Your staff survey says morale is fine. Your best people are quietly leaving. What if the survey is asking the wrong questions?

Adult
School
Experience
Survey

THRIVE goes beyond morale and satisfaction to diagnose the conditions that determine whether adults can do their best work — and whether they will stay to do it.

Join the Founding Cohort See the Framework

The Gap

What conventional school surveys don't tell you

Staff burn out even when morale looks fine

Satisfaction surveys miss emotional labor — the hidden cost of performing wellness day after day when the conditions don't actually support it.
Non-instructional staff are invisible

Operations, aides, counselors, and facilities staff inhabit the same building but experience a fundamentally different school. Most surveys never ask.
Trust fractures between staff groups go undetected

A school can score well on aggregate belonging while concealing significant fault lines between faculty and support staff, or veteran and newer employees.
The values-practice gap erodes trust silently

When what a school says it values diverges from daily practice, the most fundamental form of institutional trust breaks — and no satisfaction scale captures it.
Being heard isn't the same as having influence

Leaders ask for input. Staff provide it. Nothing changes. The gap between participatory listening and genuine influence is one of the most corrosive dynamics in schools.

A diverse group of school staff seated around a table in conversation, reflecting the kind of honest dialogue THRIVE is designed to enable

Photo: Twinkl / Unsplash

What THRIVE Reveals

Six things other surveys miss entirely

Emotional Labor Burden

Whether staff are performing wellness while depleting beneath the surface — the gap between felt emotion and required performance that predicts burnout before it's visible.
Mission Integrity

Whether daily decisions, resource allocation, and leadership behavior actually reflect the school's stated values — or whether the gap between espoused and enacted values is eroding trust.
Inter-Group Relational Trust

The hidden fault lines between faculty and support staff, veteran and newer employees, different divisions — the fractures that aggregate belonging scores routinely conceal.
Mattering vs. Belonging

Belonging is about acceptance. Mattering is about significance — whether your presence is noticed, your contributions are meaningful, and you are needed here. Both matter. Neither substitutes for the other.
Systems Friction

Where the organization makes work harder than it needs to be — a distinct construct from workload, and one of the most actionable coaching entry points in the instrument.
Voice vs. Influence

The gap between being asked for input and having your input change outcomes. Leadership that listens well but rarely acts is among the most corrosive dynamics in the dataset.

The Framework

Six dimensions of adult flourishing

Each dimension measures a distinct and essential condition. Together they spell THRIVE — and together they describe what it takes for adults to do meaningful work in a school.

Trust & Psychological Safety

The degree to which adults feel safe to speak honestly, raise concerns, take risks, and be vulnerable — extended to include Mission Integrity: when stated values diverge from daily practice, the most fundamental form of institutional trust breaks.
Core + Mission Integrity subscale
Humanity & Emotional Wellbeing

How adults experience the emotional dimensions of their work: daily affect, emotional labor burden, psychological sustainability, and whether the school treats people as whole human beings beyond their professional function.
Emotional labor · Sustainability · Authenticity
Recognition & Mattering

Whether adults feel existentially significant — not just acknowledged, but genuinely noticed, needed, and meaningful to this community as people, not only as role-holders.
Mattering · Recognition · Fulfillment
Inclusion, Equity & Belonging

Whether all adults — across role, identity, background, and experience — experience genuine belonging and equitable treatment. Extended to include a dedicated inter-group relational trust subscale that surfaces hidden staff community fault lines.
Belonging · Equity · Inter-group trust
Voice & Influence

Whether adults believe their perspectives actually shape decisions — distinguishing between performative listening and genuine influence. Explicitly attends to non-instructional staff voice, which is most frequently absent.
Influence · Autonomy · Follow-through
Enabling Conditions & Growth

The structural and relational conditions that enable or constrain effective work — extended to include Systems Coherence (where the organization creates unnecessary friction) and Collaboration & Adult Learning Culture.
Resources · Coherence · Collaboration

Six Questions Conventional Surveys Never Ask

What THRIVE actually asks

One item from each dimension. Read them and ask yourself: does your current survey ask anything like this?

T — Trust & Psychological Safety

"People in this school are careful about what they say — there are topics that feel unsafe to raise openly."