AQai analysed 19,713 first AQ assessments from January 2020 to 1 October 2026. The employer accounts for 6.8% of the difference in Work Environment readings, and every large organisation holds both Low and High. Here is what the data shows, what it does not, and what a team leader can do.
No. In AQai's analysis of 19,713 first AQ assessments, completed between January 2020 and 1 October 2026, the organisation someone works for accounts for 6.8% of the difference between people's AQ Work Environment readings, and every one of the 124 organisations with 30 or more people assessed contained people in the Low band and the High band at the same time. AQ Work Environment measures whether trying something new is safe and ordinary where a person works. It is not the building, the perks or the tools.
Work Environment is one of the five sub-dimensions of AQ-Environment, the part of the A.C.E. model of Adaptability Intelligence (AQ) that describes a person's surroundings rather than the person. This article sets out what it measures, what the data says about where those conditions sit, what it does not say, and what a team leader can do without owning the culture.
AQ Work Environment measures whether your organisation facilitates and encourages self-disruption, rapid experimentation and regular adaptation, or hampers them. The question behind it is: "Does your organization facilitate and encourage self disruption, rapid experimentation, and regular adaption, or does it hamper them?" In plain terms, it asks whether trying something new is safe and ordinary where you work.
It has three bands, Low, Medium and High. Low is the difficult end and High is the good end:
One note on language. "Disruption" reads as rebellious to many audiences, and "ongoing improvement" is often the more accurate and more welcome way to describe the same thing in a change conversation. Unlike some AQ spectrums, this is not a preference with two equally good ends. There is a better end, and raising it is a legitimate goal. It is also, in part, outside any one person's control.
No. A low reading describes the conditions around someone, not their ability or their character. In our data, 15.0% of the people in the High band for AQ-Ability sit in the Low band for Work Environment. That is 971 people with strong capability to adapt, working inside a place that does not move.
The research behind this is the work on psychological safety (Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization) and on job demands and resources (Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti). The conditions people work in change what they are able to attempt, independently of what they are able to do.
Less than most people expect. We looked at the 124 organisations with 30 or more people assessed (12,405 people). Not one of them is a single band. All 124 contain Low-band and High-band people at the same time, and the median organisation has 26% of its people in Low alongside 40% in High. Inside a typical organisation, the gap between the lowest and highest readings covers 68 points on a scale that runs from 10 to 98.
Here is the clearest way to put it. Take any two people at random and they will differ on this. If the only thing you knew about each of them was which company they work for, you would account for about 7% of that difference. The other 93% is somewhere else. For comparison, these are the figures for other factors, adjusted so that a factor with many categories does not get credit it earned by chance:
The employer is the largest single factor we measured, so this changes where the work lands, not whether culture work is worth doing. Where we can see teams of 10 or more inside organisations with at least 3 such teams (264 teams across 37 organisations), team identity accounts for a further 2.9% after the organisation average is removed. This does not say culture is unimportant. It says company-wide culture only reaches so far, and this analysis cannot name what sits closer to the person.
Yes, but the gap is small, and seniority is a tilt, not the cause. The share of people in the Low band falls with seniority, and the share in the High band rises:
Executives and entry-level staff sit about 6 points apart on the 10 to 98 scale. The obvious objection is that organisations differ in how senior their assessed population is. So we measured every person against the average of their own organisation. The executive to entry-level gap falls from 6.0 points across the whole population to 2.75 points inside the same organisation. That is real, and far too small to account for a 68-point spread inside a typical organisation.
This is association, not causation. It says the people with the most authority over the conditions report the best conditions. It does not say seniority creates a better environment, and job level accounts for 1.6% of the difference between people.
We do not know, and probably all three explanations are operating. The data shows that the variation is local. It does not show what is producing it. Three explanations are live:
Where a client asks which one it is, the honest answer is that we do not know, and finding out inside their business is a piece of work.
No. They are close, and they ask different questions. Team Support asks "Can I speak here?": share a problem, ask for help, disagree and be fine. Work Environment asks "Does anything change here?": try something new, retire the old way, see a good idea travel. One is about safety and the other is about movement. You can be perfectly safe in a place that never changes.
The two correlate at 0.71, which is large on our rubric (0.10 is small, 0.30 medium and 0.50 large). They still land in different bands for 39.8% of people. 541 people hold High Team Support with Low Work Environment: supportive colleagues inside an organisation that does not change. 456 hold the reverse, an open organisation they cannot lean on.
Holding Company Support constant, Work Environment still tracks Team Support at 0.62. Holding Team Support constant, the relationship with Company Support falls to 0.25. The nearer neighbour is the team, not the company. As always, correlation does not mean causation, and both measures come from the same instrument at the same sitting, so some shared method variance is expected.
Not automatically. Permission is not appetite. Drive to explore, measured by the AQ Explore & Transform sub-dimension, correlates 0.49 with Mental Flexibility and 0.46 with the AQ-Ability composite. It correlates 0.29 with Work Environment. That is the strongest of any environment measure, and still just short of medium. It falls to 0.12 once the Ability composite is held constant.
The bands tell the same story. Among people in the High band for Work Environment, 23.6% (1,757 people) are still in the Low band for drive to explore: permission without appetite. Among people in the Low band for Work Environment, 26.6% (1,490 people) are in the High band for drive to explore anyway. An open environment removes the cost of exploring. It does not supply the appetite, which is an AQ-Ability question.
Late, in AQai's mapping of the A.C.E. model to ADKAR: at Ability and Reinforcement, and most of all at Reinforcement. People in a Low-band environment know the change is coming, and often want it. It bites where the first attempt has a cost, and where what happens to the person who tried decides whether anyone tries again.
This is our reading of the framework, not a finding from the data. Used alongside Prosci's ADKAR, which gives the sequence people move through, it points to where the conditions may stall that sequence. Where a transformation has already stalled, Work Environment is measurable before the next one starts.
Work at the level you can change: your team, your project and your one-to-ones. Each of these four moves works at any level of seniority, and none needs authority over the whole culture.
Two approaches tend to fail. One is taking a low reading to the board, calling it a culture problem and waiting. The other is opening up the environment and expecting exploring to follow. What works instead is finding the team the person is actually in, and moving one practice from inside that team to outside it. It sounds too small to matter, and the pocket is where this lives.
If you run this with a team, do not open on the team average. The median organisation holds 26% Low alongside 40% High, so an average hides the spread. Open on the spread instead: ask the team what it means that people sitting next to each other are reading the same place differently.
These are the limits we would want anyone quoting these figures to keep attached.
AQ Work Environment is a sub-dimension of AQ-Environment that asks whether your organisation facilitates and encourages self-disruption, rapid experimentation and regular adaptation, or hampers them. It has three bands, Low, Medium and High, and it describes the conditions around a person, not the person.
No. It measures the conditions for self-disruption, experimentation and adaptation. Nothing in AQai's research data records whether anyone invented, shipped or improved anything, so a High reading does not show that an organisation is innovative.
Only in part. In AQai's analysis of 19,713 first AQ assessments, the employer accounts for 6.8% of the difference between people's Work Environment readings, and all 124 organisations with 30 or more people assessed contained both Low-band and High-band people. Culture matters, but company-wide culture only reaches so far.
Team Support asks whether you can speak, share a problem and ask for help. Work Environment asks whether anything actually changes. The two correlate at 0.71 but land in different bands for 39.8% of people, so it is possible to have supportive colleagues inside an organisation that does not change.
Work at the level you control: your team, your project and your one-to-ones. Run a small safe-to-fail experiment on a repeating cycle, share the result outside your team, retire one thing on purpose, and protect that pocket of practice. These four moves do not need authority over the whole culture.
Start with one question in your next team conversation: name the last thing this place stopped doing on purpose. If you want to see where you or your team sit on Work Environment and the rest of the A.C.E. model, explore the AQme assessment or read how AQ is measured.
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