Annual surveys were a breakthrough a decade ago. Today, employees expect feedback to flow as quickly as the work itself. Culture Amp remains the benchmark king—its scheduled engagement surveys and 360° cycles help HR capture company-wide sentiment and compare scores to thousands of peers. Windmill takes a different tack: it embeds an AI assistant named Windy in Slack, prompting peer feedback the moment collaboration happens.
The core question for modern teams is simple: Which model drives richer data, higher adoption, and faster coaching?
Culture Amp excels at structured pulses and deep analytics:
These strengths make Culture Amp indispensable for large organisations that need strict cadence, compliance, and cross-company benchmarks.
Trade-offs: insight arrives weeks after the work that triggered the sentiment; employees must log into a separate portal; and action planning can stall if HR waits for a “big-bang” survey to close.
Windy meets people where real work happens—then turns every interaction into actionable feedback.
Step | How Windy Works | Why It Matters |
---|---|---|
1 · Context detection | Notices a pull-request merged, a Jira story closed, or a calendar meeting finished. | Prompts only follow real collaboration—no random pings. |
2 · Just-in-time prompt | DM: “What did Alex do well on this feature? Anything he could improve?” | Takes ≈ 30 sec to answer; response rate stays high. |
3 · Conversational capture | Replies are stored in each participant's private feedback vault, linked to the exact project or PR. | No forms to fill out, yet feedback stays searchable and audit-safe. |
4 · Weekly synthesis | Windy auto-rolls the week's feedback, accomplishments, and blockers into a single Slack digest for each manager. | Managers walk into 1-on-1s with fresh examples—no more scrambling. |
Because prompts appear only when collaboration ends—and answering feels like chatting —feedback is specific, timely, and evenly distributed across the review period. Recency bias disappears.
Traditional engagement surveys (like Culture Amp's) can take weeks to configure, launch, and analyze. Windy's Pulse routine flips that script:
Teams get a continuous read on morale and focus without the survey-fatigue or analysis backlog that plagues quarterly pulses.
Dimension | Culture Amp (Survey-Centric) | Windmill (AI in Slack) |
---|---|---|
Feedback cadence | Quarterly or annual surveys; optional monthly pulses | Continuous prompts tied to real work events |
User effort | Form in web portal (multi-question) | One-line DM inside Slack |
Time to insight | Days–weeks after survey closes | Minutes–hours after collaboration occurs |
Manager guidance | Benchmark dashboards for HR | Instant nudges, AI summaries for one-to-ones |
Bias controls | Calibration tools; rater-training courses | AI flags subjective language, spans the full time frame |
Best fit | Enterprises needing formal survey programs & benchmarks | Tech-lean teams seeking daily, in-flow coaching |
Large enterprises often need uniform, compliance-ready engagement surveys and robust benchmark comparisons. Culture Amp's heat maps make it easy to present trends to executives and board members. Organisations that value long-form 360 narratives and extensive question libraries continue to find strong ROI in Culture Amp.
Teams that iterate weekly—or release code daily—benefit from Windmill's real-time model. Managers no longer dig for examples when review season arrives; Windy has already logged them. Early adopters report:
A 120-person engineering org layered Windmill on top of Slack. Within three weeks, 92 percent of developers had both given and received actionable feedback. Managers say one-to-ones now start with concrete wins and blockers instead of vague check-ins, trimming each meeting by ten minutes and surfacing issues two sprints sooner than before.
Windy exports its data via CSV or API, so HR can still ingest continuous feedback into Culture Amp for unified analytics.
Admins set frequency caps—for example, no more than one request per peer per fortnight. Adoption data shows response rates stay high because prompts appear only when real collaboration occurs.
Windmill is SOC 2 and GDPR compliant. Messages respect Slack channel privacy; sensitive feedback can route to private channels or manager-only views.
Windmill complements, not replaces, formal pulses. Many companies keep quarterly engagement surveys in Culture Amp for macro health checks while Windy handles day-to-day coaching.
Scheduled surveys capture sentiment at scale, but they miss the everyday coaching moments that shape performance. Windmill's AI moves feedback into the flow of work—delivering timely insight, reducing bias, and turning review season into a quick snapshot rather than a scramble. For organisations that want the depth of Culture Amp's benchmarks and the immediacy of AI-driven feedback, pairing the two platforms creates a future-proof feedback engine.