Workplace Decode

Your engagement survey tells you something is wrong. It does not tell you what, or in whose words.

That is the part we do.

Talk to Apeksha
The problem

Two things go wrong with every engagement survey.

People do not answer honestly

The survey comes from HR. The results go back to HR. So people answer the version of the truth that is safe to say. The scores look fine. The problems stay.

Nobody knows what to do with it

Knowing that psychological safety scored 42 in Engineering does not tell anyone what to do on Monday morning. So the deck gets presented, and the year repeats.

The numbers most companies are not looking at.

44%

of employees are thriving, down from 66% in 2024. The lowest Mercer has ever recorded.

71%

of managers never received feedback training before stepping into the role.

100 to 213%

of annual salary is the cost of replacing one person who leaves.

Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026 · Radical Candor 2026 · Gallup and SHRM 2026

What Workplace Decode is

A quarterly conversation with your organisation, and with the people in it.

Four things, running on a rhythm: a pulse that asks better questions, workshops built from what it finds, private conversations for anyone who wants one, and a psychologist on the bench for what sits outside our scope.

We are not a coaching firm and not a counselling service. We help people think through workplace situations they are stuck on, with someone who has been on both sides of the table.

Four steps, every quarter

  1. 📝

    Everyone answers

    Around twenty questions, eight minutes, a private link per person.

  2. 🧩

    Answers become themes

    Every response feeds scores across twenty workplace themes, cut by department and level.

  3. 📊

    You get the pattern

    Department level findings, and a working session to decide what to do about them.

  4. 🛠️

    We run what it found

    Workshops built from that quarter's themes, plus private conversations for anyone who wants one.

Why the answers are different

We ask what happens. Not how satisfied you are.

A normal survey asks

"I feel comfortable speaking up at work." Strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Everybody knows the safe answer. Most people give it.

We ask

You disagree with a decision your manager made in front of the team. What actually happens next?

I say it in the room · I raise it privately after · I mention it to a peer, not them · I let it go entirely

There is no obviously correct answer. So people tell you what they actually do.

Twenty themes, four cycles

A different conversation every quarter.

Asking everything at once takes an hour and nobody finishes it. Four core questions run every cycle. Five themes rotate in behind them, and each theme keeps its questions permanently, so you are always comparing like with like.

Q1
Role clarity · Workload and capacity · Tools and friction · Meeting load · Onboarding
Q2
Trust in leadership · Psychological safety · Manager relationship · Decision making · Respect
Q3
Recognition · Career progression · Fairness · Learning and skills · Internal mobility
Q4
Change fatigue · AI and role anxiety · Belonging · Collaboration · Purpose

You see the pattern. We hold the person.

What you see
  • Department scores, by theme
  • Trend across quarters
  • Workshop attendance numbers
What stays with Humanly
  • Individual answers
  • Who booked a conversation
  • Who we identified as at risk

This is not about whether HR can be trusted. It is that HR sits inside the same organisation, and people weigh what they say to anyone who does. It is also how we keep the people you are about to lose: we know who is close to leaving, and we work with them quietly. Handing you that list would put a label on them. You get the retention. We hold the names.

Workshops

Built from what people said that quarter.

One session a quarter, grouped by level rather than by problem. Twenty sessions sit in the bank. Which ones run is decided by the pulse, not by a catalogue chosen in January.

How work works

  • Expectations and role design
  • Capacity and boundaries
  • Removing daily friction
  • Reclaiming focus time
  • Starting well

Leadership and trust

  • Rebuilding upward trust
  • Speaking up without cost
  • The manager conversation
  • New manager clinic
  • Boundaries and escalation

Growth and fairness

  • Being seen at work
  • Owning your growth path
  • How calls actually get made
  • Building what comes next
  • Moving without leaving

Change and connection

  • Navigating constant change
  • Your role in an AI workplace
  • Connection at work
  • Team repair circle
  • Why this work matters

Run for individual contributors, new people managers, experienced managers and senior leaders.

One to one conversations

Open to everyone, every month.

Anyone can book. Weekday hours, weekday evenings or Saturday mornings, all equally available and no reason required. Booking goes through us, never your calendar system.

  • A decision they cannot make. Whether to raise something. Whether to take the role. Whether to stay.
  • A relationship that has gone wrong. With a manager, a peer, a team they inherited.
  • Something they have not said out loud. To anyone at work, because there was nowhere to say it.

We will never tell you who came. If something needs your formal process, such as harassment, discrimination or a safety issue, we do not handle it quietly instead. We help that person get it into your process properly.

Who you are working with

Two people, two clear remits.

Apeksha Khetan

Founder of Humanly, your thinking partner

Thirteen years across talent acquisition, HR business partnering and organisational development. The workplace side of things: friction, decisions, managers, teams, careers.

Consulting psychologist

Mental health and psychological safety

Runs one psychological safety session each quarter, and is available for private counselling, billed directly and independently of us.

The line between us is deliberate. Where something is beyond a workplace conversation, it moves to someone qualified.

One honest thing before you decide

🧭 The first cycle is the least useful one.

People will not believe the confidentiality promise yet, so they will answer carefully. What changes their mind is not the survey. It is watching a quarter go by in which nothing they said came back to them through their manager. Cycle two is where the real answers start. We would rather you knew that now than felt it in March.

✉️ Talk to Apeksha

Tell me what is going on. The full deck, including what it costs, comes after the first conversation.