Gallup Access vs. Culture Amp

Gallup Access

Key insight

The Gallup Q¹² is a 12-item employee engagement survey built through decades of research and testing. Gallup analyzed hundreds of survey questions from more than 1 million employees and identified the items that most consistently distinguish high-performing workgroups from low-performing ones.

The 12 items are organized into a hierarchy of employee needs: basic needs, individual needs, teamwork needs and growth needs. Each item supports action at the team level.

Gallup has conducted 11 meta-analyses on the Q¹², using data from more than 112,000 teams to examine the relationship between engagement and 11 specific business outcomes, including productivity, profitability, customer loyalty, turnover, safety and absenteeism.

The most recent meta-analysis found that top-quartile business units achieved:

Because the Q¹² employee engagement tool is fixed and proprietary, the framework is only available through Gallup Access. Every organization in the benchmark database answers the same 12 items, which makes comparisons consistent across organizations.

Beyond the core Q¹², Gallup Access supports unlimited pulse surveys. Organizations can survey employees at any time, on any topic and across all or targeted segments of their workforce. Pulse surveys can draw from a library of nearly 400 validated questions each tied to documented workplace outcomes. With this approach, the flexibility Gallup Access offers through employee pulse survey tools is based on the same evidence-based approach as the Q¹² itself.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp uses a standard engagement survey with 57 questions that measure four drivers of employee engagement: leadership, enablement, alignment and development. Culture Amp's internal organizational psychologists designed the survey using existing academic literature and research on employee engagement.

Survey structure:

• Standard 57-question survey, with a shorter 20-question version available
• Includes a five-question Engagement Index that measures motivation, pride, present commitment, future commitment and recommendation
• Customizable: organizations can add, edit or remove questions, so survey length can vary

Validation claims:

• Cronbach alpha scores between 0.80 and 0.90 for Culture Amp’s Engagement Index, which indicates that the five index questions reliably measure the same concept consistently
• Factor analysis supports this structure
• Links between survey results and external measures such as Glassdoor ratings

Platform data from Culture Amp identifies leadership, learning and development, and company performance as key factors related to engagement scores. Because organizations can customize surveys, benchmarking relies on questions that are common across multiple organizations rather than a single shared instrument.

Gallup Access

Key insight

Gallup maintains a survey benchmark database of over 1 billion Q¹² responses. Every organization in the database uses the same Q¹² survey, which allows direct comparison across organizations.

Beyond industry and size benchmarks, organizations can segment results by organizational hierarchy, job level, job function, tenure, employment status, location and work arrangement. Gallup also provides benchmarks by survey administration number, which allows organizations to compare their results with others at the same stage of their engagement journey: first administration, second administration and so on.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp's builds its benchmark dataset from over 1 billion survey responses collected across its platform, spanning multiple regions, segments and industries. Because organizations on Culture Amp can customize their surveys, benchmarks rely on questions that are common across multiple organizations rather than a single shared instrument.

Culture Amp requires at least 20 companies and 20,000 respondents before it publishes industry benchmarks and uses actual company survey data rather than panel-based research. The platform updates benchmarks twice a year based on a fixed annual cycle covering the previous 12 months of survey data.

In addition to median scores, the following benchmark cuts are available:

• top 25% (75th percentile)
• top 10% (90th percentile)

Culture Amp calculates geography benchmarks based on each respondent's location at the time of survey completion. Two types of benchmarks are available: standard benchmarks, which have strict minimum data requirements, and emerging benchmarks, which use lower thresholds to provide comparison data in categories where standard benchmarks are not yet available.

Gallup Access

One of Gallup's widely cited finding shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. This finding shapes the platform’s design. Tools, guidance and learning resources focus on helping managers take action on workplace data.

The platform delivers research findings in several ways: a learning library, guidance tied to survey results and Gallup AI.

Gallup AI uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and draws only from Gallup-owned science. It does not rely on general internet sources or client data, meaning every response is based on proprietary Gallup research. Leaders and managers can ask Gallup AI questions in plain language about their engagement results, CliftonStrengths, or workplace challenges and receive research-backed responses in real time.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp's research and insights come from an internal team of organizational psychologists and data scientists.

The company conducts research through its in-house research institute, which combines organizational psychology, data science and machine learning to generate insights from the platform's dataset.

Culture Amp analyzes survey data alongside external financial and demographic information to identify patterns across industries and regions. The platform’s AI tool draws on 1.5 billion workplace data points collected over a decade of platform usage.

Culture Amp publishes annual research reports and benchmark insights based on this dataset, covering topics such as employee engagement trends, DEI and manager effectiveness.

Gallup Access

Topics include:

• culture
• employee engagement
• employee experience
• retention and turnover
• employee performance
• management

• leadership
• wellbeing
• team building
• hiring
• customer engagement
• hybrid and remote work

• culture
• employee engagement
• employee experience
• retention and turnover
• employee performance
• management
• leadership
• wellbeing
• team building
• hiring
• customer engagement
• hybrid and remote work

• Content formats include:
• videos
•  
• how-to articles
•  
• e-learning modules
•  
• quick-learning clips

The platform organizes content by role so that each person sees what applies to their responsibilities. The library updates weekly, and individuals can connect learning modules directly to action plans, linking development resources to specific engagement priorities.

Gallup also offers external courses on strengths, employee engagement, and manager development. Organizations that invested in these courses across all three content areas saw an average 20-percentage-point increase in employee engagement and an estimated $1,812 in productivity per employee in the first year.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp's learning offering focuses on short, two-minute daily exercises delivered via Slack, Microsoft Teams or email.

Courses cover topics such as coaching, feedback, resilience, productivity, strategic thinking, one on ones, meetings and people development.

Culture Amp designs most courses for managers, but all users can access the platform's micro learning as an add-on feature.

The platform also includes a library of action plans based on how organizations have addressed similar engagement challenges.

Gallup Access

Key insight

CliftonStrengths is Gallup's strengths assessment tool that identifies each individual's top talent themes across 34 strengths. Within Gallup Access, managers can view team strengths profiles alongside engagement results and better understand how individual talents connect to team dynamics and performance. Individuals can access their strengths reports and receive AI-driven insights about team and partnership strengths dynamics.

Gallup's research shows that employees who receive strengths-based development experience increased performance, lower employee turnover, and their workgroups post increased profit, sales, and customer engagement metrics.

The platform’s AI incorporates each user's CliftonStrengths automatically into every response. This allows the system to tailor guidance on engagement results, coaching conversations and workplace challenges to each person’s natural way of working.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp does not include a strengths-based development framework. Manager development on Culture Amp focuses on skill-building and performance tools rather than individual talent identification.