EXD Score30 years
Where it began
Built from three decades of workplace consulting, after a full office redesign, new space, new tech, still measured worse a year and a half later. Beautiful design, no diagnostic.
14.3 hrs/week
The number that started it
What senior managers at one firm privately estimated they lose to work that creates no value: a meeting that shouldn't exist, an approval stuck in email. Multiply by headcount and the cost stops being abstract.
People · Process · Place · Tech · Culture
Five dimensions, not one score
Engagement surveys measure mood, not cause. These five are specific enough to diagnose and fix on their own. Culture is usually blamed for problems that actually live in one of the other four.
Instant, honest, anonymous
Built to give something back
Most surveys take from you and give nothing back for months. This one hands you your own read on your five dimensions immediately. Your employer only ever sees the pooled pattern, never your answers.
From framework to instrument
EXD Score is the always-on, digital version of "Tool 8: The EX Dimensional Assessment," the measurement tool at the centre of the Employee Experience Design (EXD) Framework.
Read more
The full framework and business case are in Designed to Work: A Business Case for Employee Experience Design (EXD), available on Amazon. More on the EXD Framework itself here.
The research behind the fifty questions
Tool 8 did not start as a survey. It came out of three decades of consulting engagements where the same pattern kept showing up: an organisation would spend real money fixing one visible thing, a new office, a new tool, a restructure, and then find, eighteen months later, that nothing had actually improved. The problem was rarely that the fix was wrong. It was that nobody had diagnosed which of five separate systems, People, Process, Place, Technology, Culture, was the one actually failing. Tool 8 was built to answer that question directly, and it became the diagnostic centrepiece of the Employee Experience Design (EXD) Framework, published in Designed to Work.
EXD Score's fifty questions are not a reinterpretation of that instrument, they are built from it directly. Nineteen of the fifty are Tool 8's own questions, used word for word, three or four anchored in every one of the five dimensions. Another eleven are reworded from an internal instrument iDream had already been testing with real teams before EXD Score existed, kept because they held up in practice. The remaining twenty are new, written specifically to cover gaps that Tool 8's own dimension definitions point to but do not fully operationalise on their own, among them one question per dimension that checks whether someone is actually using the support available to them, not just whether it exists, since a resource nobody uses helps nobody.
That lineage is the reason EXD Score is not a standalone survey someone invented and gave five nice-sounding names. It is the always-on, digital version of a diagnostic tool that already existed in a published framework, developed and tested well before this platform did. The book and the framework itself are linked in the cards above if you would rather read the underlying research directly than take our word for it.