For step-by-step instructions on choosing factors in your report settings, see Creating Filtered Reports. To keep sensitive comment content out of a report, see Sensitive Comment Management.

If you're introducing the Performance Culture Quadrant (PCQ), read this article alongside Setting Up and Using the Performance Culture Quadrant (PCQ). The PCQ plots Workplace Engagement against Performance Confidence, the two outcomes measured in the Performance Culture Diagnostic (PCD) survey, to show whether your organization has a high-performing culture. For the research behind it, see The Science Behind Culture Amp's Performance Culture Diagnostic (PCD) and Performance Culture Quadrant (PCQ).

Shared reports let you give each audience the survey results that are most relevant to them. When you create or edit a shared report, you can choose which factors it includes, so the report focuses on what matters for its audience's role. Every factor is included unless you deselect it. A shared report with one or more factors hidden is a scoped report.

Hiding factors helps you:

Hiding applies to the whole report, so everyone with access to it sees the same set of factors. It works at the level of factors rather than single questions, because taking one question out would change the score of the factor it belongs to. A question that sits in more than one factor stays in the report as long as one of those factors is still included.

The one factor you can't hide is the index. Driver analysis and focus areas are measured against it, and it's relevant to every audience, so it's included in every shared report.

A hidden factor is left out of that shared report, while your admin report always keeps every factor, question, and comment.

For the full detail of what changes in a scoped report, see Creating Filtered Reports.

Two of those changes affect what you tell recipients. Focus areas and top opportunities are worked out from the factors a report includes, so the items that rise to the top may differ from your admin report. And because the PCQ needs both Performance Confidence and Workplace Engagement to plot, hiding either one removes it from that report.

Every factor in a report carries feedback that employees gave expecting it to be seen and acted on, so leaving one out affects how people experience the survey as a whole. Three principles explain why we recommend hiding only by exception.

Employees give honest feedback expecting it to reach the people who can act on it, and their willingness to do it again depends largely on whether they believe that happened. Scoping a report to someone's role respects that exchange, while quietly reducing what people can see works against it. To the employees who answered, the difference is almost entirely in whether you told them.

People judge a process by how fair it is as well as by its outcome. In a meta-analysis of 183 studies, procedural fairness was one of the strongest predictors of organizational trust, commitment, and cooperation (Colquitt et al., 2001). When information is withheld without explanation, people can experience it as bias or manipulation, even when the intent was legitimate.

Someone who doesn't know a report has been scoped reads it as complete, and the priorities they set and the conversations they have with their team all rest on a picture they believe is whole.

We recommend hiding a factor only when it isn't relevant to a report's audience, and showing it without context would mislead them or put unfair pressure on them.

Psychosocial health factors, such as questions on bullying or harassment, are increasingly included in employee surveys, alongside safety and risk and compliance factors. Frontline and mid-level managers often can't act on these directly, and their results usually need review by a safety team, an HR business partner, or a compliance function before anything goes to managers. Hiding them from a broad manager report may be appropriate because the people responsible for taking action are a different audience, though the results still need to reach them. Hiding a factor from one report doesn't mean holding it back everywhere.

While your organization is testing the PCQ outcomes, for example in your first survey cycle with them, you might hide them from managers' shared reports. To do this, another factor, such as traditional engagement, needs to be your index. Introducing a new outcome measure and a new way of sharing results at the same time can cause confusion, and it takes time to enable managers and build the resources they'll need. A hold gives you that time to work out how to interpret the new measures and prepare managers to act on them. The same reasoning can apply to other new factors, for example while benchmarks aren't yet available.

We recommend a temporary hold only for the testing phase, with a clear plan to bring the factors back, and with recipients told the reason and the timeline. The factor is held back because your organization isn't ready to support people with it yet, not because the results are uncomfortable.

We generally don't recommend hiding a factor:

Before you hide a factor, work through these questions with anyone else involved in the decision. They're written in your team's voice so you can use them as a checklist. If you can't answer the first four clearly, we recommend keeping the factor in the report.

Hiding applies to the whole report, so to give different audiences different factors, create a separate shared report for each. Your admin report holds everything, and each shared report holds what its audience needs. Here are some examples of how that might look:

Set up the specialist team's report before or alongside the managers' report, so the hidden factors reach the people responsible for acting on them.

If you're holding back the PCQ outcomes, check which factor is your index first. Workplace Engagement is the default index in the PCD templates, and because the index can't be hidden, you can only hold back Performance Confidence and Workplace Engagement if neither of them is your index. It also helps to decide when they'll come back before you share, since that date belongs in the message that goes out with the report.

Scoped reports don't show recipients that factors have been left out, and the notification Culture Amp sends when you publish a report can't be edited. Cover the scoping in the communications you already send about results instead, such as the message telling people their report is ready, a manager briefing, or a company-wide results update. If you'd like your own message to be the one that tells people their report is available, you can publish without notifying and send it yourself. For how, see Notify and Publish Reports to Viewers and Owners.

A sentence or two is usually enough, as long as it covers:

People are more likely to trust and act on results when they understand why some are missing, whereas unexplained gaps tend to be filled with speculation that's often less charitable than the truth.

Employees know which questions they answered, so if they see no results for some of them, they may wonder whether their answers counted or whether results are being kept from them. A sentence confirming that their responses are included in the survey results, and naming who is reviewing them, helps avoid that.

Focus areas and top opportunities in a scoped report come from the factors it includes, so they may not match your full results. We recommend saying so, so that managers don't mistake the list for the whole picture.

You can change which factors a shared report hides after it's gone out. Because that changes what people can see, let them know, just as you did when you first shared it.

Adapt these to your own factors, teams, and dates.

Specialist review of psychosocial health and safety factors

"This report shows results for 6 of the 8 factors in the survey: the Psychosocial Health and Safety factors aren't included here because they're being reviewed by our Health and Safety team, who own the actions that come out of them. Your responses to those questions were included in the aggregate survey results that they're reviewing."

Specialist review of a risk and compliance factor

"This report includes every factor in the survey except Risk and Compliance, which our Risk and Compliance team reviews and takes action on. Your team's responses to those questions were included in the aggregate survey results, which that team is reviewing."

A temporary hold on the PCQ outcomes

"You'll notice this report doesn't include the two new PCQ factors (Performance Confidence and Workplace Engagement). We've held those back for this cycle while we work out how to interpret them properly, and they'll be included in the next survey report in March. Your responses to those questions were included in the aggregate survey results, which are being reviewed by the People team in the meantime."

When held factors come back

"This report now includes Performance Confidence and Workplace Engagement, the two factors we held back last cycle while we prepared to interpret them. With more factors in the report, your focus areas and top opportunities may look different from last time."

A note on focus areas

"Because this report doesn't include [factor names], the focus areas and top opportunities shown here are based on the factors you can see, and may differ from our full survey results."

When a temporary hold ends, include the factors in that cycle's reports as planned, and let recipients know they're back.

Before your next survey, look back at which factors you hid and from whom. If the same ones keep coming up, run the questions in Decide whether to hide a factor again before you set up the new reports.

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