It’s been a while now since we did a soft launch of Peakon, so I thought now would be a good time to circle back with more information about how it works and what it’s for; also I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Background
Starting in Jan, we rolled out Peakon surveys with the aim of getting insight into your day-to-day experience of being a core contributor. This input gives us a way to measure, understand and improve how Status functions, create a fulfilling workplace, and plan how best to invest time and focus on things that matter to you. The engagement score of these surveys forms part of the KPIs of the People Ops team - it’s something I keep a close eye on to see what we need to work on as we go along.
Using Peakon surveys, we can take snapshots of how things are for you at regular intervals, so we can understand how events that happen and changes we make influence your experience. From both a POps and Carl & Jarrad point of view, we want to make sure our actions make Status better, and to do this, regular feedback is needed.
If you’d like to learn more about the science behind the questions asked and what goes into “engagement” (appreciate it can be a woolly concept), here’s the whitepaper from Peakon.
Cadence
The surveys are set up such that the full question set of 46 questions is split across the number of surveys deployed to you in a quarter (i.e. the more regular we make the survey cadence, the less questions are asked in each survey and the quicker it is to complete). The current fortnightly cadence equates to a survey completion time of ~ 6 minutes. The question sets are rotated, so in each survey you receive you are not answering the same set of questions as the last survey.
The survey default cadence is weekly, however we were conscious of survey fatigue so we adjusted it to biweekly. The thinking here is to get real time information such that the feedback we have is fresh and we know we’re acting on things that are in people’s minds in the moment, and not waiting a few months when that intel will be out of date.
Think of this as a continuous listening exercise. In practice the actions we take won’t always match the pace of the surveys, however we’ll know that we have good and timely data to act on when we do work on fixes.
We can choose any cadence we want though (and this can vary by team), if you would like to switch it up, let me know - happy to adjust it for you.
Confidentiality
These surveys are strictly confidential and anonymous. Who can see what?:
- Core contributors can see a dashboard and summary of scores (I asked about making comments open to all but no dice)
- Team leads can see comments from their team if there are 3+ responses (anonymity threshold). Note that these comments are anonymous (i.e. the team lead can’t see who in the team wrote them)
- Carl, Jarrad & I can see comments from everyone at Status (again not with names, anonymous only). These can be filtered by team to get a sense of where comments are originating, if there are 3+ responses per team.
One issue I’ve seen is - for smaller teams, there may not be enough respondents to exceed the anonymity threshold, as such a team lead won’t be able to see the comments for their team. As such, do take part if you can - it might make the difference in getting your feedback to someone that would benefit in reading it. Either way, your comments are never a wasted exercise (see more below) - I am reading them continuously.
Want you to feel confident in how this data is being handled, so if you have any questions on confidentiality or are unsure, just ask 
What we’re doing with your feedback
- At the end of each survey, I go through all the comments and make notes of main themes or things that jump out as action items. I’ll share these from time to time in the Town Hall, and use these to inform what People Ops focuses on.
- I also acknowledge comments & feedback directly in the platform so you’ll get a notification if I respond to your feedback. Bear in mind that any of our comments/conversation in Peakon are also visible to your lead (although neither I nor they can see who you are, just that you are in their team). If you want to take a discussion offline, DM me anytime!
- I download all the comments at the end of each fortnightly survey round and send these to Carl & Jarrad so they can hear what everyone is saying (aggregated for all of Status, not broken out by team).
- As team leads have access to comments from their teams - they can also go into Peakon to acknowledge or comment on feedback.
How to interact with Peakon
- Core contributors - check out our dashboard anytime for real-time scores
- Team leads - would encourage you to go into Peakon at the end of each feedback round and interact with people’s feedback. Let me know if you have any questions on how to do this.
- If you’re a team lead and not seeing comments - let me know, it’s probably an anonymity threshold issue.
Open invite - if you’d like to check out or make use of the data gathered in Peakon but aren’t sure how, feel free to ask me and we can figure something out.
Thanks for giving it a try!
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy days to share your thoughts with me - heroes. I am always appreciative to see the response rate 
If you’ve got any questions about this, let me know. Also feel free to share your thoughts on how it’s going here.
Cheers! Ceri