Skip to main content
Documentation
Documentation
Peakon
Last Updated: 2026-05-29
Concept: Driver Questions

Concept: Driver Questions

Drivers are the specific elements within a question set that measure and influence overall employee sentiment. These categories represent different aspects of the employee experience at work, such as Growth, Management Support, or Autonomy, that have a demonstrated effect on high-level attitudes like engagement.
The Workday Peakon Employee Voice library contains standard questions across multiple question sets, in all supported languages. All standard driver questions support industry benchmarking.
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 more information, visitSetup Considerations: Flexible Listening Question Model.
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. In this question model, drivers are made up of questions, and each standard question has a unique title. There are no ‘main’ questions within a driver, all questions are equal. You can add up to 5 custom questions to a driver and you can provide your custom questions with a title.
For customers who had their production instance created before the 31st March 2026, you will continue to use existing question model with the driver, sub-drivers and main question structure until we make it possible for you to upgrade to the flexible listening question model in the 26R2 and 27R1 release cycles. On any standard driver or sub-driver, you can add up to 5 custom questions, or up to 15 questions per driver on the Company Questions set.
Please read the below carefully to understand the impact of these changes.

Question Sets

Each question set measures a workplace theme, such as how engaged employees feel in their workplace. The library contains these question sets:
  • Engagement
  • Health and Wellbeing
  • Diversity and Inclusion
  • Transformation and Change
  • Onboarding
  • Exit
  • COVID-19
  • Custom Company Questions
  • Environmental, Social and Governance
  • ANCC Magnet Nursing Excellence
Standard question sets have 1 core and up to 3 additional questions that measure the theme at a high level. These high-level questions make up the main score for the associated question set. Example: The main Engagement score consists of the core eNPS question and Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Belief questions. Each question set comes with multiple drivers to help your analysis.

Impact and Statistical Validity

Although driver scores provide distinct focus areas, they also have an indirect influence on the overall dashboard score. Workday Peakon uses statistical modeling to extract which drivers have the most influence on high-level scores, displayed as Impact Circles.
To ensure unbiased results, questions are distributed via random sampling. Focus areas and strengths are only assigned once results pass a statistical significance test.

Algorithm

The survey asks all active questions from the question sets that you activate within the survey schedule, except for questions using question timings.
Setting a question frequency dictates how often each employee should receive a question from each question set. When using an automated survey cadence, the algorithm checks the last time each employee received each question to determine if it is due again. When using question timings for Onboarding and Exit question sets, the rotation algorithm does not apply.
When a survey launches, the visibility window shifts and all driver scores update with new scores coming in and old scores falling out. If you deactivate a driver question, existing scores gradually fall out of the current score with each new survey round.

Drivers

The drivers in each question set are the factors that influence employees’ overall perceptions within each question set. They’re aspects of employees’ experience of work that have a demonstrated effect on the overall perceptions of attitudes. Example: Improving employee perceptions in relation to the Growth driver is likely to improve overall employee engagement. Each driver has its own score, based on its own questions, and can provide guidance on what to prioritize within the theme.
The Peakon dashboard provides an indication of how much influence each driver is having on overall perceptions, within each specific organisation or segment, using the impact circles. Example: If the impact circles on the Growth driver overlap, you can assume that based on your organization's survey data, increasing Growth scores could also increase Engagement scores.

Driver and Subdriver Questions

The infomation on this section is relevant for customers who had their Workday Peakon production instance created before 31st March 2026.
Each driver has 1 core question and up to 4 subdriver questions that make up the driver score. Example: The Growth driver contains the core question and the Career Path, Learning, and Mentoring subdriver questions.These 4 questions have equal weighing on the Growth driver score.
Each driver score at team or company level is the average of each employee's overall score for that driver. It calculates each employee's overall score by using their latest score to each question from that driver (as long as the scores are within the visibility window).
Employees can answer driver questions with a score on a 0-10 scale. It's also possible to add a comment, or answer using a comment only.
The Environmental, Social, and Governance and the ANCC Magnet Nursing Excellence question sets use a simplified model without subdriver questions. Each driver is made up of questions and question titles. For this question set and Custom Company Questions, you can add and edit question titles and its localization.

Recommendation

  • Activate All Questions: Survey frequently to ensure continuous cover for all questions.
  • Ensure Relevance: Targeted questions should be relevant to all areas of your organization. Example: Exclude blue-collar segments from Remote Work questions.
  • Use Company Questions: To ensure the survey distributes questions using the frequency you select, add custom questions to the Company questions section instead of standard question sets.
  • Use Question Timings: Apply suggested timings for Onboarding and Exit question sets.
  • Formulate Carefully: Refer to Concept: Custom Driver Questions Best Practice for advice on phrasing custom questions.

Limitations

  • If using the classic question model, it's not possible to edit or deactivate the main question of each standard question set.
  • For customers who had their Workday Peakon production instance created before 31st March 2026, it's not possible to set frequency per individual question, but rather as a question group. Example: Subdriver frequency for the Engagement question set.
  • With the new Flexible listening question model, customers who had their production instance created after 31st March 2026 will have the ability to set the frequency per individual question. For all other customers, we will make it possible to upgrade and access this functionality in 26R2.
  • It's not possible to add custom drivers or subdrivers to standard question sets. Instead, use the Company Questions to create custom drivers.
  • The Transformation and Change question set doesn't yet support external benchmarks, focus areas and strengths, micro courses, and articles.
  • The Custom Company Questions and COVID-19 question sets don't support creation of subdrivers.
  • Deleting a question doesn't delete historical data from that question. The historical data gradually drops out of the current dashboard, as more scores fall out of the visibility window during each survey round.
  • You can't add more than 5 custom questions to a standard driver or subdriver.
  • You can't add more than 15 questions to a custom driver.
  • Adding custom questions to standard drivers or subdrivers while using the recurring survey mode may cause it to take longer for all employees to receive all questions of the specific driver or subdriver.
  • You can’t move a question from the ESG and ANCC Magnet Nursing Excellence question sets to another Peakon question set (Example: Engagement, Health and Wellbeing). It is possible to move questions between the ESG and ANCC Magnet question sets.
  • The Onboarding, Exit and, ANCC Magnet and ESG question sets are not shown on the Curated Insights page, doesn’t have resources on Improve and doesn’t offer external Benchmarks. External Benchmarks for the ANCC Magnet question set can be obtained from the Magnet Benchmark template.
  • Peakon doesn't support multiple choice questions.
  • You can’t move a question from the ESG question set to another Peakon question set (Example: Engagement, Health and Wellbeing).