Our Methodology
The Green Culture Index exists because we believe the gap between what companies sayabout sustainability and what employees actually experience deserves to be measuredhonestly. That means the survey itself has to be built to a standard that holds up. One thatproduces findings people can trust, report on, and act on.
This page sets out exactly how the GCI works: how questions were designed, how the indexscore is calculated, and what steps were taken to make the data as honest as possible.We’re sharing this not because we have to, but because transparency is the whole point.
At a glance
Here’s the shape of the survey before we get into the detail.
17
questions across five sections
< 2 mins
to complete, a hard constraint, not a target
6
scored questions that feed into the GCI benchmark
0
identifying fields. Fully anonymous, always
5
demographic segments: sector, seniority, size, location
How the questions were designed
Built on established principles
The GCI question set was developed using principles drawn from decades of workplaceresearch and psychometric survey design. The approach draws on three well-establishedpractices.
The scored questions in the GCI use a five-point agreement scale, a format developed bysociologist Rensis Likert in 1932 and now the most widely used scale in workplace andsocial research. Five-point scales are well-validated for capturing nuanced opinion withoutoverwhelming respondents with too many choices. They also produce clean averages thatcan be aggregated into benchmark scores, which is exactly what the GCI requires.
The GCI measures what employees perceive their organisation to be doing on sustainability,not what organisations report about themselves. This is a deliberate choice. Employeeperception is the most honest available signal of whether sustainability efforts are visible,credible, and culturally embedded. It’s also the measurement approach used by the world’smost respected workplace benchmarks, including Gallup’s employee engagement research,which has demonstrated consistently that employee experience and organisationalperformance are closely linked.
The GCI doesn’t claim to audit organisational sustainability practice. It measures somethingmore candid: whether the people inside an organisation feel it.
Several questions in the GCI are deliberately behavioural rather than purely attitudinal,asking what respondents have noticed or done, rather than only how they feel. Behaviouralquestions are harder to answer dishonestly, because they ask for a concrete account ofexperience rather than an abstract self-assessment. This is a standard technique in surveydesign for improving the accuracy of self-reported data.
Tackling response bias
The biggest methodological risk in any survey about sustainability is social desirability bias,the tendency for people to give answers that sound good rather than answers that are true.In a survey about a topic as loaded as climate action, this risk is significant.
Every question in the GCI was reviewed against this risk. The steps taken to mitigate itinclude:
Framing questions around specific experience rather than general values. “Myorganisation practises what it preaches on sustainability” is harder to inflate than “Doyou think sustainability is important?”
Including answer options that make honest scepticism easy. Options like “No, noteven close” and “I have no idea” give respondents explicit permission to be candid,reducing the pull towards the safe middle.
Avoiding leading language. No question signals a “correct” answer. Questions werereviewed and rewritten wherever they implied that a particular response was expectedor desirable.
Full anonymity. When people know their answers cannot be traced back to them, theyanswer more honestly. No identifying information is collected at any point.
Some degree of response bias cannot be fully eliminated in any self-reported survey. The GCIfindings should be read as a measure of how working professionals experience sustainability intheir workplaces, not as an independent audit of organisational practice.
How the GCI score is calculated
The GCI benchmark score is produced from six questions that directly measure greenworkplace culture. Each asks respondents to assess a specific dimension of theirorganisation’s approach to sustainability:
Overall sustainability performance
Authenticity: whether efforts are genuine or performative
Goal visibility: whether employees are aware of sustainability commitments
Actions versus words: whether the organisation practises what it preaches
Psychological safety: whether employees feel comfortable raising sustainabilityconcerns
Voice and agency: whether raising issues leads to real change
Each question is scored on a scale of 1 to 5. Scores are averaged across the six questionsto produce an individual score, which is then converted to a number out of 100. The headlineGCI benchmark is the average of all individual scores across all respondents.
This produces a single, comparable number that can be tracked year on year, broken downby sector and seniority, and held up as an honest picture of where workplaces actuallystand.
Year-on-year comparability
The six scored questions and the core five-section structure of the GCI are designed toremain consistent year on year. A benchmark is only useful if you can measure movementagainst it, so stability in the question set is the priority.
That said, the GCI will evolve as we learn. If a question ever needs to be updated orreplaced, we will say so openly, explain why, and be transparent about what that means forcomparing results across years. The integrity of the benchmark depends on that honesty,not on pretending the survey will never change.
Future editions of the GCI will report changes in the headline score, sector rankings, andseniority gaps over time. The first year establishes the baseline. Every subsequent year tellsyou whether things are getting better, getting worse, or staying the same.
Data collection
The GCI is collected via an anonymous online survey open to any working professional.Participation is free. No account is required. No identifying information (name, emailaddress, or employer) is collected within the survey itself.
The survey is distributed primarily through professional networks, LinkedIn, and directoutreach. Responses from different countries are collected and reported separately, allowingfor both global and market-level findings.
Findings are published as aggregated data only. No individual responses are shared orattributed.
Limitations
We’d rather tell you what this study can’t do than let you find out later.
The GCI measures perception, not performance. A high score means employees feeltheir organisation is doing well on sustainability. It does not independently verify thatthis is the case.
Self-reported data has inherent limits. Despite the steps taken to reduce bias, somerespondents will answer more charitably about their employer than their experiencestrictly warrants.
Sample composition affects results. If participation skews heavily towards one sectoror seniority level, that will be reflected in the headline score. Segment-level findingsare the most reliable way to interpret the data.
Year 1 is the baseline. With one year of data, the GCI score tells you whereworkplaces stand right now. It takes more than one year to tell you whether things aremoving, and in which direction.
Questions about the methodology?
We’re happy to talk through how the GCI was built. Get in touch at [contact email]
