Hundreds of conversations. One consistent pattern.
OUR STORY
Collective Culture + Communication Inc. started in 2017 with a simple belief: for companies to consistently succeed externally, they need to thrive internally.
Founder Amanda Bates has spent more than 25 years in rooms with employees and leaders at every level, across every kind of organization. Regardless of the industry, the needs of employees are universal. They spark with questions like: What do we stand for? Where are we going? How will we get there? What's my role in this? Who can I trust? What's my personal ambition?
Your organization's reputation is directly impacted and shaped by the stories told by your team members. Understanding where they have clarity, connection and collaboration is core to building a culture in which employees thrive and freely share the stories and moments that elevate your organization. The Collective Culture Compass tool was born from that work.
Every employee is carrying nine essential questions.
Regardless of industry, role, or seniority, the same questions kept coming up in our listening sessions. Questions about purpose. About direction. About whether their voice counted. About how to succeed. The questions weren't complicated. The answers were often absent.
That pattern led us to develop the Collective Trust Ladder™ — a framework that maps the nine questions every team member carries, from the foundational (who are we and why do we exist?) to the relational (who is my leader?) to the operational (how do I do my job?). At every rung, trust is either built or broken.
The Trust Ladder told us where trust breaks. But it raised a bigger question: could we diagnose how culture is actually functioning across an entire organization? Not just how people feel about it — but what conditions are producing those feelings?
That question became the Collective Culture Compass™.
Built by communicators. Grounded in practice.
Amanda Bates founded Collective Culture + Communication in 2017 after a career in communications and organizational consulting. Her work has taken her into boardrooms and break rooms, through mergers, leadership transitions, growth, and reinvention.
The Compass is the product of everything she's observed in those rooms, distilled into a tool that gives leaders the precision they need to act, not just the data they need to feel informed.
The Compass is built and delivered by the team at Collective Culture + Communication.
“Change should be designed with people, not just for them.”
Collective's approach
“Change should be designed with people, not just for them.”
Collective brings a communicator's lens to culture and change. The Compass is built on established research in organizational psychology, culture theory, and survey methodology. It was built by people who understand how language shapes experience, how messages cascade and fail to cascade, and why what leaders say and do either builds or erodes trust.
The result is a diagnostic that is plain-language, practical, and built for leaders, not for data analysts.
THE FOUR DIMENSIONS
A diagnostic tool. Not a survey.
The Compass is 50 questions designed by communication professionals and organizational culture experts. Questions are anchored to observable, behavioural conditions — not attitudes or preferences. They ask what actually happens, not how people feel about it in the abstract.
That distinction matters. Behaviour-anchored questions produce more reliable data. And because every question maps to a specific condition, every result points directly to something that can be changed.
The Compass scores conditions across four dimensions. Each produces a result, and together they give a complete picture of culture health.
Core
The foundation. Does your organization provide a psychologically safe environment where values are lived — not just stated? Core measures safety, trust, leadership integrity, and whether your people believe in the organization they're working for.
Clarity
Can people translate strategy into action? Clarity diagnoses whether your direction, priorities, decision rights, and role expectations are understood well enough to drive consistent behaviour. This is where strategy stalls most often.
Collaboration
Are the right structural and relational conditions in place for people to work well together? Collaboration surfaces silos, meeting culture, process friction, and information flow — the everyday mechanics of how work actually gets done.
Connection
Do people feel like they belong here? Connection examines whether people feel seen, valued, and aligned with your organization's purpose. It is the dimension most directly linked to retention and discretionary effort.
Data without a conversation is just a report.
We deliver more.
Every Compass question maps to a specific recommended action. Results are delivered with a prioritised action path through three lenses:
Facilitated debrief
We deliver results live with your leadership team, walk through what the scores mean, and answer the questions that come up.
90-day action plan
We provide you with an action plan so you can get started tackling what matters right away.
Re-measure
Survey your people again after a period of time to track what’s moved and improved.
Diagnose one team or the whole organization.
Whether you’re growing, restructuring, or working through change, the Compass shows you where you are and what do to next. Each option is a distinct service level with its own timeline.
Tiers
Compass™
Organizations or departments of up to 99 employees. A full diagnostic for growing organizations. Survey, report, debrief, and a 90-day action plan. Typically, 2–3 weeks from kickoff to action. For growing organizations that want a clear starting point or organizations that want to focus their understanding on a specific department.
Compass Plus™
Organizations of 100 to 499 employees. Full survey, detailed report, two facilitated workshops or listening labs, and a recommended action plan.
Optional triennial (3-year) engagement including pulse check-in surveys and annual benchmarking. This is our anchor offering for the mid-market.
Compass Enterprise™
Organizations of 500+ employees. Multi-unit deployment with sub-culture analysis, two-level debriefs, a Culture Navigation Roadmap, and multi-year Compass check-in strategy.
Includes follow up listening labs and workshops to start actioning as soon as possible.
Common questions.
How is the Compass different from an engagement survey?
1
Engagement surveys measure how people feel. The Compass diagnoses the specific conditions producing those feelings, the policies, practices, and structures that are either supporting or undermining your culture. It tells you not just that trust is low, but where exactly it is breaking down and what you can do about it.
How long does it take?
2
The Compass takes about 3 weeks from booking to debrief. The full Compass Plus engagement runs 8–10 weeks for the initial survey and report. The triennial (3-year) arc, which includes Pulse check-ins, Cornerstone workshops, listening labs and yearly re-measures, is where the most meaningful change happens.
How do you protect employee anonymity?
3
Responses are collected and stored by a third-party platform, independently of your organization. Results are anonymized at collection. Subgroup results are only shown when 5 or more people in that group respond, smaller groups are suppressed so no individual response can be traced. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
What size of organization is the Compass designed for?
4
The Compass works for organizations with 20 employees or more. Whether you are a small business, mid-market or enterprise organization, there is an option for your size and budget. We'll always recommend the right engagement model for your size and situation.
Should we still do our yearly engagement survey?
5
Engagement surveys serve a great purpose and provide a broad understanding of how your people feel. The Collective Culture Survey is a great add-on to go deeper into those findings, or we can add in key engagement questions if you'd like to combine the surveys.
What happens after we get the results?
6
Results are delivered in person with a follow up report. Every Compass engagement includes a facilitated debrief where we walk through the findings, answer your questions, and help your leadership team agree on the priority actions. We then work with you to build a 90-day action plan, and for most clients, an ongoing engagement arc that tracks progress and deepens the work over time.
Where needed, we can support your action plans or transfer the knowledge to your internal teams or existing consultants to activate the recommendations. Our goal is to help you understand and elevate how your company works in whatever way that makes sense.