Building a Public Employee Engagement Dashboard for Work.Life

What they built

A public-facing employee engagement dashboard embedded in Work.Life's careers/people hub, showing:

• Engagement scores across survey dimensions (tracked quarterly from October 2024)
• Score trends over time (Oct → Jan → April)
• Thematic summaries of what employees value and what they're asking for
• A direct mapping of employee feedback → actions launched in response
• A running narrative of progress made each quarter

Why they built it

• Work.Life operates across 14 physically distributed locations, making belonging and engagement harder to maintain
• The business was at a classic startup scaling crossroads - long-tenured staff vs. newer joiners, culture in flux
• The People team lacked visible accountability: employees couldn't see that engagement data was being acted on
• Goal: replace shadow conversations and visceral feedback with a transparent, adult-to-adult dialogue about real workplace issues
• Secondary goal: own the EVP publicly - making weaknesses visible so they can't be weaponised, and so candidates self-select in with eyes open

Tools used

• Engagement survey platform (any tool with CSV export capability) - or Google Forms / Microsoft Forms as a free alternative
• ChatGPT - thematic and language analysis of open-text survey responses
• Claude - uploading brand book + detailed prompt to generate an interactive dashboard as a custom HTML artifact
• Team Tailor (their ATS/careers site builder) - used to host the dashboard publicly via custom HTML embed
• Alternative hosting options mentioned: Google Sites or Microsoft SharePoint (for internal-only versions)

How you could build this yourself

1. Run your engagement survey using your existing platform, Google Forms, or Microsoft Forms - ensure you can export results as a CSV.
2. Prepare before you go public - share results as a PDF slide deck in Slack (or equivalent) for a quarter or two first, so employees recognise the format and leadership is comfortable with transparency.
3. Get stakeholder buy-in incrementally - don't jump straight to a public dashboard; baby-step the business into the mindset.
4. Paste open-text responses into ChatGPT and prompt it to identify themes - what employees value most, what they're asking for. Refine the language here.
5. Go to Claude - upload your brand book and provide a detailed prompt specifying: layout, dimensions to show, date comparisons, score trends, and the "feedback → actions launched" mapping. Ask it to generate an interactive HTML artifact.
6. Decide where it lives:
   • Internal only → embed the HTML into a Google Site or SharePoint page
   • Public → embed into your careers site builder (e.g. Team Tailor) as a custom HTML page
7. Update each quarter - re-run steps 3–6 with new data; condense older quarters over time so the dashboard stays readable rather than endlessly growing.
8. Use it in hiring - share the link with candidates who are on the fence; it functions as a powerful, differentiated EVP proof point.

Source

Built by Olya Yakzhina, Head of People at Work.Life. Presented as part of Open Org's "Shipped by HR" session series, in which startup People leaders demo AI-assisted tools they've built for their organisations.