Skip to main content
Documentation
Documentation
Peakon
Last Updated: 2026-05-15
Concept: Custom Drivers

Concept: Custom Drivers

Background

You can create Custom drivers in the supplementary Custom Company Drivers question set. Custom drivers are customizable groupings of questions created to represent a particular theme and measure initiatives.
Custom drivers allows you to create these question groupings using:
  • Peakon standard questions
  • Custom questions
You can create up to 100 custom drivers. It's possible to add up to 15 questions per custom driver. Each custom driver aggregates the scores of its individual questions to give an overall score. As with all driver questions, employees can answer with a score, a comment, both, or skip the question entirely.

Recommended Custom Drivers

Peakon provides a curated library of recommended custom drivers that are scientifically validated by Workday organizational psychologists and data science teams. These drivers enable you to measure strategic organizational themes while ensuring the scientific validity of your survey data. By using these expert-vetted questions, you gain the ability to benchmark your results against industry standards for deeper context.
The library organizes these drivers into key strategic themes:
Driver
Theme
Burnout Risk
Measures factors such as feeling energized, finding focus, and maintaining a manageable workload.
Psychological Safety
Assesses the team environment for learning from mistakes and sharing differing opinions.
ESG Impact
Focuses on integrity, community and environmental impact, and personal safety.
Workforce Relations
Covers career paths, pay discussions, and fair opportunities.
Innovation
Evaluates openness to new ideas and trying new approaches.
Customer Focus
Measures commitment to customer satisfaction and the significance of work outcomes.
Manager Effectiveness
Reviews timely communication, manager openness, and the utility of 1-on-1s.
Team Effectiveness
Assesses cross-collaboration, hybrid work support, and quality outcomes.
You can edit the wording of recommended drivers after adding them to align with your organization’s specific language. ReviewConcept: Custom Driver Questions Best Practice when editing questions.
Results for these drivers display in the segment heat map, drivers page, question scores page, and comments sections.

AI Custom Drivers

AI Custom Drivers is a generative AI tool that helps administrators create customized survey question sets. It uses a Large Language Model (LLM) hosted in your region to understand what you want to measure.
When you enter a description (Example:
"Mental health and manager support"
), the AI analyzes the meaning behind your words. It then matches your goals to the right drivers in your question library, even if the questions don’t use the exact same wording.
AI Custom Drivers is optional and delivered through our AI feature framework, so you have transparency and control over your data. Administrators can turn it off at any time in
Administration
Data Settings
.

Reporting

You can view results for company questions in these pages:
  • Segment heat map
  • Curated insights
  • Drivers page
  • Question scores page
  • Comments

Recommendation

Custom Drivers are intended for ongoing listening on topics that benefit from continuous measuring. It's best for strategically important questions to the business, rather than ad hoc surveys. We recommend that you run custom drivers alongside other question sets within the same survey.
Where possible, we recommend using the custom drivers set for new custom questions, which helps ensure the external benchmarking for standard questions remains accurate.
We recommend referring to Concept: Custom Driver Questions Best Practice for advice on formulating questions.

Considerations

  • Due to custom drivers being unique to the company, they only support internal benchmarking for segments.
  • You can manage access to custom drivers for each access control group separately. It's also possible to set specialist access for a single custom driver.
  • Setting the custom driver question frequency to
    Always
     means that all questions from each Custom Driver will be in every survey. Example: If you create a new driver with 10 questions and set the custom driver frequency to
    Always
    , employees will receive all 10 questions in every survey while you're using that frequency option.
  • If you need to delete a custom driver from your Company question set, first delete the questions associated to the driver.

Limitations

  • It's not possible to create subdrivers in the Custom Company Drivers question set.
  • Custom Company Drivers do not support dashboard sharing or calculation of focus areas and strengths.
  • Having multiple questions on a single driver can lead to slower distribution of the questions to each employee.
  • Peakon does not support multiple choice questions.
  • The custom driver detail page may have less information compared to other drivers, but this will be expanded over time.