Setup Considerations: Questions
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of survey questions. 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.
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 instance 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 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.
The document below lists the setup considerations for the current model. For information on the flexible listening question model, visit Setup Considerations: Flexible Listening Question Model.
What They Are
Workday Peakon questions enable you to gather feedback on different aspects of your organization. We offer 9 question sets, 4 of which support industry benchmarks, and you can incorporate your own questions alongside the standard ones. Driver questions measure specific factors influencing employee perceptions and help prioritize areas for improvement.
Business Benefits
With Workday Peakon questions, you can:
- Gather actionable insights on employee sentiment that Peakon automatically transforms into trends on leaders' dashboards.
- Use benchmarking to compare your organization's results to industry benchmarks through driver questions.
- Retain employees and develop talent through data-driven insights.
- Empower managers to improve through post-survey resources, including both internal and curated external content.
Use Cases
- Gauge employee satisfaction and tracking engagement levels on all areas of your organization.
- Gain insight on employee sentiment regarding their experience at work, and whether that aligns to your company values.
- Understand and measure employee perceptions of company efforts to maintain a diverse workforce and create an inclusive environment.
- Collect feedback on ad-hoc topics by configuring open-ended questions.
- Tailor questions that address specific concerns with custom driver questions.
- Target questions broadly or precisely to learn the opinions a select group of employees. Example: Target a custom question to the Dublin office to gather feedback about a location-based event.
- Survey workers during key moments of their employee lifecycle. Example: Use the Onboarding and Exit question sets.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
What type of questions do you want to ask your employees? | You can use questions from the standard question sets, which include translations and benchmarks. These standard question sets support industry benchmarks:
These question sets enable you to capture feedback on specific moments in the employee lifecycle:
Peakon offers these supplementary question sets for additional company feedback, such as strategic initiatives and general overviews:
We also offer Values questions, which enable you to track whether your employees feel that their experience at work aligns with your company values.Note: For customers using the flexible listening model, we will no longer be offering the Covid-19 question set. |
How do you want to target your questions to each audience? | By default, all question sets target every employee in your company. Use the Only including or Excluding targeting options to ask a question to a specific segment of employees. You can use our question timings to target Onboarding and Exit questions.Translations of standard questions are available in all supported languages. |
How do you want to set up the driver question frequency? | Along with the survey schedule frequency, you can set how often each employee should receive a driver question from each question group. When you set the driver or subdriver frequency to be more than the survey frequency, Workday Peakon will ask more questions from drivers or subdrivers, respectively. Note: For customers who had their Workday Peakon instances created from the 31st March 2026 onwards, you will use the flexible listening question model unless you opted out. You will have access to our enhanced survey schedules experience where you can set the frequency on an individual question level. |
How often do you want to include a question in each survey round? | Our question rotation algorithm enables you to keep surveys short and frequent. When you use an automated survey cadence, Peakon checks the last time that each employee received each question to determine whether they’re due again. You control which questions to ask in each survey round by activating or deactivating:
Note: For customers who had their Workday Peakon instances created from the 31st March 2026 onwards, you will use the flexible listening question model unless you opted out. You will have access to our enhanced survey schedules experience where you can turn individual questions on or off within the survey schedules set up. |
How do you want to ask event-based questions? | Workday Peakon offers research-based question sets for the events in the employee lifecycle, such as for onboarding and exit phases. |
Recommendations
- Activate all driver questions and launch frequent surveys, to ensure coverage of all questions on a continuous basis.
- Add any custom questions to the Company questions section instead of standard question sets, to ensure that the survey distributes all driver and subdriver questions using the frequency that you select.
- Ensure that the questions are relevant to all areas of your organization. Example: Exclude the on-site employees (blue collar workers) segment from theremote workdriver question.
Requirements
Configure the required firewalls and proxies, and add all required IP addresses to your company's allow list.
Limitations
- You can't add more than 5 custom questions to a standard driver or subdriver.
- You can't add more than 15 questions per driver on the Company questions set.
- The Onboarding and Exit question sets don't have external benchmarks, as these processes are not standardized across businesses, industries, and roles.
- You can't disable comments on questions. Workday Peakon considers comments a core feature for gathering insight and enabling a deeper understanding of employee perspectives and experiences.
Tenant Setup
No impact.
Security
- Allow or restrict each access control group's access to specific question sets. You can also create a specialist access control group with either company-wide or segment access. The system adds all users to theEmployeesaccess control group by default.
- Enable or disable question sets at the access control group level. Only users with theManage questionsaccess control permission can add and edit survey questions in their assigned areas. Example: Administrators have company-wide access and can edit survey questions for the entire organization. Segment managers with the Manage questions access control permission can only edit questions for the segments they manage.
Business Processes
No impact.
Reporting
You can view and filter the live results of the survey on the manager dashboards. Additionally, you can:
- Compare your scores, track the biggest changes, and identify areas for action on theCurated Insightspage.
- Get a full picture of the employee lifecycle by reviewing the survey data on theEmployee Experience Cyclepage.
- Set up Impact metrics and compare how drivers affect results on theImpactspage.
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.