The Impact Report shows which topics from your unique Culture Profile are most likely to lead to an improvement in happiness. It is designed to help you target time, energy and budgets more effectively.

The 15 topics are presented in rank order of their potential impact. The top three topics have the greatest potential to improve happiness in your team or organization.

How do we calculate impact?

It’s not always the case that focusing on your lowest score will create greatest improvement in happiness. This is because each topic in your Culture Profile has a different potential to improve happiness depending on a combination of factors, including your unique set of scores, how easy it is to improve these scores and what effect we can expect improvements to have on overall happiness.

We calculate an Impact score for each topic in your culture profile using three variables:

1. Your score for each topic

The data for this variable comes from your organization’s culture profile. We look at the distribution of everyone’s responses for your team, organization or grouping. Friday sees how many people chose to answer a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 when asked about their experience on our 1-5 scale.

2. The scope of your opportunity to improve scores for each topic

We model the possibility that people answering 1 to 4 on the scale will give a higher score rating next time they are asked. The scope of your opportunity to improve varies from topic to topic and is contingent on how people respond on the scale – for example, it’s impossible to improve a 5, and often much easier to improve a 1. Our modelling for this variable uses data from our client dataset where we have been tracking improvements to scores for over 10,000 respondents over several years.

3. The estimated impact on happiness

We estimate the likelihood that an improvement in a particular topic score would increase your Happiness Score. These estimations are different for each topic. For example, when we look at the relationship between the topic Appreciation and happiness, we find that moving from a good score (green) to an excellent score (dark green) on Appreciation has a bigger impact on happiness than moving from a low score (red) to an okay score (orange). However, moving people from a low score (red) on the topic Learning to an okay score (orange) has more impact on happiness than moving the Learning score from good to excellent. The data to calculate this variable comes from our benchmark surveys made up of over 22,000 respondents globally, or from the subset of respondents from the country choosen for your benchmark country.

Friday then ranks the 15 topics in your Culture Profile by order of potential impact, so you can where to focus your time and energy when it comes to making improvements.

Your Impact Report can only signal potential impact because actual impact ultimately depends on the effectiveness of any action you take. See our guidance on using you Impact Report here

Why green scores are sometimes higher in the ranking

It can seem strange to see green scores at the top of the table. This happens when the most efficient route to improving overall happiness is to convert good experiences in some areas of your culture into great experiences.

It’s perfectly legitimate to ignore the ranking in favour of prioritizing lower scoring areas. All topic areas in your Culture Profile are important in their own right, independent of their relationship to happiness. So, if you and your colleagues have a clear idea of where to start to improve your culture, get going.

Looking after workplace culture can feel big and unwieldy, so sometimes it can feel like it’s not legitimate to suggest where to start improving it. The Impact Report brings confidence and focus to your efforts, suggesting action in some key areas expected to directly – and positively – influence people’s experience at work.