15Five's Lifecycle Surveys make it easier for HR leaders to capture timely, relevant employee feedback at key stages in the employee journey. From onboarding to exit, these surveys deliver continuous insights that help diagnose issues, plan initiatives, and take meaningful action—without overwhelming your team.
In this article, you will learn...
- What are Lifecycle Surveys? 🌟
- How they work 🧑🏼💻
- 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? 🌟
Lifecycle Surveys are automated or manually triggered surveys sent to employees at key moments, such as onboarding, milestone check-ins, and exits. They give HR leaders consistent access to employee feedback throughout the employee experience, enabling real-time insights and action.
Use Lifecycle Surveys to:
- Collect real-time feedback at key moments like onboarding, milestones, and exits
- Uncover patterns and trends with filterable, time-based reporting
- Inform strategic decisions with insights tied to performance, engagement, and retention
- Automate survey delivery to ensure consistent feedback without added admin burden
- [COMING SOON!] Contribute valuable data to the HR Outcomes Dashboard for a fuller picture of employee experience over time
How they work 🧑🏼💻
- Create your survey: Use one of our pre-built templates or build a custom survey to gather feedback around key moments in the employee journey. You can choose to trigger it automatically by hire date or send it manually. Learn how →
- Employees and/or managers respond: Assigned participants are notified via email or Slack (if enabled). They have 14 days to complete the survey before it expires.
- Review results: Admins access results through a dashboard, where responses can be viewed by individual or group and analyzed over time. Learn how →
- Take action: Use the insights to create Action Plans that identify patterns, flag concerns, and make targeted improvements that support engagement, performance, and retention. Learn how →
🎥 Check out this clip from our "Goodbye Guesswork, Hello Insights: Measuring Employee Milestones in 15Five" webinar for a walkthrough of Lifecycle Surveys:
Ready to get started?
Check out our "Create a Lifecycle Survey" article to create your first survey!
Best Practices 💡
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.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ❓
Only account admins have permission to create and trigger Lifecycle surveys in 15Five.
Notification recipients depend on the survey’s question types:
- Employees receive notifications if the survey includes questions directed to them.
- Managers receive notifications only if there are questions in the survey designated for them to answer about their direct reports.
By default, only account admins have access to Lifecycle survey results.
However, you can use the "Manager visibility into team results" setting to grant managers visibility into surveys submitted by their direct reports. This added flexibility supports a range of privacy preferences and organizational needs.
Many HR leaders prefer to keep survey responses limited to the HR team—especially for sensitive moments like onboarding or exit—to help ensure employees feel safe providing candid feedback.
No. Account admins can see who completed the survey, who didn’t, and view individual responses.
If the “Manager visibility into team results” setting is enabled for the survey, managers will also have access to responses from their direct reports.
Participants are informed during the survey that their responses will be visible to the HR team and, if applicable, to their manager.
Yes. To delete a survey, click the ellipsis (•••) next to the survey name and select "Delete."
Please note: Deleting a survey permanently removes all associated questions, triggers, and reporting. This action cannot be undone.
Yes. You can manually trigger an automatic survey using one of the following methods:
- Click the survey name and select "Send Manually" from the top-right button.
- Click the ellipsis (•••) next to the survey name and select "Send manually."
While Best-Self Review® can be used for new hire check-ins, it requires manual setup—creating a new cycle, assigning participants, and managing timelines for each cohort. This often leads to inconsistencies, delays, or missed reviews altogether.
They allow you to automate 30/60/90-day check-ins based on hire date, ensuring that every new employee receives the right survey at the right time, without the need for manual intervention.
In addition, Lifecycle Surveys offer centralized reporting. Unlike Best-Self Review, where results are siloed in individual cycles, Lifecycle Surveys consolidate results into a single dashboard. This makes it easy to view trends over time, compare cohorts, and take strategic action, without exporting or analyzing data outside of 15Five.