Others measure engagement. Some deliver programmes. We do both — moving emotional culture and measuring what changes.
Think about the last team that actually felt human to be part of. The one where people said what they meant. Since the end of 2023 we have been working with Professor Michael Parke at The Wharton School, measuring what makes those teams different and how to build more of them. This page is what we found.
Combined results from three ECD Certified Partners & Practitioners across three organisations and two continents. 31 participants measured.
A manager opens a pack of cards. A team stops performing and starts speaking. This is what happens next.
Emotional Culture work lands — and people want more. Across three very different organisations, 76% of participants are satisfied with the emotional culture work and 75% want to continue. The data shows that trust and care are building, but the harder skills — sharing difficult emotions and speaking up about wellbeing — still need more time and safety to grow.
A food and beverage team. 35 people. Six months later, 85% of them say they feel safer to speak up. The numbers are below. The reason is in the room.
Psychological safety moved most. When teams build emotional literacy and leaders create permission to express feelings, connection and trust follow. The emotional culture work produced measurable shifts across every dimension measured.
A brand-new multi-region team across three continents. One emotional culture workshop. Six weekly retros. Forty-two days.
Strangers on three continents. The kind of team that usually takes a year to find its voice. This one found it in six weeks — and trusted each other enough to disagree out loud.
When teams map both how they want to feel internally and how they want stakeholders to feel, culture change accelerates. Tracking emotions weekly made the culture visible, adjustable, and owned by the team.
A team inside a significant transformation. 16 participants. Pre and post measurements.
The kind of change that usually leaves people guarded and exhausted. Here's what shifted when leaders and employees started naming emotions out loud — and the room started breathing again.
Naming emotions — positive and negative — is a learnable skill. After the programme, participants labelled both positive and negative emotions significantly more. Voice, engagement, and leader emotional support all increased, while job demands fell. The biggest shift was in emotional expression itself.
A cross-sector field study across multiple organisations. What we measured: the conditions that make employees actually voice wellbeing concerns, and what shifts when emotional culture work is in the room.
Think about the thing you nearly said in the last meeting. The concern you carried home instead. Most workplaces aren't short on wellbeing policy. They're short on the conditions that let people speak before it's too late. This is what we found changes that.
The desire to speak up is there — but the conditions aren't always. While 71% of participants are actively engaged and 75% value their ECD work, only 43% regularly voice concerns about wellbeing. Psychological safety and manager emotional support are the critical unlocks — and they're the areas with the most room to grow.
The Unspoken Conversations Workshop tested whether naming and sharing an emotion before raising a concern with a leader changed the quality of the conversation, and the relationship itself.
Every number on this page came out of a live session with an intact work team. A leader and their people, in the same room, on the clock, talking about the things that actually matter to them. Not a focus group and not a simulation.
That is deliberate. The organisations we work with are not buying a research project. They are buying a culture conversation their team genuinely needs, and it has to move something for them on the day. The study runs underneath the engagement rather than in place of it. If it only served the science, we would not run it.
So the outcome was never just a dataset. Teams left having had a conversation they had been circling for months.
For some of what they heard, leaders were not allowed to answer. Not in that moment. They listened, they acknowledged what had been said, and they carried it into a follow-up conversation later.
Every organisation pushed back on this, and so did I. Inside a real workplace the norm is to solve the thing in front of you, and solving it quickly is how most leaders show they care. It is also how the status quo quietly keeps itself in place, because when the answer arrives before the concern has properly landed, the concern gets managed rather than heard. Asking a leader to sit on their hands felt close to impossible.
Nothing was fixed that day. No problem was solved in the room. And people still walked out saying they felt listened to, understood and cared for.
That is the finding I keep coming back to. The care was never in the answer. It was in the listening. Which means "just listen, do not respond yet" is a skill a leader can be taught, not a personality they either have or they don't.
Named their emotion on an ECD card and shared it aloud with their leader before raising a concern.
Named their emotion on an ECD card but kept it private, and did not share it with their leader.
Alongside the check-out survey, we ran a controlled experiment. Half the participants named the emotion attached to their concern and shared it with their leader before raising it. The other half named it but kept the emotion private. Everything else was the same.
When people named and shared how they felt, three things improved, and the one worry we tested for didn't materialise:
Comparison: participants who named and shared their emotion aloud (treatment) vs those who named it but kept it private (control). Drawn from 142 participants across 6 organisations in not-for-profit, government, consulting, and commercial sectors.
That line came from a head of culture inside a large organisation, and it started the next piece of work. If naming an emotion changes the way a concern lands, what happens when you put that conversation exactly where concerns usually go to die, in the weeks straight after an engagement survey?
Sitting underneath it is the question this study raised and could not answer. When a leader holds their response rather than giving it straight away, does the concern land differently a week later? That is running now, live, inside real teams, through the platform we built to carry it.
It is early, and the findings belong with the research team until the work is done. So there are no numbers to share yet. When there are, they will appear on this page.
Proof of Practice, live from our global community of practice.
The studies prove the method works. This is the living evidence of it working.
Not a controlled study. This is what our Emotional Culture Deck Certified Partners are collecting inside real teams and organisations across the world, through the Emotional Evidence Platform. It is self-reported, anonymous, and it grows every week.
273 voices telling us what’s moving for them, because of the emotional culture conversations.
Every practitioner knows the moment. Someone finally says the real thing, the room goes quiet, and something shifts. Then the session ends and all you have to show for it is a feeling and a wall of sticky notes. The client asks what changed, and the honest answer is that you had to be there.
That gap is what the Emotional Evidence Platform closes.
Nothing changes about how you facilitate. You set the workshop up on the platform beforehand, and that is the whole preparation.
At the end, participants answer eighteen short questions on their own phone. A few minutes, and it doubles as a reflective close to the session.
Your dashboard fills in as they answer. What moved, by how much, ready to walk a client through or hand over as a report.
Most of our Certified Partners are running their own practice. They are not backed by a research department, and their next piece of work usually depends on being able to show the last one landed. Walking out of a session with evidence in hand changes that conversation entirely.
It also does something none of them could do alone. Every session quietly joins the picture above, so a single workshop in one city becomes part of a body of evidence built from thousands of rooms. That is where the numbers on this page come from. Not from us. From them.
The Emotional Evidence Platform is available to ECD Certified Partners.
