Workforce sessions

A workforce session is a structured conversation format that Soma conducts separately with each invited participant. Admins design the questions and select the audience; Soma runs the interviews, follows up within the design, and prepares a summary of their session together for each participant to review.

The review step supports epistemic justice: participants decide how their perspective is represented before it contributes to the report. They can correct emphasis, remove a point, or clarify what they meant, reducing the risk of system bias.

When enough participants submit approved summaries, admins can conclude the run and create a narrative report across those contributions.

Sessions work well for team listening, onboarding, culture work, and questions that need more depth than a survey response. Open them from Workforce sessions.

Understand sessions and runs

A session is the reusable design: its conversation flow, audience, schedule, conclusion settings, and report scope.

A run is one cycle of that session with a set of participants. A run keeps the published design it opened with. You can edit the session for a future run without changing an interview already in progress.

Create and publish a session

Workspace admins can create and manage sessions.

1. Open Workforce sessions and create a session.
2. Build the conversation in the Session designer.
3. Choose an audience:
   • all members
   • a group
   • selected members
   • new members
4. Choose when a run opens:
   • on demand
   • on a specific date
   • when a member joins the selected organization or group
5. Set the report threshold and the ways an admin can conclude the run.
6. Choose whether a report covers this run or also includes previous runs.
7. Publish the session.

Publishing validates the design. A session can be paused to stop future runs or archived when it is no longer used. Pausing does not stop interviews already underway.

Take part in a session

Participants receive an invitation in their activity feed.

1. Open the invitation and start the conversation.
2. Answer at your own pace. You can leave and return later.
3. At the end, review Soma’s summary.
4. Edit the summary if needed, then submit it.

Only the submitted summary is used for the report. The review step lets each participant correct emphasis, remove a point, or clarify what they meant before contributing it to the shared analysis.

An inactive participant expires after the session’s inactivity period, which is five days by default.

Follow a run

The run view shows participant progress, including how many people are enrolled, in conversation, in review, completed, or expired.

Admins can add participants, conclude or cancel the run, and reopen a run that closed below its report threshold.

Soma notifies admins when the threshold is reached. The threshold counts completed participants and participants currently in review. A run cannot produce a report below its configured minimum.

Create and read the report

Concluding an eligible run starts analysis of the participant-approved summaries. The run shows analysis progress while Soma identifies themes and writes the narrative report.

Report scope can be:

• Thematic — use the current run only.
• Across runs — include previous runs from the session.

Current limits

• Only workspace admins can design and manage sessions.
• Participation requires enrollment. Public invitation links are not available.
• Repeating cadence schedules are not available; open another run on demand.
• A configured close date or duration is not yet enforced automatically. An admin must currently conclude the run.
• Explicit run-over-run comparison reports are not available. The comparison option is currently disabled.
• A run below its participant threshold closes without a report, but can be reopened.
• Interviews count toward the workspace’s interview allowance.

Related features

• Session designer covers questions, routes, references, validation, and publishing.
• Groups can define a session audience or route.
• Attributes can route participants using workspace-defined profile values.
• Pages can provide background for Soma during an interview.
• Privacy applies to participant text and profile context.