Lifecycle Surveys: Feature Overview – 15Five Help Center

HR leaders have enough work on their plate that it's hard to keep up with every milestone for every person in the company, causing HR leaders to miss out on relevant, real-time insights at key employee milestones. Lifecycle surveys allow HR leaders to more easily get this information, and the ability to automate these surveys ensures the right survey is sent to the right people at the right time. Lifecycle Surveys are essential for continuously diagnosing, planning, and acting on employee feedback, and by integrating these surveys into a broader HR strategy, HR leaders can get this feedback from an employee's first day to their last.

In this article, you will learn...

What are lifecycle surveys? 🌟
How it works 🧑🏼‍💻
How lifecycle surveys impact HR Outcomes 🎯
Roles and visibility 👥
Best Practices 💡
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ❓

Access and availability

⛔️ Required access to Engagement.
👥 This article is relevant to account admins and employers/managers assigned as participants.
📦 This feature is available in the Total Platform, Legacy Perform, and Engage pricing packages.

What are lifecycle surveys? 🌟

15Five's Lifecycle Surveys help HR leaders automatically collect employee feedback at key stages like onboarding, milestones, and exit. Lifecycle Surveys are essential for continuously diagnosing, planning, and acting on employee feedback before, between, and after major measurement milestones like company-wide engagement surveys and performance reviews. Prior to lifecycle surveys in 15Five, HR Leaders were missing out on a treasure trove of feedback and data from employees on what matters most when it matters most. Or, if this information was being collected, it was an incredibly time-consuming process. Lifecycle surveys automate the process of collecting this pivotal data, freeing up valuable time for you and your HR team to analyze the data, and drive improvements.

Use cases:

Onboarding surveys (30/60/90 day check-ins)
Employee milestones
Exit surveys

How it works 🧑🏼‍💻

Account admins create the survey. These surveys can be set to trigger automatically based on employee start date, or require manual sending. Admins can use a pre-built survey created by 15Five, or create their own from scratch.
Participants complete the assigned survey. Employers and/or their managers will receive an email and/or Slack notification (if enabled) to complete the survey. Participants will have 14 days to complete the assigned survey before it expires.
Admins interpret and analyze results. HR leaders will have the ability to view results by person or group, as well as view an aggregate of all responses to track this trending data over time. Trending data can be compared by month, quarter, or year.
Admins take action on results. The real-time insights and feedback received at key employee milestones allows HR leaders to take swift action and prioritize the most pressing issues in an effort to increase performance, engagement, and retention.

How lifecycle surveys impact HR Outcomes 🎯

Lifecycle surveys within your organization can have a major impact on 15Five's HR Outcomes: maximizing employee performance, increasing employee engagement, and decreasing regrettable turnover.

Onboarding surveys or check-ins at 30/60/90 days help identify early challenges or gaps in training, allowing real-time insight and feedback as to how HR or department/team leads can help support employees (current and future) reach productivity faster.
Onboarding and exit surveys give HR leaders key feedback on potential issues that could impact or have impacted short- and/or long-term performance.

Regular milestone surveys capture employee sentiment and helps foster a culture of continuous feedback.
Regular opportunities to provide feedback promotes a sense of value and inclusion, as employees feel their voices are heard and their opinions matter.

Capturing employee feedback in exit surveys reveals reasons for turnover, allowing HR leaders to take strategic action to help reduce future turnover.
Feedback from onboarding surveys helps HR leaders work with team leaders to refine onboarding programs, setting up future employees for success beginning on Day 1.

Other benefits

Ability to automate lifecycle surveys, which reduces administrative burden, and allows for more time and effort into strategic action planning.
Turn employee departures into learning opportunities, as this feedback is vital for strategic planning to help avoid future turnover.

Roles and visibility 👥

Account administrators are the only individuals who can create, launch, and view results from a lifecycle survey.
Any person in the company can be a participant in a lifecycle survey.

Best Practices 💡

Use automated surveys to reduce manual work

Automating lifecycle surveys ensures that feedback isn't missed at these key stages of an employee journey, and frees up time for you and your team to be more strategic with these initiatives. Rather than spending hours ensuring that surveys are sent at the right time to all the right people, that process can be automated, opening more bandwidth for interpreting, analyzing, and taking action on the feedback given.

Keep the surveys concise and focused

While there's likely a lot of desired feedback on various elements during an employee's journey with the company, it's important to keep the surveys concise and focused to allow for more actionable data. Incorporating a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions yields the best results.

Analyze and act on feedback

Receiving all of this feedback is one thing, but taking action on the data to improve the experience for current (and future) employees is critical. Lifecycle surveys reporting allows you to view aggregate data, track answers over time, and take targeted action to drive improvements in performance, engagement, and retention.

Integrate lifecycle surveys into a broader feedback strategy

These lifecycle surveys should complement your other HR initiatives, like semi-annual engagement surveys and Best-Self Review cycles, to provide a comprehensive view of the employee experience. Lifecycle surveys in 15Five give HR leaders the ability to gather important employee feedback from their first day of employment to their last.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ❓

Who can create and trigger lifecycle surveys?

Only account admins can create and trigger lifecycle surveys.

Who receives notifications when a lifecycle survey is sent?

It is based on the questions being asked in the survey. An employee is notified if they are assigned to complete a survey with employee questions included. Managers of employees assigned to complete a survey will be notified if the survey included questions for the manager to answer.

What does the survey invitation look like for a participant?

An individual being assigned a survey will receive the below email in their inbox. Please note that they can also receive a Slack notification (if enabled) about a survey to complete.

How long do participants have to complete an assigned survey before it expires?

Participants will have 14 days to complete the assigned survey.

Can I delete a lifecycle survey?

You will have the ability to delete a survey by clicking on the ellipsis, and selecting delete. Upon deletion, all associated questions, triggers, and reporting will be permanently deleted, and none of this information can be recovered.

Are lifecycle surveys confidential like engagement surveys?

Results from lifecycle surveys are not confidential. Account admins will be able to see who completed an assigned survey and who didn't, as well as individual responses from said survey. When completing the assigned lifecycle survey, participants are made aware that their answers will be shared with the HR team.

Do managers have visibility into the feedback submitted by their direct report(s) and/or hierarchy?

Only account admins can view results. Many HR leaders we spoke with expressed concerns that giving managers visibility into their direct reports’ feedback from onboarding and exit surveys might result in less candid responses.

I'm already using the Best-Self Review feature to conduct 90 day check-ins on new hires. Why should I switch to using lifecycle surveys?

While you can clone Best-Self Review cycles to help with portions of the setup, there is still a manual element to creating a new cycle to be sent to the appropriate new hire(s). Furthermore, the manual burden likely means that some folks aren't getting the review at 90 days, and potentially, folks are being grouped into hiring cohorts. Lastly, results from these reviews live solely in reporting for that cycle, and it requires HR leaders to download results from multiple cycles, and work outside of 15Five to compare responses, view trends, etc. Lifecycle surveys allow HR leaders to automate this process, and have a single reporting dashboard to compare trending results over time.