Why you find out late
The person burning out is the last person who will tell you. Saying it out loud costs them something: it sounds like not coping, it lands in the same conversation as their progression, and by the time they are certain enough to say it they have usually already decided to leave. So the honest answer arrives at the exit interview, which is the one moment it is worth nothing.
Every instrument built to catch it earlier has the same flaw — it is an event. An engagement survey happens quarterly, takes twenty minutes, and is answered by people who know their answers are filed somewhere. A weekly pulse gets a number picked in two seconds to make it go away. A one-to-one asks somebody to volunteer bad news to the one person whose opinion of them matters most. A chat status is set once and left there for a month.
What a leader actually wants is much smaller than any of these: a background sense of the team, current, that nobody had to be asked for. That is what an office gave away free and what remote work took, and it is the only thing weathr does.
What weathr does
The team is a channel. Somebody creates it and lets the team in. Nobody can be put in a channel without accepting: an invitation is never accepted automatically, on any setting, so a team channel holds people who said yes to being in it.
Saying how you are is one tap. One of five symbols — sun, sun and cloud, cloud, rain, storm — at one of four levels. No sentence, no camera, no meeting, and nobody has to be online at the same time as anybody else.
It is blind by default. A blind cast hides who said it and never what was said, so the mood still counts in full. The default is in the app, it resets every time the input opens, and there is no owner's setting that can turn it off for somebody else.
A mood stands until it is replaced, and ages in public. There is no daily form: what somebody said on Monday still counts on Thursday. As it ages the team's signal is drawn weaker, so a team that has gone quiet reads as quiet rather than as fine. A chat status cannot do this — it looks identical on day one and day thirty.
The team becomes weather, and the weather becomes a record. Every half hour weathr takes the proportion of everybody's moods and draws a sky with a temperature and a trend. Hours, days and weeks are sealed and never rewritten, so "it has been raining since the reorganisation" is something you look at rather than argue about. The trend is the part that matters here: one rainy Tuesday is weather, three rainy weeks is a finding.
Every voice weighs the same, including yours. A group's weather is the proportion of its members' moods, not a count of messages, and whoever owns the channel has exactly one voice in it. There is no seat that only watches — a leader who stops casting stops seeing the sky move, like everybody else. Why that is the design and not a limitation is argued in the manifesto.
What it doesn't do
It does not let you drill into a person. No per-person dashboard, history, report or export, and no alert when somebody casts a storm. That is not a gap waiting to be filled. If what you need is per-employee measurement, weathr is the wrong product.
It does not diagnose anything. weathr is not a clinical instrument and makes no assessment of any person. It shows how people say they are, added together, over time. It tells you that the team is under weather, never why, and the answer to a storm is still a conversation.
It is thin cover in a small team. In a team of three or four, a blind storm can be worked out by elimination. Blind hides a name, not arithmetic, and that is worth knowing before you put it on a squad rather than a department.
There is no corporate half yet. No admin console, no single sign-on, no directory sync, no departments above a channel, no Slack or Microsoft Teams app and no billing — a team is one channel, and it is free. An Android app with a home-screen widget is being built.
Compared with what leaders usually have
| Engagement survey | Weekly pulse | One-to-one | weathr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How current it is | Quarterly | Weekly | Fortnightly, per person | Every half hour |
| Effort for each person | Twenty minutes | A form | A meeting | One tap |
| Answered anonymously | Claimed | Sometimes | No | Blind by default |
| Shows when it is out of date | No | No | No | Yes, as a weaker signal |
| The team sees what you see | No | Rarely | No | Always |
| Drills down to a person | Often | Often | It is the point | Never |
Questions
How can a leader tell if the team is burning out?
Not from one answer on one day. What tells you is the same question asked continuously and read as a trend. In weathr each person taps one of five weather symbols for how they are, the team channel draws everyone together as a sky every half hour, and the timeline behind it keeps hours, days and weeks. A fortnight of rain over a team is a reading a quarterly survey cannot give you.
Can I see which person on my team is struggling?
No, and that is deliberate. Casts are blind by default, and there is no owner setting that can make somebody else's cast public. There is no per-person dashboard, no report and no export. A team that knew the sky could be traced back to them would cast what looks good, which is the problem this is meant to solve.
Is weathr an employee monitoring or HR analytics tool?
No. It has no admin console, no per-employee history, no scores, no exports and no integrations to feed. It reads a whole group or nothing, and everyone in the channel sees exactly what the leader sees. If what you need is per-employee measurement, weathr is the wrong product and will stay the wrong product.
How big does a team have to be for the reading to be honest?
Around eight is where blind starts hiding much. The weather itself is a real reading from two people up, but in a team of three or four a blind storm can be worked out by elimination, so the anonymity is thin. Read a small team at the department level, or accept that people know it is not really anonymous.
Does weathr diagnose burnout?
No. It is not a clinical instrument and it makes no assessment of any person. It shows how people say they are, added together, over time. It tells you that the team has been under weather for three weeks, not why and not what to do, and the answer to a storm is still a conversation.