. CultureMonkey offers two kinds. An internal benchmark compares a team, location or survey against your own organization's average or history - useful for spotting who's above or below the company norm. An industry benchmark compares your scores against external data for your sector, so you can see how you stack up beyond your own walls. See Compare against internal benchmarks and Compare against industry benchmarks.

Business group (Business unit)

A high-level organizational division - for example a region, a brand, or a line of business - used to segment employees, surveys and results. Business groups sit above teams and can carry their own logo and survey scoping, which makes them handy for large or multi-entity organizations that want cleanly separated reporting. See Add and manage business groups.

C

Channel

The route a survey or reminder travels to reach a participant: email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. You can mix channels within a single send - reaching desk workers by email and frontline staff by SMS, say - and reminders can go out on their own channels too. See Distribution channels overview.

Comment Analytics

The part of CultureMonkey where all the open-text responses come together for analysis - survey comments, pulse feedback and proactive feedback in one place. It layers sentiment, driver tagging and keyword extraction on top of raw comments, and it's the home of tools like Topic Explorer and the word cloud. Reached from the sidebar under Comment Analytics. See Browse all feedback.

Conversation

A private, anonymity-preserving reply thread you can open from a piece of feedback to ask a clarifying question or acknowledge a comment - without ever learning who wrote it. It lets you close the loop on individual feedback while keeping the respondent anonymous. See Start a conversation from feedback.

Custom attribute

An employee data field you define yourself, beyond the built-in ones like team, location and manager - for example "Shift," "Cost Center" or "Hire Cohort." Custom attributes become filters and breakdown dimensions in reports, and can be hidden from certain roles. They're what let you slice results by dimensions that matter uniquely to your organization. See Add custom employee attributes.

D

Demographic

Any dimension you can group or filter results by - team, location, manager, tenure, gender, employee type, region, or any custom attribute. "Demographic" and "segment" are used more or less interchangeably in the product. Slicing results by demographic is how you move past a company-wide average to find where a story really lives.

Detractor

In eNPS, an employee who answered the recommendation question with a 0-6. Detractors are unhappy or disengaged and are more likely to leave or speak critically about the workplace. Their percentage is subtracted from promoters to produce the eNPS score. See What is eNPS?.

Driver

An engagement dimension that CultureMonkey measures - for example Leadership, Recognition, Growth, or Wellbeing. Each driver is made up of one or more questions, and the average of those question scores becomes the driver's score. Drivers are the backbone of analysis: they tell you which area is strong or weak, so your action plans have a target. See Understand drivers and factors.

E

Employee experience

The whole of how it feels to work at your organization, across the entire employee journey from candidate to alumnus. In CultureMonkey this isn't a single number but the combined picture your engagement score, eNPS, sentiment and lifecycle data paint together. It's the "why we measure" behind everything else.

Engagement score (Overall score)

A composite index of how engaged your people are, aggregated from the rating questions across your engagement drivers. Where eNPS answers one narrow question (would you recommend us?), the engagement score is the broader, diagnostic read. It's shown prominently on the Dashboard and trended over time. See Understand the overall engagement score.

eNPS

Employee Net Promoter Score - a single number, between −100 and +100, that captures whether your people are, on balance, advocates for your workplace. It's calculated as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, from a 0-10 recommendation question. See What is eNPS and how is it calculated?.

F

Factor

A finer-grained theme within a driver. Where a driver like "Growth" is the headline dimension, factors are the sub-aspects that make it up (for instance, learning opportunities versus career pathing). Thinking in drivers-and-factors helps you diagnose which part of a broad area needs attention. See Understand drivers and factors.

Feedback

The open-text side of your data - every comment, verbatim and free-text answer employees leave, whether inside a survey, a pulse, or as proactive feedback. Feedback is where the why behind your scores lives, which is why it flows into Comment Analytics for sentiment and theme analysis. See Browse all feedback.

H

Heatmap

A color-coded grid that lays driver or eNPS scores across demographic dimensions - teams down one axis, drivers across the other, say - so patterns jump out at a glance. Green cells are strong, red cells need attention. It's one of the fastest ways to spot which team is struggling with which driver. See Read a heatmap of driver scores.

L

Lifecycle survey

A survey automatically triggered by a moment in the employee journey - onboarding, a work anniversary, a role change, or exit - rather than launched manually. Lifecycle surveys are configured once inside Autopilot and then fire on their own as employees hit those milestones, so you're always listening at the moments that matter. See What are lifecycle (autopilot) surveys?.

M

Manager mapping

The behind-the-scenes link between a manager (or sub-admin) and the employees whose results they're allowed to see. Manager mapping is what enforces scope - it ensures a manager sees their own team's data and nothing beyond it. Get it right and everyone sees exactly what they should. See Set up manager-employee relationships.

O

Org hierarchy

The reporting structure that maps managers to their direct and indirect reports across multiple levels. When enabled, it powers roll-up reporting - a senior leader can see their whole sub-tree, drilling from division down to team. It underpins manager mapping and team-level views. See Enable and configure your org hierarchy.

P

Participation rate

The share of invited employees who submitted a response, expressed as a percentage - submissions divided by invitees. It's the headline health check on any survey: a great score from a tiny fraction of people is a weaker signal than a good score from most of them. See Track participation rate.

Passive

In eNPS, an employee who answered the recommendation question with a 7 or 8. Passives are satisfied but not enthusiastic - content for now, but easily tempted away. They don't count directly toward the eNPS score, which makes lifting them into promoters one of the surest ways to raise it. See What is eNPS?.

Proactive feedback

Feedback an employee shares spontaneously, outside any survey window - not tied to a survey, pulse or submission. It gives your people an always-open channel to raise something the moment it's on their mind, and it lands in Comment Analytics alongside survey comments. See Share proactive feedback anytime.

Promoter

In eNPS, an employee who answered the recommendation question with a 9 or 10 - a genuine advocate who's likely to stay, refer others and speak well of the workplace. Promoters, minus detractors, define your eNPS. See What is eNPS?.

Pulse survey

A short, recurring survey that runs on a fixed cadence - often weekly - to take a lightweight, ongoing read of sentiment between larger engagement surveys. Pulses trade depth for frequency: fewer questions, but a continuous heartbeat you can trend. See What is a pulse survey?.

R

Report Builder

The tool for composing custom reports from a menu of report types and export formats (PDF, PowerPoint, Excel), with control over anonymity and demographic breakdowns. It's how you produce a tailored, presentation-ready deck rather than a one-size-fits-all export. See Build custom reports with the Report Builder.

Reports Panel

A streamlined, manager-facing area for pulling pre-configured survey reports - anonymous and confidential - with one-click download or delivery by email. Where Report Builder is about composing something bespoke, the Reports Panel is about grabbing a standard report fast. See Bulk-generate reports in the Reports Panel.

Response threshold

The minimum number of responses a survey needs before it will produce results at all. It's related to but distinct from the anonymity threshold: the response threshold governs whether a survey shows results; the anonymity threshold governs whether a group within those results is large enough to reveal. Anonymous surveys carry a small built-in minimum. See Set the response threshold.

S

Segment

A slice of your workforce defined by one or more demographic dimensions - "Sales in the UK," "Managers hired this year," and so on. Segmenting is how you find where a company-wide average hides a very different local reality. In practice, "segment" and "demographic" are used interchangeably. See Filter reports by demographic & attributes.

Sentiment

An AI-generated read on the emotional tone of a piece of open-text feedback - positive, neutral, or negative (with more critical comments flagged more strongly). Sentiment lets you scan hundreds of comments at a glance and jump straight to what's glowing or what's on fire. You can override the AI's call where needed. See Understand sentiment scores.

Speak Up

CultureMonkey's confidential concern-reporting and whistleblower module. Employees raise a case - anonymously or identified, their choice - through a portal, and designated admins manage it through a case workflow (new → triage → investigation → closed) with notes, messages and attachments, all while protecting the reporter's identity. See What is Speak Up?.

Sub-admin

An administrator with scoped access - able to manage and view results only for the teams, locations, business units or attributes assigned to them, rather than the whole account. Sub-admins let you delegate survey and reporting duties (say, to an HR business partner for one division) without handing over the keys to everything. Contrast with a super admin, who has full account access. See Understanding roles.

Super admin

The top-level administrator role, with full access to every setting, survey and report in the account. Super admins configure the account, invite other admins and managers, and can use view-as to see the product through a manager's eyes. See Understanding roles.

Survey template

A reusable blueprint - predefined sections, questions and question sets - that you start a new survey from instead of building from a blank page. CultureMonkey ships a library of research-backed templates, and you can save your own designs as custom templates to reuse and standardize. See Browse and use survey templates.

T

Topic Explorer

An NLP-powered view inside Comment Analytics that automatically clusters your open-text feedback into emerging themes, so you don't have to read every comment to find the patterns. Pick a theme and drill straight into every comment behind it. It's how hundreds of verbatims become a handful of clear stories. See Drill into a theme with Topic Explorer.

V

View-as

A feature that lets a super admin temporarily see the product exactly as a specific manager (or sub-admin) sees it - same dashboards, same scoped data - then switch back. It's invaluable for support and for verifying that people see the right results and nothing more. See See reports as a specific manager.

W

Word cloud

A visual summary of the most frequent words across a set of open-text responses, sized by how often they appear. It's a quick, at-a-glance sense of what people are talking about - a starting point for deeper reading in Comment Analytics, not a substitute for it. See View a word cloud of responses.

How these terms fit together

It's easier to remember the vocabulary when you see how the pieces connect rather than as a flat list:

Two ideas quietly hold the whole thing together. First, anonymity - the anonymity threshold and response threshold exist so employees can be honest, which is the entire point of listening. Second, structure - your org hierarchy, manager mapping, segments and custom attributes determine who sees what and how finely you can slice it. Get those foundations right and every metric above becomes more trustworthy and more useful.

Frequently asked questions

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

They protect different things. The response threshold decides whether a survey has enough responses to show results at all. The anonymity threshold decides whether a particular group within those results - a small team, a narrow filter - is large enough to reveal without exposing individuals. A survey can be past its response threshold while specific segments inside it stay hidden by the anonymity threshold.

Is a "segment" the same as a "demographic"?

In everyday use, yes. Both refer to a way of grouping employees - by team, location, manager, tenure, a custom attribute, and so on. "Demographic" tends to describe the dimension (e.g. Location), while "segment" tends to describe a specific slice (e.g. Location = London), but the platform uses them interchangeably.

What's the difference between Report Builder and the Reports Panel?

Report Builder is for composing a custom report - you pick report types, formats and breakdowns to build something tailored. The Reports Panel is for quickly pulling pre-configured, standard reports (anonymous or confidential) with a single click. Reach for Report Builder when you need something specific; reach for the Reports Panel when you need something standard, fast.

How do drivers, factors and questions relate?

Questions are the smallest unit - the actual items employees answer. A group of related questions rolls up into a factor, a fine-grained theme. Factors roll up into a driver, the broad engagement dimension. So a low driver score is a signal to look at its factors and questions to find the specific cause.

Why do some terms have two names (e.g. business group / business unit)?

Organizations describe their structure differently, so a few concepts carry more than one common label. Where that happens, this glossary lists the alternate name in parentheses. The underlying feature is the same regardless of what your account calls it.

Where to go next

• Learn the core vocabulary in depth: Key concepts
• Understand the headline metric: What is eNPS?
• Get the big picture: What is CultureMonkey?