Employee Experience Assessment
The foundational read on how your culture is actually being lived, across all eight dimensions of the NICH framework. Standalone, or the baseline for everything else.
Watch the videoFind out if your people are ready for AI.
Ask them.
Emersen has a real conversation with every employee and tells you who's ready, who's waiting, and what's in the way.
Organizations we've done this work with
- Children's Healthcare of Atlanta
- PulteGroup
- Novelis
- Lidl US
- CSC ServiceWorks
- TegraGlobal
- Roark
NICH+Culture has helped some of the world's most renowned organizations earn recognition on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For and achieve top-tier global engagement scores.
Emersen is how that work scales, built by the practitioners who have been doing it in person for nearly a decade.
The distinction
Proficiency is whether people can. Readiness is whether they will.
Proficiency
Can your people use the tools? Certification, training completion, and usage dashboards answer this. It's a real question, and it's the one most organizations measure.
Readiness
Will they? Do they trust the intent behind the rollout? Do they know what they're allowed to do? Have they seen someone they respect actually use it? What are they afraid of, and what would move them? No dashboard answers this. A conversation does.
Most AI programs stall in the gap between the two. Emersen measures the second one, at scale, so the training you've already bought lands on people who are ready to use it.
See the AI Readiness Assessment →
When it matters
Three moments when knowing changes the decision.
01
Before the rollout
Your people have already formed an opinion about AI from headlines, a colleague's shortcut, a leader who uses it and hasn't said what it means for anyone else. Find out what they believe before you announce the plan, so the plan answers the story they've already written.
What you get: A readiness read by population, and the concerns your announcement has to address.
02
After the deployment
Licenses issued. Training complete. Dashboard green. Six months later, who is actually using it, who isn't, and why? Provisioning is not adoption. A conversation finds out what the usage report can't.
What you get: Who adopted, who's waiting, and the specific things in the way.
03
At the investment decision
The plan has a productivity assumption. The assumption depends on adoption. Before the board approves a workforce decision on projected efficiency, know whether the people expected to deliver it are ready to.
What you get: The people-side risk on the number, before you commit to it.
Emersen is repeatable. Read the room again every six months and see the trajectory, not just the position.
How it works
Meet emersen.
The qualitative depth of a focus group, at the scale of your entire workforce. Until now, organizations had to choose between depth and scale. Emersen collapses that tradeoff.
Emersen is a workforce intelligence platform from NICH+Culture. Purpose-built AI agents, designed by the practitioners who have run these conversations in person for nearly a decade, have a natural, voice-based conversation with every person in your organization, each guided by the NICH Employee Experience Framework.
What it produces isn't data points. It's understanding, the kind leaders have always paid consultants to deliver, now available across an entire workforce, and repeatable whenever you need to read the room again.
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I.
A real conversation
Voice-led, never typed. It adapts in real time and follows the threads that matter, the way a NICH consultant would in person. Closer to an interview with a trusted advisor than anything text-based.
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II.
Across every person, not a sample
Hundreds or thousands of conversations, running in parallel, each twenty to thirty minutes. Qualitative depth at the reach of the whole organization.
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III.
Mapped to a proprietary framework
Every response is read against the NICH EX framework, eight dimensions of employee experience, plus a ninth for AI readiness.
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IV.
Aggregated into understanding
A consolidated findings report your leadership can act on, understanding, not a dashboard of averages. And because it's repeatable, you can watch how your workforce evolves over time.
Why Emersen is different
An assessment is only as good as
An assessment is only as good as
the question that comes next.
Most instruments measure what they already know to ask about. They can't follow a thread, hear hesitation, or tell curiosity from fear.
Emersen listens, then follows up, the way a skilled interviewer would, across thousands of conversations at once. Until now, organizations had to choose between depth and scale. Emersen collapses that tradeoff, and gives leaders both.
The Emersen suite
Six families of AI tools,
Six families of AI tools,
one methodology underneath.
Emersen applies the same conversational methodology to whatever question is most urgent for your organization. Three families are the diagnostic and talent core the platform was built around. Three more extend it from point-in-time engagement into an ongoing relationship with your people.
Family 01
Emersen Assess
“What do my people actually think?”
The full picture on how your culture is being lived and how ready your people are for AI, every voice, not a sample.
AI Readiness Assessment
A standalone read on how the workforce is experiencing and adapting to AI. Designed for organizations that need a clear answer before a rollout, after a deployment, or at the inflection point of an investment decision.
Watch the videoEmployee Experience + AI Readiness
All eight EX dimensions plus a dedicated ninth measuring AI readiness across willingness, capability, permission clarity, access, leadership signal, trust in AI intent, vision for AI role, and peer dynamics. For organizations navigating AI transformation, where the human and the technology questions cannot be separated.
Watch the videoBehavioral Adoption Assessment
A targeted assessment that measures whether a specific initiative, leadership program, change effort, or new tool is actually taking hold at the employee level. Not whether it launched. Not whether training was completed. Whether the behavior the organization invested in is being lived.
Watch the video
Family 02 · on the roadmap
Emersen Advance
“How do I make the most of the talent I already have?”
Maps what your people can do and want to become, then puts that talent into motion. Starts at the cohort level: which functions hold the people who could fill the roles you'll need next. Consultative-led, and a longer horizon than Assess.
Nº 05 · On the roadmap
Talent Horizon
A pre-decision read on what your people can do and want to become, surfaced through conversation. Map your talent before you decide.
Watch the video Nº 06 · On the roadmapTalent Redeployment
Match people to roles that exist now or soon, combining talent intelligence with your HR system data. Activate the talent you already have.
Family 03 · on the roadmap
Emersen Predict
“How will my people respond to what's coming?”
A predictive capability that will draw on Emersen's accumulating body of qualitative findings to anticipate how employees will respond to specific initiatives, communications, or change programs before they launch.
Where Assess helps leaders understand where their workforce stands today, Predict will help them understand how their workforce is likely to respond to what comes next.
Family 04 · on the roadmap
Emersen Assist
“What's happening between the assessments?”
Where Assess reads how the workforce stands at a moment, Assist puts an agent to work between those moments. An embedded, ongoing presence, not a one-time engagement.
Onboarding Companion
A persistent agent assigned to each new hire at onboarding. It teaches them the organization from your own material, answers their questions as they arise, and gives leadership a continuous read on how each person is settling in, not a single point-in-time score.
Decision Reaction Assessment
Tied to a specific pending decision: a benefits redesign, a compensation change, a policy shift. You provide the options under consideration; the agent interviews the affected population and reports how they're likely to respond, before you finalize it.
Family 05 · the keystone
Emersen Companion
“What does each person need to do their best work here?”
A persistent, individual work companion for every employee, past onboarding and into everyday work. It helps a person understand what's being asked of them, stay on track, and think things through before going to their manager. And it's the relationship that powers the rest of the suite.
The moat isn't the company information Companion knows. Any capable AI can import a handbook. What can't be replicated is the rapport it builds with a person over months and years, and everything it learns about them along the way. Companion interviews as much as it informs, organized around the same eight-dimension Employee Experience Framework NICH has always used, turned toward the individual.
A note on privacy: unlike Assess, where individual disclosure is abstracted into aggregate, Companion is built to remember the individual. Its lasting memory of a person is the point. Leadership sees personas and insight, never a person's raw conversations.
The framework
Nine dimensions of what makes work work.
Eight dimensions of employee experience, refined over nearly a decade of in-person work with Fortune-recognized organizations. Plus a ninth, AI readiness, for the most consequential workforce shift in modern memory: not an IT question, but an employee-experience one.
Emersen also surfaces what most assessments miss, the employees who could become champions of AI adoption, the curious and adaptable people who can model new behaviors and bring their peers along.
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Meaningful WorkSense of purpose & contribution
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Positive WorkplaceRelationships & belonging
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Fundamental NeedsPay, security, the basics
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LeadershipDirection & decision-making
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Trust in OrganizationConfidence in leadership intent
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Recognition & AppreciationBeing seen for the work
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Health & WellbeingSustainability of work
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Development & GrowthWhere this role can lead
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AI ReadinessTrust, willingness, leadership signal & 5 more
What you actually get
Not a dashboard. A findings report you can act on.
Every engagement ends the same way: a consolidated read on where your workforce stands, the verbatim evidence behind it, and a roadmap your leadership team can put on a calendar. Below is a redacted excerpt from a real engagement.
Redacted sample
Section 02 · Dimension scorecardp. 14
Where the organization stands
n = 4,208 conversations · 91% participation
Meaningful Work81
Positive Workplace77
Fundamental Needs72
Leadership54
Trust in Organization48
Recognition & Appreciation63
Health & Wellbeing69
Development & Growth58
AI Readiness41
Strength
Watch
Priority
Redacted sample
Section 03 · Recommendationsp. 27
What to do about it
Prioritized, with owners and timelines
01
Name the AI question directly with leadership
CEO memo + manager talking points · wks 1–2
02
Give managers a script for the trust conversation
People team + comms · wks 2–4
03
Tie AI training to an explicit retention commitment
CHRO + L&D · wks 4–10
04
Re-run the AI Readiness read in 90 days
Track movement by group · wk 12+
Redacted sample
Section 01p. 3
Executive summary
One page your CEO will read
3
findings that change a decision
91%
of the workforce heard
Redacted sample
Section 04p. 41
Theme map
Where sentiment splits by group
Frontline34
Middle mgmt47
Technical78
Executive86
A 52-point gap between the executive team and the frontline on the same question.
Redacted sample
Section 05p. 52
90-day roadmap
Sequenced, with owners
01
Name the role question out loud
CEO memo + manager script · wks 1–2
02
Recruit 40 adoption champions
Already identified by name · wks 3–6
03
Tie AI training to a retention promise
CHRO + L&D · wks 6–12
Representative excerpt. Client name, team names, and identifying details anonymized.
The model
The instrument listens at scale. The people who built it interpret.
For nearly a decade, NICH+Culture did this work in person. Sat across the table, asked the open question, followed the thread. We could do it with sixty people a year. Emersen does it with all of them, and every conversation is read against the framework by the people who spent those years doing it by hand. Software alone gives you a score. Consultants alone give you a sample. Emersen gives you the whole workforce, understood.
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I.
Listen
Our AI agents have real, voice-led conversations with every person in your workforce. The conversations adapt as they unfold, surfacing what your people are thinking, feeling, and ready for as AI reshapes their work.
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Strategize
NICH partners synthesize the findings into a consolidated picture of where your culture stands today and develop a strategic roadmap your leadership can commit to. Human judgment informed by AI-scale evidence and by nearly a decade of culture practice.
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III.
Activate
Strategy only works when people experience it. We bring the roadmap to life through the capabilities that have defined NICH+Culture since the beginning: culture campaigns, leadership communications, onboarding and training content, storytelling, experiential design, and visual identity systems.
This arc is what makes Emersen fundamentally different from any standalone assessment tool. The findings are not the outcome. They are the beginning.
Enterprise-grade by design
Built to pass enterprise review, not work around it.
CHROs rightly ask: if we open our organization to a voice-based listening tool, where does the data go, who has access, and what happens to what our employees share? Emersen runs on a dedicated, standalone model, not a shared cloud environment, never a consumer AI platform.
Isolated infrastructure
Each client deployment operates in a contained, client-specific environment.
No shared model training
Employee conversations are never used to train external or shared AI models.
Data residency controls
Data is stored and processed in compliance with your organizational and regulatory requirements.
Access control
Only authorized NICH personnel with a defined role in the engagement can access conversation data.
Data disposal
Client data can be permanently deleted on request, consistent with GDPR's right to be forgotten.
Confidential by default
What employees share informs NICH's insights and goes nowhere else. We never sell data.
Because Emersen is built on isolated infrastructure with no shared model training, your security, legal, and AI governance teams can approve deployment faster, the architecture was designed for enterprise review from the start.
What we believe
Meaningful work leads to meaningful lives.
That has been the NICH purpose from the beginning, and it's only possible when organizations truly know what their people are experiencing. AI will test that proposition more than anything in modern memory.
It is both the greatest threat to that purpose and, handled well, one of its greatest enablers. We are not claiming AI replaces human insight, we are claiming it scales it. The organizations that listen to their people now are the ones that will retain them, retrain them, and place them where they can succeed in whatever the future of work becomes.
Be part of the pilot
A workforce shift is underway.
A workforce shift is underway.
Don't get it wrong.
We're selecting a small group of organizations for the Emersen pilot. You'll get a NICH partner, a consolidated read on where your workforce stands today, and a roadmap your leadership can act on, at a moment when the cost of getting the AI workforce shift wrong is compounding. Forty-five minutes is enough to see whether it fits.