Administration of Employee Engagement

Engagement Administration

Pulse Survey Settings

The Engagement module offers a variety of administrative functions that allow you to manage the details of your pulse surveys and employee cohorts. To manage pulse survey details, navigate to the Pulse Survey Settings page under the Engagement administration. This page is organized into three tabs: 

• Settings - Configure your pulse survey schedule, frequency, timing, and reminders.
• Questions - Choose how questions are selected and manage which questions appear in your surveys.
• Current Pulse - View real-time participation data, take action on your active survey, and review reminder history.

Settings Tab

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 tab allows 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.  

Specifying Employee Status

This setting builds upon the toggle above by allowing a company to specify the status an employee must reflect in order to receive a pulse survey. Active employees are selected by default, but users can expand pulse survey distribution to invited employees by changing the selection to Invited.

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 – Not before 9 AM
• Mid-day – Not before 12 PM
• Afternoon – Not before 4 PM
• Evening – Not before 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 the initial survey email sent at the start of the survey period, you can choose to have PerformYard automatically send reminder emails to employees who haven't completed the survey.

By default, reminders are turned off to reduce email volume. When enabled, PerformYard will send up to three reminders:

• 1st reminder: 3 business days after the survey starts
• 2nd reminder: 7 business days after the survey starts
• 3rd reminder (for less frequent surveys only): 20 business days (4 weeks) after the survey starts

Reminders are only sent on weekdays. If a reminder falls on a weekend, it will be sent the following Monday.

If reminders are enabled, you'll also see the upcoming reminder schedule on the survey settings page to help you coordinate any additional outreach.

Sending Manual Reminders

Manual pulse survey reminders are a useful way to follow up with participants outside of PerformYard's automated reminder schedule.

By default, manual reminders are subject to a 3-day cooldown period and are also disabled for 24 hours in advance of or following any automated reminder. This helps prevent employees from receiving too many notifications in a short time. When the manual reminder option is disabled, PerformYard will always display when it will next be available regardless of what activity imposed a block.

Controlling the Survey Frequency

The survey will be sent to all employees at the selected frequency. Higher frequencies enable better month-over-month comparisons of satisfaction and engagement trends across the company.

The number of questions per survey automatically adjusts based on the chosen frequency. More frequent surveys will include fewer questions, while less frequent surveys will include more questions to ensure broad coverage of satisfaction and engagement factors.

The total number of questions depends on the selected frequency and which question types—eNPS, Factors, Additional Feedback, and Custom Questions—are included. eNPS and Factor questions are grouped and treated as a single block. If eNPS is excluded, the system will automatically add an additional Factor question to maintain the expected number of questions for that block based on the survey frequency.

In contrast, Additional Feedback and Custom Questions are always additive. If these are included, they will directly increase the total question count.

Note that regardless of the frequency or number of questions, employees are not required to answer all questions.

Questions Tab

Specifying the Question Selection Method

In the Questions tab of the Pulse Survey Settings, admins can choose how questions are assigned to participants and the frequency to include various questions in the pulse surveys. PerformYard offers two options for determining how questions are assigned to participants:

• Automatic Selection (default) - Questions are randomly assigned to participants based on the question type frequency settings. This is the default for all organizations.
• Manual Selection -  Admins can select a specific set of questions that all survey participants will receive. This ensures every participant sees the exact same questions in the same order, which is useful for organizations that need consistent, comparable results across their survey program. 

Configuring Manual Question Selection

To switch from the default automatic selection method to manually selecting your pulse survey questions, navigate to the Question Selection Method dropdown and select the Manual Selection option.

Once Manual Selection is selected, admins can use the question management interface to select up to 32 questions to include in the pulse surveys. Please note that disabled questions will not be available for selection. To get started, click the Manage Questions button.

Within the question management interface, admins can search by question title and toggle between viewing all available questions or a refined view showing only selected questions. A warning will display once the 32 question limit has been reached.

View All Available Questions

View Only Selected Questions

After making the desired selections, click the Complete Selection button to return back to the Questions tab. From here, admins can drag and drop their selected questions to set the order in which they will appear in the pulse survey.

Controlling Question Frequency

Organizations opting in to the Manual Selection method are also able to control how often the eNPS question, additional feedback question, and manually selected questions are asked in their pulse surveys. The frequency for each can be defined in the dropdown settings titled Ask eNPS Question, Ask Additional Feedback Question, and Ask Manually Selected Questions.

Organizations set up with an Automatic Selection method are also able to control question frequency. This information can be defined in the dropdown settings titled Ask Core Factor Questions, Ask eNPS Question, Ask Custom Factor Questions, and Ask Additional Feedback Question. 

By separating into separate dropdown settings, admins can set up their pulse surveys to capture Factor questions more or less frequently than the eNPS question, exclude the eNPS question entirely, or capture the eNPS question more frequently than the Custom and Factor questions. More information about these settings can be found below: 

• Additional eNPS Feedback Question (Ask eNPS Question) - Admins can enable a long answer field that prompts survey recipients to provide more information about why they provided a particular eNPS score. Using the Set Feedback Ranges field, 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.
• Include All Custom Questions (Ask Custom Factor Questions) - By default, custom questions are not included. Pulse surveys using an Automatic Selection method have a fixed number of questions based on the survey frequency. More frequent surveys include fewer questions, while less frequent surveys include more questions. As a result, custom questions are selected randomly from the list of enabled custom questions alongside the built-in questions. The option to "Include all custom questions" bypasses the random selection approach and forces the survey to include all currently enabled custom questions. You can learn more about custom engagement questions here.
• Additional Feedback Question - Admins 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.

Current Pulse Tab

On the Current Pulse tab, admins have access to current survey insights including the number of days until the pulse survey closes, its question configuration, and participation rate. Beneath this high level overview information, various actions can be taken on the current active survey. Specifically, you can trigger manual reminders or choose to close the survey entirely. Before manually triggering reminder emails, review the information reported in the gray box below the Manual Reminder setting. This section provides helpful context about the survey's reminder history and scheduled reminders to help admins determine the best time to send follow up reminders. To move forward with triggering manual reminder emails, click the Send Reminder button. To stop capturing responses and close the survey entirely, click the Close pulse button.

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 (static) or as rules based on employee attributes (dynamic). To create and manage cohorts, navigate to the Employee Cohorts page listed under the Administration > Engagement settings. 

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 selected list of employees.  PerformYard will automatically update the list of members to match the rules it was set up with. For example, an HR administrator can create a cohort to represent all East Coast employees 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.  

Archiving and Reactivating Cohorts

In addition to editing, PerformYard also offers the ability to archive and delete cohorts. If an active cohort is no longer needed, you can archive it to remove the group from your dashboard reporting. To archive a cohort, click the action menu in the cohort row and select Archive. You can view the list of archived cohorts by navigating to the Archived tab at the top of the Employee Cohorts page.

Archiving a cohort

View archived cohorts

To add an archived cohort back to your dashboard and start measuring its engagement data again, you can restore the cohort by clicking the action menu and selecting Reactivate. The module allows an organization to have up to 100 archived cohorts at a time. To delete a cohort entirely, select the option to Delete. It is important to note that cohorts cannot be recovered once they've been deleted.