The diagnostic instrument at the center of every Helix Group engagement. Eighty-six items across six cultural domains — administered, scored, and debriefed by The Helix Group to give your organization a factual baseline before any transformation begins.
The overwhelming majority of transformation failures trace back to one skipped step: nobody measured the organizational culture and behaviors before trying to change them. The ADAPT© Organizational Culture Survey is the instrument that closes that gap — administered and debriefed by The Helix Group as a structured engagement, not a self-serve download.
“Did your last transformation start by baselining your organizational culture and behaviors? If not, you are likely among the majority of organizations that either failed or saw far fewer benefits than expected.”
This survey is the answer to that question — a structured, multi-dimensional diagnostic that surfaces the real starting point, not the assumed one. It is administered by The Helix Group as part of a formal engagement.
Organizations launch transformation programs against an assumed cultural starting point — what leaders believe the culture is — rather than a measured one. This produces interventions designed for a culture that does not actually exist.
Culture is the underlying system of values and beliefs. Behaviors are what people actually do. They are not the same. Changing behaviors without changing the underlying culture produces compliance that reverses under pressure — which is why most transformation gains do not hold.
Without a pre-transformation baseline, there is no way to know whether the transformation produced lasting change or temporary compliance. Six months after the program closes, the question “did it work?” has no answer grounded in data.
The ADAPT© Organizational Culture Survey measures organizational culture across six domains, each targeting a distinct dimension of how your organization actually works. The survey is administered to all employee levels and takes approximately 25 to 35 minutes to complete.
Goal clarity, planning quality, performance evaluation systems, cooperation, and organizational effectiveness. Surfaces the strategy-to-execution gap.
Whether communication is adequate, honest, bidirectional, and reaches people about the changes that affect them. Reveals whether the communication culture can sustain transformation.
Employee experience of management effectiveness across 27 specific leadership behaviors. The most diagnostic and the most sensitive section — often the most revealing.
Actual team-level culture: cooperation, performance standards, communication, readiness for change, autonomy, and pride in work. Frequently reveals a gap between organizational-level and team-level culture.
Trust, psychological safety, authenticity, and the real employee-management relationship. Items here around trust and fear are foundational — transformations cannot succeed without this foundation in place.
The organization’s demonstrated capacity to adapt, seek employee input, and handle new demands. Low scores here combined with low Part E scores signal transformation fatigue or change saturation.
Each item is rated from 1 (Least Effective / Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Most Effective / Strongly Agree). Section averages are calculated and mapped to one of three capability bands. High-variance items — where some respondents score 1–2 and others 6–7 — are often the most revealing and productive for debrief discussion. The Helix Group scores, aggregates, and interprets all results as part of the engagement.
A cultural asset. Protect it, build on it, and ensure the transformation does not accidentally erode it.
Active improvement required. These areas have the capacity to improve with the right intervention — they are not organizational strengths, but they are not failures yet either.
Significant cultural gaps requiring immediate focus. These items represent the organizational conditions that will actively resist transformation if left unaddressed.
The survey is administered exclusively through The Helix Group as part of a formal Organizational Culture Diagnostic engagement. This is a deliberate design choice: the instrument’s value is not in the questions themselves but in the administration protocol, the confidentiality architecture, the aggregated scoring, and the facilitated executive debrief that follows. Without those elements, the data is incomplete and the findings are often misread or defensively dismissed.
The Organizational Culture Diagnostic is a formal Helix Group engagement — scoped, administered, and debriefed by our team. Book a 30-minute conversation to learn how the diagnostic works, what the engagement includes, and how the results connect to the transformation program that follows.
Book a 30-minute conversation with The Helix Group. We will walk you through the survey instrument, the engagement process, and what the results would mean for your transformation program.