Setup Considerations: Flexible Listening Question Model
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 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.
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and adoption of the new flexible question model. It explains:
- Why to set it up.
- How it fits into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What It Is
The Flexible Question Model is a new foundation for surveys in Workday Peakon Employee Voice. It simplifies the question structure to provide a flatter hierarchy. In this model, all questions within a driver are equal, and there are no main questions. This model enables you to evolve and adapt your listening strategy to meet the needs of your business.
The Flexible listening question model is made up of 3 key pillars that enhance how you configure surveys and analyze employee feedback:
- The ‘simplified’ question model: We have simplified our question model so that all questions within a driver are equal and there are no main questions within a driver. Each question will have its own unique title.
- Flexible foundation (‘flexible’ capabilities): We are providing flexible capabilities such as custom drivers (Concept: Custom Drivers) and more flexible schedules, unlocking the ability to build a listening strategy that mirrors your organization.
- An enhanced question library: We have consolidated our library into 90 high-performing questions organized into 23 refined categories providing greater flexibility and enhanced predictive power, based on the latest Workday research. You can read more about our question development and validation here.
The Flexible listening question model delivers a number of enhancements which are detailed on our release note.
Business Benefits
This new model enables Workday Peakon to:
- Display key insights in a clearer and more understandable way, making it easier to explain survey insights to leaders and managers, building trust in the data and decisions.
- Reduced time spent on configuration and maintenance, and more time spent on using the insights
- A more scalable foundation for future innovation and new listening use cases which evolve with your organisations needs.
Use Cases
- Run multiple schedules in parallel with different questions—for example, keep regional and global surveys live at the same time.
- Expand the question library to cover a wider range of science-backed topics.
- Let users self-serve by adding custom questions to any question set and configuring custom drivers that combine standard and custom questions to match business goals in employee listening.
- Combine science-backed questions with custom questions to report on business KPIs.
- Modify standard question wording and question titles (formerly sub-driver names) through localisation overrides to better align with business terminology.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
Are you a new or existing customer? | New Peakon tenants : Tenants created after the 26R1 release are on the new flexible question model by default.Existing Peakon tenants : You can opt-in to upgrade to the new question model starting in the 26R2 release. A 6-month grace period is planned before complete upgrade, though this is subject to change. |
How will you manage survey frequency? | The algorithm is simplified. You no longer set frequency for main questions and sub-drivers. Instead, you control frequency at the individual question level. |
How will you manage custom questions? | You must provide a unique question title for all custom questions. Titles are no longer inherited from the driver. You can also localize question titles. |
Requirements
You must be aware of these required changes that are part of the new model:
- Scoring: Only 1 score aggregation method,Aggregate, is used. This calculates a straight average of the question scores. TheSeparatescore mode is removed as there are no main driver questions.
Limitations
- Focus area recommendations for new questions or new question sets are not available at the company context initially, as industry benchmarks do not exist for them yet.
- Recommendations for new questions in all other contexts use the company benchmark for calculation.
- The new questions and drivers added as part of these enhancements will not have benchmark data yet as it will take some time for survey responses to build up.
- Currently, specialists and general access groups with partial access to a question set do not have access to see nps summaries even if those were generated from questions that the specialist has to.
Security
Review your access controls to ensure the right people have access to the right data. For more information, visit Concept: General Access Control Groups.
Reporting
The flexible model introduces several changes to reporting and data analysis:
Report | Considerations |
|---|---|
All Comments
| The single Driver dropdown is replaced by 2 dropdowns: 1 for the driver and another for the questions. |
Comments Export
| Topics are removed and Question titles are added to the export. |
Topics Page
| The Topics and Semantic Topics features are replaced by AI Topics . |
Heat map
| All copy is updated to remove outcome , driver , and sub-driver terminology. It now lists the Question title . This change also applies to the heatmap export and hover-over text. |
PowerPoint Export
| Exports for Engagement, Diversity & Inclusion, and Health & Wellbeing are updated. Slides referencing deprecated drivers or the old hierarchy (Example: main Engagement question) are removed or updated. |
Connections and Touchpoints
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.