Concept: Surveying Exited Employees

Background

Surveying exited employees enables organisations to collect feedback after departure, offering a more complete view of the Exit experience. You can ask questions before termination, after termination, or both. Consider which Exit questions provide the most value at each stage. Our recommendation for surveying employees who have left the organization is 3 days after departure.

Exited employees don’t have access to personal dashboards and survey summaries. If they unsubscribe to surveys, they stop receiving both survey invitations and survey-related emails.

Use Cases

You can leverage this functionality to address:

Varying notice periods across departments or countries.

Departures of contingent or field-based workers with a short notice period.

Timing issues where feedback before departure may be limited due to handover and workload pressures.

Configuration

You can find the steps on how to configure surveys for exited employees on Set Up Exit Surveys.

To survey exited employees, you must collect personal email addresses. Ensure you have the necessary internal approvals to manage this data in line with your organization’s privacy guidelines.

You can add personal email addresses using an automatic sync from your HRIS by marking the checkbox to enable sync of Personal emails on the Workday integration settings, or by manual upload. For manual steps, visit Bulk Update Email Addresses.

When using a HRIS integration, ensure Termination Dates
and Termination Reasons
are synced in advance so rules can be applied correctly. Review your Exit question set and decide which questions to ask, then apply the rules in bulk or individually in

Administration

Questions

Exit

To survey employees after they leave, select the

Left

survey schedule type. By default, it includes only the Exit questions and, if you select a target segment, it automatically includes only employees who have already left the organization. To survey employees before they leave, select the

Employed

survey schedule type. Test the setup to confirm rules and timing work as intended.

When configuring Exit surveys, also review how long former employees remain in Peakon and how their scores are retained:

Deletion of former employees

: By default, employees are removed after 90 days.

Inclusion of former employees

: Defines how long their scores contribute to aggregated results. Default is 3 months. We recommend setting to

1 year

if you’re running Exit surveys.

You can optionally enable new Termination Date segments to target employees before and after their departure.

Before termination

: for example, <3 months, 3-6 months, 6-9 months
, or up to 2 years before termination.

After termination

: <1 month, 1-3 months, 3-6 months, or >6 months
after termination.

By default, all leavers are grouped in the < 3 months before termination
segment. Enabling the new segments allows for more precise targeting. If you enable them, scores are recalculated and employees are reallocated into the new segments. If you don’t enable them, employees remain in the
> 3 months before termination
segment.

When surveying exited employees through the Workday-Peakon integration, ensure that terminated workers retain key attribute values required for eligibility and reporting. In Workday, certain fields are cleared after termination, which can affect survey targeting or data sync. To prevent this, follow the setup described in Maintain Attributes for Terminated Workers to configure calculated fields that preserve attribute values as of one day before termination.

Recommendation for U.S. based organizations

In the U.S., most employees give less than 2 weeks’ notice, and Termination Dates are often entered late. Because of this, prioritize

after

termination rules or a

before and after

approach. Avoid relying only on before termination rules, as the short notice period limits response opportunities.