More About Employee Cohorts

Employee Cohorts

 The PerformYard Employee Engagement module provides the ability to get company-wide insights into engagement and satisfaction factors based on a periodic survey of all employees.   Employee cohorts represent groups of employees for use in analyzing employee engagement and satisfaction results for subsets of employees (departments, demographics, locations.) Individual employees can be members of multiple cohorts. For example, a new employee, Susan, is based in the east coast office and is a member of the New Hires cohort because she recently started as a new Marketing team member with the company.

Types of Cohorts

PerformYard offers support for two types of cohorts: static cohorts and dynamic cohorts.

Static Cohorts

Static cohorts represent a fixed list of employees that HR Administrators manually manage. Administrators are responsible for remembering to update the cohort to add or remove members as needed, for example, when an employee switches departments and no longer belongs to that cohort.

Dynamic Cohorts

Dynamic cohorts represent rule-based lists of employees that are automatically managed and kept up to date by PerformYard. For example, a cohort of all employees whose Department employee attribute is set to Marketing or employees whose location is set to East Coast.

Cohort Membership

A cohort is made up of zero or more employees.  In the case of dynamic cohorts, the membership can change over time automatically based on the rules defining the cohort.  For static cohorts, the administrator must manually add or remove members from an existing cohort. 

Cohort Analytics

When an employee completes a survey, they can be a member of one or more cohorts, either static cohorts where they were explicitly added as part of a list of employees or possibly in one or more dynamic cohorts where their employee attributes match the rules for the dynamic cohorts.  The employee survey answers are then "counted" towards those cohorts when visualized on the employee engagement and satisfaction dashboard.

Analytics for Newly Created Cohorts

When a new cohort is created, PerformYard will go back in time and look at past surveys to calculate the analytics and metrics for the cohort as if the cohort had been defined before the surveys were answered.  This enables HR Administrators to define new cohorts at any time.

Analytics for Updated Cohorts

Unlike when creating a new cohort, changes to an existing cohort are assumed to be "go forward" because they reflect new membership to a cohort from this point forward. In that case, survey answers by the newly added members should only contribute to future results.  For example, Susan was in the Marketing team the first half of the year but then got promoted to a sales role in the second half.  Any surveys and answers she completed in the first half of the year are associated with the metrics for the Marketing cohort. In contrast, the surveys she finished in the year's second half will be related to the Sales Cohort. 

Analytics for Duplicated Cohorts

As mentioned above, a Duplicated Cohort is treated as a New Cohort whose membership or rules were copied from an existing cohort.  Duplicating cohorts is helpful when creating multiple cohorts with similar members or rules.