Most leaders can tell when a team isn’t firing. Work takes longer than it should, and good people start to drift. Working out why is much harder.
The Nimble Index is built to answer that question. Here’s how, and the research behind each step.
When a team is struggling, most explanations look in one place: the system, or the people. Each is reasonable. On its own, each one leaves something out.
People do their best work when they fit their job, their team and their organisation, and when those fit them back. Performance depends on the workplace and the person together.
Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman & Johnson (2005), Personnel Psychology
Programs aimed only at the individual, like resilience training or wellbeing apps, made no measurable difference while the workplace around them stayed the same.
Fleming (2024), Industrial Relations Journal
Look at only one side and you can spend a lot of effort fixing the wrong thing.
Three dimensions describe the workplace your team works in. The other three describe how people show up within it. Each is grounded in research.
Read together, the six dimensions show whether the work to do is in the system, with the people, or both.
Managers usually see their workplace more positively than the people who work in it. A study of 42 manufacturing companies found managers rated almost every aspect of the workplace more favourably than their staff did, and the staff view predicted productivity just as well.
A 2024 Australian survey found the same pattern with wellbeing.
Problems don’t travel upward easily. People with less say in a team are less likely to raise concerns, so a leader can be well meaning and still not hear them.
The leader and the team answer the same 76 questions. The team’s responses drive the results. The leader’s sit beside them, so you can see where the views differ and start a conversation about it.
Sources: Patterson, Warr & West (2004), Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology; Nembhard & Edmondson (2006), Journal of Organizational Behavior; Infinite Potential, State of Workplace Burnout 2024
The link between how people experience work and how the business performs shows up most clearly in teams and business units. Research across almost 8,000 business units found the differences that matter sit between units. A single score for the whole organisation blends your strongest and most stretched teams into one number, and that’s a hard number to act on.
Each team gets its own results, so you can see where to focus.
Sources: Harter, Schmidt & Hayes (2002), Journal of Applied Psychology; Schneider, Salvaggio & Subirats (2002), Journal of Applied Psychology
Many organisations already run an engagement survey, so it is important to be clear about how the two fit together.
Engagement surveys do an important job. They track how people feel about their work across the organisation, and that data relates to retention, customer outcomes and financial results. The Nimble Index works alongside them. It explains what’s behind those results in a particular team, and what to do about it.
| Engagement survey | Nimble Index | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | How do people feel? | What’s producing it, and what should we do next? |
| The level | Across the whole organisation | Team by team |
| Who answers | Employees | The team and its leader, on the same 76 questions |
| What it measures | Engagement and sentiment | Workplace conditions and people capability, across six dimensions |
| What you get | A score tracked over time | Three priorities the manager owns, with tools to act on them |
Run it alongside your survey, or bring it in when your results show something is off and you need to know why.
Start with a team where something doesn’t feel quite right, or one about to go through change. It doesn’t need to be in crisis.
When the results come back, read your team’s view first. Then look at where your answers differ from theirs. That’s often where the most useful conversation begins.
The report gives you three priorities, deliberately. Research on survey follow-up shows the value comes from what managers do next, and that’s the step most often dropped. Three is enough to make a difference and few enough to actually get done.
Then talk it through with your team. Structured debriefs lift team performance by around 20 to 25%, and facilitated debriefs are roughly three times as effective. For organisations of 20 or more, the debrief is facilitated.
A few months later, run it again and see what’s moved.
Sources: Huebner & Zacher (2021), Frontiers in Psychology; Tannenbaum & Cerasoli (2013), Human Factors