A culture survey asks employees how work actually gets done in the organisation: how decisions are made, how people collaborate, what gets rewarded and what is tolerated. It measures the shared ways of working, where an engagement survey measures how people feel about working there.
What a culture survey measures
Culture is the pattern of behaviour that becomes normal in a place: whether people speak up or keep quiet, whether decisions are made by consensus or from the top, whether the focus is on people or on tasks, whether risk is welcomed or avoided. A culture survey turns those patterns into something you can compare across teams and over time. The most useful ones measure both the culture people experience now and the culture they think the organisation needs.
Culture survey or engagement survey?
They answer different questions. An engagement survey tells you how committed people feel. A culture survey tells you why: the ways of working that lift or drag that commitment. A team can score well on engagement while working in a way that will not deliver the strategy, and a team can be disengaged because of a gap between the culture it has and the one it was promised. Measuring both shows you which problem you have.
Using the results
Read the results by team, not only as a company average, because culture often varies more between teams than a company average shows. Look for gaps between current and desired culture, and between what leaders think the culture is and what employees report. Then act on one or two gaps and tell people you did, because a survey with no visible follow-through makes the next one less honest.
Where Compono Engage fits.
Compono Engage is an employee engagement platform that reads culture and climate alongside work personality, team by team.
See where your current culture and the culture your people want pull apart, across 12 validated dimensions.
Once or twice a year is typical, because culture moves slowly. Pulse surveys in between can track whether specific changes are landing.
Can you measure culture with an eNPS question?
No. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a single loyalty question. It can tell you something is wrong; it cannot tell you which ways of working are causing it.
This page is general information, not legal advice. We check figures annually and update them on a best-efforts basis, but employment rules change and we cannot promise everything here is current or complete. Before you act on it, confirm the detail with the official source for your jurisdiction or your own adviser. Last reviewed October 2026.
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