Circles
Small peer groups with weekly anonymous reflection prompts. Circles build psychological safety through shared vulnerability, surfacing themes that surveys miss.
What Are Circles?
A circle is a small, stable group of 3-8 colleagues who share a weekly reflection prompt. Responses are submitted anonymously within the circle: members can see what their peers wrote, but not who wrote it. Over time, circles build the habits of candor and mutual support that underlie psychological safety.
Circles vs. Surveys
Surveys measure sentiment at a point in time. Circles build it. Where a pulse survey asks 'Do you feel you belong?', a circle prompt asks 'Share one moment this week when you felt, or didn't feel, like you belonged.' Responses are qualitative, peer-visible, and anonymous. The data feeds into belonging scores; the practice itself changes culture.
How Circles Work
Each circle operates on a weekly cycle.
Prompt assigned
A new prompt is assigned to each circle at the start of the week. Prompts are curated to be open-ended, psychologically safe, and relevant to belonging themes: identity, recognition, inclusion, or team dynamics.
Members respond
Each member has until the end of the response window to submit a free-text reflection. Responses are encrypted and stored without any user identifier, making them truly anonymous within the circle. Members can see responses from their circle as they come in, but never who wrote them.
Summary shared
Once the response window closes, ClimaHQ extracts the top themes from the round using statistical text analysis (TF-IDF), with no AI involved. A summary is shared with the circle and, in aggregate, with HR admins. The raw text of individual responses is never shared outside the circle.
Anonymity in Circles
Circle responses are anonymous to the circle, by design and by architecture.
Technical Guarantee
Responses are stored without a user_id. The only link to the circle member is a response token, a random UUID generated at submission that cannot be reverse-mapped to a user. Even ClimaHQ administrators cannot determine who wrote a specific response.
What the Circle Sees
After the response window closes, circle members can read all submitted responses as a collection, without authorship. They also see the top extracted themes. No individual response is attributed to anyone.
Circle Summaries
Every closed circle round produces a summary available to both circle members and HR admins.
Theme Extraction
ClimaHQ uses TF-IDF statistical analysis to identify the most significant terms and phrases across all responses in a round. Themes are displayed as a ranked list. No AI or language model is involved: the same data always produces the same themes.
HR Admin View
HR admins can view aggregate circle activity (active circles, participation rates, and top themes across all circles) from the HR dashboard. They cannot access individual response text. The active circles count and top themes feed directly into compliance reports.
Build belonging through conversation
Circles are included on all ClimaHQ plans. Start a circle with any team in minutes.