Our Story
Transforming employee feedback into decision-grade intelligence
The Founders
Thomas Hawighorst
Co-Founder
Thomas spent most of his career inside organizations, as an HR executive in Fortune 500 companies and as a top management consultant at McKinsey. He worked with supervisory boards, investors and leadership teams of companies large and small. They genuinely wanted to improve performance and culture but were flying blind when it came to what was actually happening inside their organization. They had dashboards for finance, operations, customers — but when it came to people and execution, they relied on anecdotes, gut feeling, or employee surveys that did not tell the full story.
Craig Saunders, PhD
Co-Founder
Craig comes from a different direction. He spent the last twenty five years building and leading AI and machine-learning systems at large tech companies like Amazon. He has worked with the best of the best in the field and has incredible insights into all things AI. He has a Ph.D. in machine learning. His world is about extracting signal from noisy, unstructured data — at scale, and with scientific rigor. Craig has also led teams and multi-skilled departments of over 200 people. He is known as a leader and an AI expert: it is talent and culture first and technology second.
The Shared Insight
People were always central to business success, but in the AI age, they become the last remaining competitive advantage. As AI makes building products faster and cheaper for everyone, the technical playing field levels out. This leaves the quality of your people and culture as the last true differentiator. The right analytics can surface the human patterns that drive this, even when people are harder to measure than financials.
At some point we realized we were looking at the same gap. Organizations either measure the wrong things or generate enormous amounts of data through employee feedback, interviews, surveys, and comments — but almost all of it is wasted, because it is too complex and inconclusive.
It's not an easy task. Employees can be messy and fuzzy when asked for their views. What they really think and how they behave cannot be captured in numbers. With the right analytics and expertise about organizational effectiveness, though, it becomes very clear what employees really need and what management can improve.
What We Built
That's exactly what we built at Survey Springboard.
A simple and fast way of gathering rich, qualitative employee feedback — not numbers.
AI-driven analytics and organizational expertise to separate relevant signals from noise.
Immediately actionable insights without further delays to understand the data.
Our surveys turn open employee feedback into decision-grade intelligence. They don't measure "engagement." They surface patterns, blockers, and leverage points that leadership teams can actually act on. The AI does the heavy lifting — structuring, clustering, cross-validating — but the logic is grounded in how organizations really work.
The Point Is Clarity
The point is not AI for its own sake. The point is clarity.
When leaders use Survey Springboard, they don't get more data. They get fewer, sharper conversations — and better decisions about where to focus, what to fix, and what to protect.
Why We Founded Survey Springboard
Our Vision
To fundamentally change how organizations understand the relevant signals from their employees quickly so they can act swiftly — so people, and the business, improve.
The Problem
Traditional employee surveys work against this vision. They are often long, complex, and drain the very people they're meant to understand. When results finally arrive, they rarely drive real change. Leadership delegates the problem down, and managers are left holding the bag. Most providers compound this with multi-year lock-ins that limit you to a single snapshot of your people per year — exactly when agility matters most.
For decades, the employee survey industry has optimized for measurement, benchmarks, and comparability. They produce scores that feel scientific but rarely help leaders understand what is actually blocking performance. As a result, companies run surveys, discuss results, and repeat the process without meaningful change. The consequence: response rates decline as employees get tired of sharing their views without seeing much of an improvement that affects their daily work.
A Better Way
Survey Springboard gives customers the right insights that drive the right conversations and actions — the only way to effectively change at speed. What we want is behaviors across the organization to change when and where needed, at every level, so people, and the business improve. It starts with listening to employees in their own words and then translating what they say into clear, actionable insights to improve work culture and performance simultaneously.
We know that real insight comes from language, not scores, and that modern AI makes it possible to extract structure, meaning, and ultimately performance relevance from open employee feedback at scale. Our approach combines deep HR and leadership expertise with rigorous, applied AI to reveal the concrete organizational issues that matter for execution and results.
Our Ambition
We are building the future of employee intelligence — where every voice is heard, every insight is actionable, and every organization can move faster because they truly understand their people.