CASE STUDIES / INFLAMMATIX
CASE STUDY · BIOTECHNOLOGY · MOLECULAR DIAGNOSTICS
Small Enough That Everyone Would Know Who Said It.
Inflammatix
San Francisco Bay Area, California
Inflammatix is a molecular diagnostics company where folks analyzing employee data were colleagues of the people providing it. They hired us to find out what their workforce actually thought. The instrument had to earn that honesty before it could measure anything.
SECTOR
Biotechnology · host-response molecular diagnostics
PROFILE
Venture-backed scientific startup, hybrid and global facing
ENGAGEMENT
Multi-phase engagement, 2020–2021
SERVICES
Employee listening · organizational strategy · executive advisory · leadership development
IN BRIEF
What Changed.
Inflammatix builds diagnostics that read a patient’s immune response rather than hunting for the pathogen. Their workforce is small, highly scientific, and spread across time zones. Their people already cared about this work. An employee committee was running before we arrived.
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They hired us to find out what the whole company thought, not just the volunteers, and to turn that into a plan the committee could run themselves.
A listening program designed around a headcount too small to guarantee anonymity by default.
A strategy the committee could execute without us, anchored on their own demographic baseline.
An employee resource group that traces back to the survey and was still running three years later.
THE CHALLENGE
In A Company This Size, The Honest Answer Is The Risky One.
Several departments at Inflammatix were small enough that selecting one on a survey would identify a single person. The colleagues who would help interpret the results sat next to the people giving them. A standard engagement survey run at that scale does not produce candor. It produces silence, or polite noise that leadership then acts on as though it were real.
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They also already had a committee, subcommittees and volunteers who cared about the work. What they did not have was a read on the rest of the company, or a plan that could outlive any one volunteer’s enthusiasm.
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The brief was not to build a program. It was to find out what was actually true across the whole organization, in a setting where telling the truth carried a personal cost.
THE APPROACH
Earn The Candor First. Then Measure. Then Hand It Over.
We designed every stage around one constraint: at this scale, people will only tell you the truth if you have shown them it is safe to.
We open with a listening session, not an instrument.
Before any survey went out we facilitated a company-wide session and set the terms explicitly: a safe zone, a judgment free zone, no retaliation. Employees submitted questions anonymously in advance so the hardest ones actually got asked. The CEO opened it himself and spoke candidly about his own thinking. People decide whether to be honest with you by watching what happens to the first person who is.
01
We design the instrument around the constraint, not despite it.
We built the survey with the committee rather than for them, and made anonymity the governing requirement rather than a footnote. Where a department was small enough to identify one person, we combined it with an adjacent one. Every question was optional. Screening questions were placed so answers could be interpreted without exposing who wrote them. A scientific population will interrogate your methodology, and they should.
02
We establish the baseline before we recommend anything.
We took the company’s own workforce reporting and built it into a point-in-time picture of where they were starting from. Without that, every later claim about progress is an opinion. With it, the next conversation is about evidence.
03
We write the plan for the people who have to run it.
We presented findings to the executive team and then to the committee itself, and delivered a strategy with named objectives and tasks written to be executed by volunteers with demanding day jobs. The real test of a plan at this scale is whether it survives someone’s manager asking why they were in a committee meeting.
04
We hand over the analysis, not just the summary.
The client received the full report and every individual response. What gets shared internally is their decision, not ours. This committee was led by working scientists who did not want a vendor dashboard. They wanted the data, and they were more than capable of reading it.
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WHAT CHANGED
The Clearest Sign It Worked Is That They Took It From Here.
We do not publish survey results for this client. What we can tell you is what happened afterward, which is the part that actually matters.
THEY CHOSE TO SELF-RUN
The engagement ended because they were ready to run it.
Leadership reviewed the deliverables, looked at the goals they had set, and decided they wanted to tackle those themselves. They told us so in writing. That is the outcome we design for, and it is the reason the work stopped.
THE PLAN OUTLIVED THE ENGAGEMENT
The committee was still working these goals three years on.
Through a company relocation, a commercial ramp and repeated resource constraints, the structure held and the committee kept moving. Plans written for volunteers with day jobs have to survive exactly those conditions.
THE LISTENING PROVED SOMETHING REAL
Employees asked for a resource group, and the company built one.
Interest surfaced in the survey responses. Inflammatix launched a women’s resource group with its own channel, workshops and career development programming. It was still running three years after we stopped invoicing.
A listening program is only worth running if somebody acts on what it finds. The strongest evidence we have from this engagement is not a score. It is that a group of employees asked for something in a survey, the company built it, and it was still there years after we left.
“Everyone is so amazed with where we started and how far we’ve come, in huge part because of your contributions, insights, and keeping us on track.”
Tawny Darling
Director of People Operations, Inflammatix
THE OUTCOME
They Can Run It Without Us, And They Have.
Inflammatix started this engagement with a committee, good intentions and no reliable read on what the wider company believed. They finished it with a baseline, a plan written to their own constraints, and the confidence to execute it themselves.
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The resource group is the part we point to. It began as interest expressed in survey responses, it became a standing employee group with its own programming, and it was still running years later through layoffs and a company move. That is what a listening program is for. Not the report, but the thing the report makes possible.
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If your organization is small enough that people hesitate before answering honestly, that is a design problem before it is a culture problem. It is the one we would start with.
MORE PROOF
What Changed After We Left.
Retention
NONPROFIT · DISABILITY SERVICES
In a sector built on turnover, more of Las Trampas’ people plan to stay.
Cascade
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENTS
Head office thought the message had landed. The field said otherwise.
Culture
MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT