What your people are told.
What stays private.
The Audit interviews every person on a roster, each in a private room. That only works – methodologically and morally – if the rules are published, plain, and kept. These are the rules. They are written for three readers at once: the owner buying the Audit, the team member sitting the interview, and the HR adviser checking both of their backs.
The Promise comes first
Before any interview opens, every member of the team receives the same written promise from their own leadership, in words they can keep and re-read: this work buys capacity, never redundancy. Honest answers move the repetitive work onto machines and the meaningful work toward the people. The method requires this promise because a frightened team answers carefully, and careful answers make a worthless diagnosis. If leadership will not make the promise, we do not run the Audit.
Participation is voluntary, and priced that way
No one is compelled to sit an interview. Each person receives a private invitation and may decline it – without giving a reason, and without the fact of declining being flagged to anyone as a mark against them. The commercial terms are built around this: the client is charged for interviews that happen, not for names on a roster. A declined interview reconciles the invoice down. We would rather hear fewer people honestly than everyone under duress.
The room is private – including from the employer
Each interview happens in that person’s own private room – typed or spoken, their choice, in their own words. What a person says in their room is never shown verbatim to their employer, their manager, or their colleagues. What the business receives is the aggregate: one operating Picture of how the work actually runs, composed from every room, with duplication, bottlenecks and repetitive load visible – and individual voices not. Where a finding could only have come from one identifiable person, it is either generalised or, if that is impossible, left out. One question is treated with special care: what each person wants from their role and career is recorded privately, shapes the redesign, and is never reported to a manager with a name attached.
Who sees what
The interviews are conducted by Industrial Strategic’s assessment instrument and processed by our AI providers under contract, as our processors – they do not use the material to train their models. The verbatim transcripts are seen by Industrial Strategic alone, for the sole purpose of composing the Picture. The employer sees the aggregated Picture, the scored elements, and the costed redesign. Each team member keeps access to their own room and their own People Profile. Kirk J. Torrance reviews and signs every Picture before it reaches the client; no Audit ships unsigned.
Where the data lives, and how it leaves
Interview data is held on Industrial Strategic’s systems in the UK, under the safeguards set out in our privacy policy. Spoken answers are transcribed and the audio is then discarded; only text is kept. The data is used to deliver the engagement the client bought – the Audit, and, where the client keeps the Compass, the quarterly re-marks that follow. It is never sold, never shared for anyone else’s purposes, and never used to benchmark one client against another by name. When an engagement ends and the client asks, the transcripts are deleted; the client keeps everything they bought – the Picture, the reports, their systems – because everything we build lives in the client’s own accounts.
What a team member is told, verbatim
Every invitation carries the same plain text, so there is never a private version of the rules: “You are invited to a thirty-minute interview about the work you actually do – what fills your day, what you would gladly hand to a machine, what only you can do, and what you want more of. Typed or spoken, whichever you prefer. Your room is private: your employer sees the combined picture of how the business runs, never your words. Taking part is your choice. The purpose is written down and it is the only purpose: to move the repetitive work off people and onto machines – the same team, with the hours bought back.”
Questions before an Audit?
Ask them of a person.
HR advisers and boards are welcome to put these rules under a lamp before anything is signed – it is quicker for everyone if the scrutiny happens first.