About survey and question frequency and how it works

Having the ability to survey your employees more frequently than on an annual basis allows you to move towards a continuous listening approach, which in turn can lead to a positive impact on your employee engagement.

When considering the frequency of your survey, there are two aspects to keep in mind:

• Survey frequency
• Question frequency

Together, they dictate how often employees will receive a survey, and how the questions will be distributed over the surveys. 

This article will contain:

• How survey frequency works
• How question frequency works
• The order of questions
• Continuous listening versus manual surveys
• How frequency works with multiple schedules 

For general information on the survey, see About Peakon surveys and how they work. For information on how to configure your survey frequencies, see Configuration of survey frequency. To better understand Peakon's question sampling algorithm, see Understanding the question algorithm. 

How survey frequency works

The survey frequency dictates how often a new survey round will launch. The available options are:

• Weekly
• Bi-weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Manual
• Custom

Exception: manual mode

The manual mode differs from the other frequency options in that it will only launch once, on the set launch date. It will automatically ask every single active question, from the question categories that have been enabled on the schedule. 

How question frequency works

Question frequency dictates how often each employee will get each question. A survey can include a mix of all question sets (Engagement, Health & Wellbeing...), and the frequency is configured separately for each question set. This means that organizations can control the type of questions that will cover the majority of the survey.

When setting the frequencies for a question category, the frequency option must be chosen on each question type, such as main question, driver questions and subdriver questions.

For most question types, the frequency options range between:

• Always*
• Weekly
• Bi-weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Twice a year
• Yearly
• Custom

* An edge case: when using the 'Always' setting on a Main category question frequency, it will ask the one main question every single time.

Example

• Survey frequency: monthly
• Main question frequency: monthly
• Driver question frequency: monthly
• Subdriver frequency: quarterly

The above set up would ensure that every month each employee would receive a main group question and a driver question every month. This could mean each survey round, but not necessarily.

For example, it could be that an employee completes one monthly survey very late, and the next monthly survey very early. As a result, the difference between the two survey completions is less than 1 month (4 weeks), which means that the algorithm will have already satisfied the required condition for the main question frequency and for the driver question frequencies. It will therefore not ask those questions in this round, and perform the same checks again in the next round.

Using multiple questions on the same driver or subdriver

When adding custom questions to a core driver or a subdriver, it is important to keep in mind that the question frequency will ensure that a question from that driver or subdriver is asked every X month or quarter, or whichever option is used.

The order of questions

When answering the survey, question sets will appear in this order:

1. Engagement questions
2. Diversity and inclusion questions
3. Health and wellbeing questions
4. Transformation and change questions
5. COVID-19 questions
6. Company custom drivers questions
7. Values questions
8. Open-ended questions

If a respondent scores a question with an extreme score (ie. 0 or 10) the system will follow up with an additional subdriver question, if available. Such questions will come at the end of the relevant question set, ie. if the extreme score was added to an engagement question, the follow-up question would come after the original engagement questions. 

Continuous listening versus manual surveys

With a higher frequency, there are generally more advantages. 

How frequency works with multiple schedules 

It is possible to run multiple surveys at different frequencies. This is a useful option to cater for the different needs of a business. Question frequency is set individually on a per schedule basis. 

It is useful to keep in mind that if a specific segment contains employees which are part of different schedules, the results of that segment will recalculate at the close of each survey round. For more information, see Running multiple survey schedules simultaneously.