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Peakon
Last Updated: 2026-03-13
Concept: Strengths and Focus Areas

Concept: Strengths and Focus Areas

After the close of each round, Peakon determines which drivers represent strengths for your team and recommends drivers for improvement. For more information on our AI model, see Strengths and Focus Areas AI Fact Sheet.
For each question set, you can view a full list of drivers on your
Drivers
 page, or focus areas on your dashboard
Overview
.
Workday Peakon is transitioning to a Flexible Listening Question model which provides greater simplicity and flexibility to our question model through a number of enhancements.
For customers who had their Workday Peakon production instances created from the 31st March 2026 onwards, you will use the flexible listening question model unless you opted out.
For customers who had their Workday Peakon production instance created before the 31st March 2026, you will continue to use the existing Workday Peakon Question model until we make it possible for you to upgrade to the flexible listening question model in the 26R2 and 27R1 release cycles.
Please read the below carefully to understand the impact of these changes.

Access

These 2 permissions determine access to focus areas and strengths:
Permission
Description
Access to strengths and focus areas
Ability to see focus areas and strengths.
Manage focus areas
Ability to set new focus areas, dismiss recommended focus areas and remove existing focus areas.

Managing Focus Areas

Peakon recommends the most impactful focus areas based on team feedback while enabling leaders to decide on focus areas by putting them in control.
You can accept or dismiss recommended focus areas from supported question sets and manage custom focus areas across all question sets.
When you accept a recommended focus area or set your own focus areas:
  • You can choose whether to notify employees through email.
  • You can choose whether to add a custom message which will display in the email and on personal dashboards.
  • Employees can submit confidential suggestions, either through a standalone page from the email token or on their personal dashboard.
  • The focus areas display on your employees' personal dashboards, and the shareable dashboard.
  • Peakon recommends actions and training content supporting you in creating a plan of action.
  • You can view the increase or decrease in scores after each survey round.
  • Peakon notifies you when you've been successful in improving focus area scores by recommending you move focus to new areas.

Supported Question Sets

Peakon recommends strengths and focus areas from these standard question sets:
  • Engagement
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • Health & Wellbeing
It's also possible to set your own focus areas across all driver question sets.

Dashboard Recalculation

Dashboards trigger a recalculation of strengths and focus areas after a survey round individually on every segment. For a recalculation to happen, the segment must meet all these requirements:
  • The segment isn't a
    Direct Reports
     segment.
  • The segment meets visibility requirements.
  • The aggregated participation is more than 25%.
  • At least 30% of the employees from the segment are in the survey round.
  • The segment doesn't represent more than 90% of the company employees, to avoid multiple sets of focus areas for very similar datasets.
These requirements apply per segment context, and ensure that small surveys don't impact strengths and focus areas at company level.

Strength and Focus Area Selection

A driver or a subdriver can become a focus area for a combination of 2 reasons:
  • Driver performance is low (measured against the 75th percentile of the benchmark).
  • Driver impact on the overall score is high. Close alignment of the impact circles indicates that a driver has a high indirect impact on the overall score.
To determine the strengths and focus areas, Peakon:
  1. Assigns each driver a prioritization score using this calculation:
    score = performance x impact.
  2. Ranks all drivers by their prioritization score.
  3. Sets the highest and lowest ranking drivers as strengths and focus areas, respectively.
In rare cases, it's possible for a focus area to be above benchmark and for a strength to be below benchmark.
Even though Peakon recommends focus areas, you can dismiss the recommendations and set your own focus areas.
Peakon recommends a maximum of 3 focus areas for Engagement, 2 for Health & Wellbeing and 1 for Diversity & Inclusion question sets.
75th percentile of the benchmark:
 When you display your dashboard at company level, the 75th percentile is of the industry benchmark. At company level, it's possible to see benchmark percentiles for a driver by hovering over this text
on the driver's dashboard:
In the top [%] in the [Industry]
. These benchmark percentiles use rounding and have True Benchmark adjustments, so they won't always be an exact match to the 75th percentile that the calculation uses.
When you display your dashboard at a segment level, the 75th percentile is of the company scores. Segment dashboards don't display benchmark percentiles in the user interface.

Considerations

Most focus areas have a strong negative difference to benchmark and high impact on the overall score, however a driver can become a focus area even if it only meets 1 of the criteria. Example: Finding statistically significant driver impacts on segments with fewer than 30 people is more difficult. Difference to benchmark then becomes the main way to determine strengths and focus areas, with no impact circles displayed.
Sometimes drivers that perform above benchmark become focus areas. A driver must be in the top 75th percentile not to be eligible to become a focus area.
It's possible for a driver to be above benchmark in
Average
 mode, while being below benchmark in
NPS
 mode, due to methodology differences.
The strength and focus area calculation always uses the mean (average) score, regardless of the score mode selected in your company data settings. This also applies to the calculation of highlighted segments.

Notifications

Employees receive email notifications for focus areas that their direct or indirect manager has chosen to notify them about.
Dashboard notifications and end of round digest emails include updates in strengths and focus areas.
Managers don't receive notifications for updated strengths and focus areas on their direct reports segments, or segments that represent more than 95% of the company's employees.
Where managers have access to multiple contexts, they also receive notifications of any updates to their strengths and focus areas.
It's not possible to disable focus areas notifications for a specific survey, as they're separate from survey email notifications. An employee will be notified about a focus area if a manager adds a focus area, even if they're not part of a survey round.