Administration of Employee Engagement

Engagement Administration

The employee engagement module offers a couple of administrative functions that allow for managing the frequency or cadence of employee pulse surveys and the definition of cohorts of employees for the analytics dashboard.

Pulse Surveys

The PerformYard Employee Engagement and Satisfaction module relies on regularly sending surveys to company employees with questions contributing to scoring engagement, satisfaction, and eNPS scores.  The settings on the Pulse Surveys tab allow you to control if surveys should be sent and how often these surveys should be sent to employees.

Enabling Pulse Surveys

The Enable Pulse Survey toggle controls whether surveys can be sent to employees.    When toggled on, PerformYard will send out surveys according to the preferences for Survey Frequency. When toggled off, PerformYard will not send out surveys.  

Setting the next Survey Date

PerformYard will default to sending the next survey the day after enabling pulse surveys when no prior survey has been sent.  Setting a specific next survey date establishes the first date in the recurrence for the selected survey frequency.  The small schedule preview display will show the expected dates for the next four surveys based on the selected settings.

Setting a Preferred Time for Surveys

You can schedule surveys to be sent at a time that works best for your organization. The available options are morning, mid-day, afternoon, and evening. These times are based on your company’s timezone and generally align with the following:

• Morning – Around 9 AM
• Mid-day – Around 12 PM
• Afternoon – Around 4 PM
• Evening – Around 7 PM

Please note that these times are approximate and not guaranteed. While we aim to send surveys within these general timeframes, actual delivery times may vary.

Sending Reminders

In addition to sending the survey email at the start of the survey period, it is also possible to have PerformYard automatically send reminder emails to those employees who have not yet answered the survey.  By default, reminder emails are not enabled to minimize the emails your employees receive. When enabled, PerformYard will send a reminder email to those employees who have not yet responded to their survey after 3 days and a second reminder after one week.  A third reminder is sent for less frequent surveys after four weeks.

Controlling the Survey Frequency

The survey will be sent to employees (all employees) at the frequency selected.  A higher frequency will allow for a better month-over-month comparison of changes in satisfaction and engagement across the company.

Controlling the Frequency of the Factor Questions

In addition to managing the frequency of the surveys, you can also control the frequency of including Satisfaction Factor questions on surveys, potentially electing to capture Factor questions more or less frequently than the eNPS question.

Controlling the Frequency of the eNPS Question 

As with the ability to control the frequency of inclusion of the Factor questions on surveys, you can also control the frequency of the eNPS question, potentially electing to capture eNPS more frequently from employees throughout the year or excluding the eNPS question from all surveys.

Enabling the Additional eNPS Feedback Question

In addition to controlling the frequency of the eNPS question, you can enable the presence of a long answer field that prompts your survey recipients to provide more information about why they provided a particular eNPS score. Using the Set Feedback Ranges field is where you can configure when the additional feedback field appears or even if you only want to ask for more information from your detractors or promoters instead of requiring both ranges to answer the question.

Controlling the Frequency of Custom Questions

As with Factor and eNPS questions, it is possible to control how often Custom Questions should be included in surveys. By default, custom questions are not included, but you can choose to have them on every survey or to control the frequency to be less often, for example, every other survey. 

Pulse surveys have a fixed number of questions, and the number of questions is based on the survey frequency.  More frequent surveys include fewer questions, while less frequent surveys include more questions.  In the case of custom questions, they are selected randomly from the list of enabled custom questions alongside the built-in questions.  As a result, there is no guarantee that any particular custom question or number of custom questions will be included in any given survey. The Include all custom questions option allows you to force them to be included. 

Including All Custom Questions

The option to "Include all custom questions" bypasses the random selection approach and forces the survey to include all your currently enabled custom questions.  Many companies have a few questions they "always want to ask," and this option allows for that scenario.  Remember that this option can potentially result in a large survey if there are many custom questions.

You can learn more about custom engagement questions here.

Controlling End of Survey Additional Feedback Questions

Similarly to our other question types, administrators can enable a question to be posed at the end of a survey that asks the recipient for any additional feedback not already covered by previous questions in the survey. These questions can have their frequency controlled in the same way as our standard and custom question frequencies.

Once enabled, the additional feedback question will be noted in the survey cadence section.

Employee Cohorts

A cohort is a group of employees for analysis in the analytics dashboard.  Individual employees can belong to more than one cohort; for example, you may define a cohort of East Coast employees and engineering employees.  An engineer who works on the East Coast would potentially be a member of both cohorts.   Cohorts can be defined manually as a fixed list of specific employees, which are called static cohorts or can be defined as rules based on employee attributes, which are called dynamic cohorts.

Creating a Static Cohort

To create a new static employee cohort, you'll need to provide four pieces of information:

Analytics for New Cohorts

When a new cohort is created, PerformYard will revisit all past surveys answered by the cohort members and associate those survey results with the analytics for the newly created cohort.  This allows an HR Administrator to define cohorts even after surveys have been collected from employees.  Please note that this behavior of revisiting past survey results only applies to new cohorts.  Editing existing cohorts only affects analytics in a go-forward manner (see below.)

Creating a Dynamic Cohort

Dynamic Cohorts, like Static Cohorts, represent a list of employees.  Dynamic Cohorts, however, are based on rules instead of a manually managed list of employees.  PerformYard can automatically keep the list of members for the cohort "up to date" for those employees that match the rules of the Cohort.  For example, an HR administrator might define a cohort that represents all the employees from the East Coast by defining a rule matching employee attributes for location.  Alternatively, an HR Administrator may want to create an employee cohort representing newer employees with a hire date less than 90 days from the day they answered their engagement survey.

To create a new dynamic employee cohort, you'll need to provide four pieces of information:

Editing an Existing Cohort

Cohorts can be edited and modified at any time by selecting Edit from the list of cohorts.

Impact on Analytics of Adding and Removing Members from an Existing Cohort

Historical analytics about the cohort will reflect the cohort's membership when the surveys were answered. Changes to membership of an existing cohort are "go forward" changes.  Any newly added members' survey answers will contribute to the cohort's future scores and will not affect the cohort's past results.