The employee engagement & workplace wellbeing glossary
Clear, jargon-free definitions of the terms that show up in engagement reports, compliance audits and board decks — written for people who have to act on them, not just cite them. Each entry explains what the term means, how it is measured, and where teams usually get it wrong. Built for HR leaders, people managers and anyone running a listening program.
Employee engagement has its own vocabulary, and it gets mixed up constantly — people use "pulse survey" and "engagement survey" interchangeably, confuse eNPS with an overall engagement score, or treat NOM-035 and ISO 45003 as the same requirement wearing different names. This glossary exists to untangle that, in plain language, before those mix-ups turn into a survey program built on the wrong premise or a compliance file missing the wrong evidence.
Every term here is also a term Bloomder measures. eNPS is tracked automatically every cycle rather than calculated by hand once a year. Psychosocial risk factors map directly onto the questions inside the NOM-035 templates in the product, so the survey and the legal requirement are answering the same question instead of two different ones. Burnout detection is built on the same trend data a pulse survey already produces, so "burnout" is not just a term in a glossary — it is a number the platform is watching in the background of every survey cycle.
Start with the essentials
Pulse Survey
A short, frequently repeated employee survey — usually 3 to 5 questions sent weekly or biweekly — that tracks engagement, workload and wellbeing between annual surveys.
Read more →eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)
A single-question metric that measures how likely employees are to recommend their employer as a place to work, reported on a scale from -100 to +100.
Read more →NOM-035
NOM-035-STPS-2018, the mandatory Mexican standard that requires employers to identify, analyze and prevent psychosocial risk factors in the workplace.
Read more →Psychosocial Risk
Aspects of how work is designed, organized and managed that can cause psychological or physical harm — excessive workload, unclear roles, low control, poor support.
Read more →ISO 45003
The international standard offering guidance on managing psychological health and safety at work inside an occupational health and safety management system.
Read more →Employee Burnout
A syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed — exhaustion, mental distance from the job, and reduced effectiveness.
Read more →How to use this glossary
These terms overlap more than people expect. A pulse survey is the instrument; eNPS is one question you can put inside it; psychosocial risk is the category of problem you are usually looking for; NOM-035 and ISO 45003 are the frameworks that tell you what to look for and how to document it; burnout is the outcome everyone is trying to avoid.
If you are building a listening program from scratch, read Pulse Survey first, then Psychosocial Risk. If you are responding to a compliance requirement in Mexico, start with NOM-035. For deeper practical guides, the Bloomder blog covers running surveys, benchmarking scores and reducing turnover.
Each entry links out to a longer page with the full definition, how the metric or requirement is typically measured, and common mistakes teams make when they first encounter it. Where a term corresponds to something Bloomder does — tracking eNPS, generating a NOM-035-ready export, flagging a team drifting toward burnout — the entry says so directly, so you can go from definition to the feature that acts on it without a second search.
New to the space entirely? Read the six terms above in order once. They build on each other: the survey produces the data, eNPS and psychosocial risk are two ways of reading it, NOM-035 and ISO 45003 are the frameworks that tell you what to document, and burnout is the outcome the whole program exists to catch early.
This glossary is intentionally short. There are longer taxonomies of HR and I/O psychology terms elsewhere, but most of them describe measurement approaches Bloomder does not implement, so defining them here would only create the impression of coverage that does not exist in the product. These six terms are the ones a customer runs into inside the app itself — on a dashboard, in an AI summary, or in a NOM-035 export — which is why they, and not a longer list, are the ones worth defining well. We'll add a term the day it shows up in the product, not before.
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