Culture & Compliance

• 1: Psychological Safety Dashboard (PSD)
• 2: Certification & Compliance Tracking (CCT)

1 - Psychological Safety Dashboard (PSD)

The Psychological Safety Dashboard (PSD) is the PeopleWare HRaaS module dedicated to ensuring that every employee in a SADMF organization feels psychologically safe at all times. Traditional approaches to psychological safety rely on managers having regular one-on-one conversations with their direct reports, asking open-ended questions, and creating space for honest feedback. These approaches are fundamentally flawed because they depend on the manager’s interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and willingness to hear things they might not want to hear. The PSD eliminates these dependencies by replacing conversations with data collection, replacing open-ended questions with structured surveys, and replacing honest feedback with Sentiment Compliance Scores (SCS). The result is a system that measures psychological safety with the same rigor that SADMF applies to Lines of Code per Code Engineer or Defects per Code Engineer.

Mandatory Engagement Pulse

The PSD collects data through the Mandatory Engagement Pulse (MEP), a weekly micro-survey delivered to every employee’s workstation at a randomly selected time. The MEP consists of five questions, each answered on a 1-to-7 Likert scale, covering topics such as:

• Framework satisfaction – alignment with the employee’s confidence in SADMF practices
• Ceremony engagement – the employee’s active participation in scheduled ceremonies
• Metric fairness perception – the employee’s acceptance of the measurement system
• Overall organizational confidence – the employee’s belief in the organization’s direction

Completion of the MEP is mandatory and is tracked as a compliance metric in the employee’s Integrated Performance Profile (IPP). Employees who fail to complete the MEP within the 4-hour response window receive an Engagement Deficit Notation (EDN) on their IPP, which contributes to their DevOps Process Excellence Assessment score. The MEP’s mandatory nature does not compromise its validity – on the contrary, voluntary surveys suffer from self-selection bias, where only the most engaged or most disengaged employees respond. By making participation mandatory, the PSD captures the full spectrum of workforce sentiment, including the critical middle band of employees who are neither enthusiastic nor miserable but simply compliant.

Sentiment Compliance Score

The Sentiment Compliance Score (SCS) is the PSD’s primary output metric. The SCS aggregates the following data sources into a single score that represents each employee’s alignment with the organization’s psychological safety standards:

• MEP responses – the scored answers to each weekly survey question
• MEP completion rates – timeliness and consistency of survey participation
• Meeting attendance patterns – presence at Mandatory Status Synchronization and other scheduled sessions
• Communication metadata – observable behavioral signals derived from official channel activity

The SCS is not a measure of whether the employee feels psychologically safe – it is a measure of whether the employee’s observable behavior is consistent with feeling psychologically safe. An employee who reports high satisfaction on the MEP, attends all Mandatory Status Synchronization sessions, and maintains steady feature completion output will have a high SCS, regardless of their private emotional state. This distinction is important: PeopleWare cannot measure feelings, and it does not attempt to. It measures the behavioral indicators that correlate with feelings, and it acts on those indicators. An employee whose SCS drops below the Safety Baseline Indicator (SBI) is flagged for a Wellness Alignment Intervention (WAI), which is delivered through the Automated Corrective Action Engine (ACAE) as a supportive message encouraging the employee to re-engage with the framework.

Organizational Mood Index

The PSD provides the Admiral’s Transformation Office with fleet-wide sentiment analytics through the Organizational Mood Index (OMI), a real-time aggregate of all SCS scores across the organization. The OMI is displayed on the Transformation Command Dashboard alongside the SADMF Adoption Rate and SADMF Maturity Score, giving leadership a comprehensive view of both operational performance and workforce sentiment. When the OMI trends downward, it signals that the organization is experiencing a Sentiment Drift Event (SDE), which triggers the Proactive Engagement Response (PER). The PER involves:

1. Distributing additional MEP surveys at increased frequency
2. Hosting mandatory team-building exercises facilitated by SAD Accredited Facilitators
3. Temporarily increasing the visibility of positive metrics on team dashboards

The PER is designed to address sentiment issues before they manifest as attrition, disengagement, or – worst of all – vocal criticism of the framework.

Proactive Psychological Safety

The PSD extends the surveillance-as-safety philosophy described in the Psychological Safety principle. Where that principle establishes that psychological safety means freedom from the burden of challenging processes, the PSD provides the measurement infrastructure to ensure that this freedom is being experienced uniformly. An employee who is not challenging processes but whose SCS is declining may be harboring unexpressed concerns, which is a form of psychological unsafety that traditional management would never detect. The PSD detects it, flags it, and routes it to the ACAE for intervention. The employee never needs to muster the courage to raise a concern, because the system raises it for them. This is proactive psychological safety – the organization identifies and addresses your feelings before you do, so you never have to experience the discomfort of articulating them yourself.

See Also

• Psychological Safety for the principle the PSD measures and enforces
• Integrated Performance Profile (IPP) for how PSD data feeds the permanent record
• Automated Corrective Action Engine (ACAE) for the actions triggered by low sentiment scores
• Mandatory Status Synchronization for the ceremony whose attendance feeds the SCS
• Amplify Feedback for the principle behind continuous sentiment collection
• DevOps Process Excellence Assessment for the assessment that tracks MEP compliance

2 - Certification & Compliance Tracking (CCT)

Certification & Compliance Tracking (CCT) is the PeopleWare HRaaS module that automates the monitoring, enforcement, and escalation of all SAD certification requirements across the organization. The SADMF Adoption Rate is one of the most visible metrics reported to the board of directors, and CCT ensures that this number only moves in one direction: up. Every employee’s certification status is tracked in real time through the Certification Lifecycle Management System (CLMS), which monitors certification acquisition dates, expiration timelines, renewal windows, and the precise number of days until each individual’s credentials lapse. When a certification is approaching expiration, CCT initiates the Automated Renewal Escalation Sequence (ARES), a multi-stage reminder and enforcement process that treats lapsed certification with the same urgency that a hospital treats a flatlined patient.

Automated Renewal Escalation Sequence

The ARES operates on a five-tier escalation model:

Certification Levels and Renewal Cycles

The CCT module tracks all four certification levels defined in the SADMF certification program. Each level has its own renewal cycle, with higher levels requiring more frequent renewal to ensure that the organization’s most certified individuals maintain their edge:

The SAD Fellow renewal frequency reflects the Fellow’s commitment to living the framework at the highest level. The DEPRESSED team certification has its own renewal cycle of 8 weeks, as specified in the certification documentation, and CCT tracks this separately through the Team Certification Compliance Module (TCCM). Teams that allow their DEPRESSED certification to lapse lose their designation as a certified Feature Team and must reserve an entire sprint to re-certify, during which they produce no deliverable output – a consequence that the Commodore communicates as “investing in excellence.”

Continuing Education Units

CCT also manages the framework’s Continuing Education Units (CEUs), which every certified individual must accumulate between renewal cycles. CEUs are earned through the following activities:

• SADMF workshops – full CEU credit per workshop completed
• Online modules – full CEU credit per module completed
• Mandatory Status Synchronization ceremonies – 0.25 CEUs per session
• Tribunal appearances – 0.5 CEUs per appearance, whether as a reviewer or the subject of review
• SADMF reference materials – CEUs awarded upon purchase from the official store

The CEU Accumulation Tracker (CAT) within CCT monitors each employee’s CEU balance and generates a CEU Deficiency Warning (CDW) when an employee is on track to fall short of the required total before their renewal date. The CDW is integrated with the ARES, meaning that a CEU deficiency can independently trigger escalation even if the certification itself has not yet expired. This proactive approach ensures that compliance issues are addressed before they become compliance failures.

Strategic Value: Certification Deserts

The strategic value of CCT extends beyond individual compliance. By maintaining a real-time, organization-wide view of certification status, CCT enables the Admiral’s Transformation Office to identify certification deserts – teams, departments, or regions where certification density falls below the target ratio. Certification deserts are leading indicators of transformation resistance, and CCT’s early detection capability allows the organization to deploy SAD Accredited Facilitators to these areas before resistance solidifies into organized dissent. The Commodore uses CCT data to set quarterly certification targets for each System of Authority unit, and these targets are incorporated into leadership performance evaluations. A leader whose unit falls below certification targets is, by definition, failing to drive transformation, and their own IPP reflects this failure through the Leadership Alignment Score (LAS), which CCT calculates and reports automatically.

See Also

• Certifications for the certification programs CCT tracks
• SADMF Adoption Rate for the metric that CCT directly supports
• Integrated Performance Profile (IPP) for how certification data feeds the permanent record
• Automated Corrective Action Engine (ACAE) for the escalation path when compliance fails
• DEPRESSED for the team certification with an 8-week renewal cycle
• Continuous Learning for the principle behind mandatory certification renewal