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.
Note: Dashboards will not display results for a cohort, factor, or month if fewer than three unique respondents contribute answers to that question or factor to ensure the anonymity of survey takers.
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.
Note: If you want analytics for an edited cohort to include past surveys, you can duplicate the cohort as a new one. This duplicated cohort will then process analytics for all previous surveys.
However, keep in mind that only responses collected when a member met the cohort criteria will be included. For instance, if Daniel Johnson was in the Sales Team cohort from January 1 to June 1 and then joined the Marketing Team cohort on June 2 due to a change in his data, duplicating the Marketing Team cohort will not include Daniel's responses from before June 2 in its analytics.
This is to avoid situations where duplicating a cohort would incorrectly attribute someone's responses to a team, office, or manager that they were not thinking of at the time of their survey response
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.