Removing an employee from Peakon

Important

This article is based on Workday's recommendations on how to manage users in the platform. Please reach out to your system administrators within your organization to understand how internal policies and processes apply to managing users in Workday Peakon Employee Voice.

Gaining insights from employees who have separated from your organization is key when attempting to mitigate contributing factors leading to employee attrition. This article will focus on how to mark an employee as a leaver. To learn more about analyzing the separated employee insights, refer to Understanding Peakon's Attrition Prediction model and Overview of the employee experience cycle.

In this article you will find:

• Overview
• How to mark employees as leavers
• Viewing and managing leaver employee records
• When do leavers disappear from the results?

Overview

For some background, these two attributes work in unison to manage and analyze tenure-based data:

• Tenure: used to record an employee's start date. This date can be in the past or future
• Separation date: used to record an employee's separation (last day of employment) with the company. This date can also be in the past or future

The default Tenure and Separation date attributes will automatically affect email communications, participation rates and dashboard login access for each employee.

Table 1: Actions associated with the Tenure attribute:

	Receive survey & other emails	Included in a new round's participation	Access employee or manager dashboard	Taking up an employee licence
Date is in the past	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓
Date is in the present	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓
Date is in the future	No ✘	No ✘	No ✘	Yes ✓

Table 2: Actions associated with the Separation date attribute:

	Receive survey & other emails	Included in a new round's participation	Access employee or manager dashboard	Taking up an employee licence
Date is in the past	No ✘	No ✘, aggregated participation only*	No ✘	No ✘
Date is in the present	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓
Date is in the future	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓	Yes ✓

* A leaver is included in the aggregated participation as long as the visibility window for former employees allows. For more information, refer to the About survey participation and how it works article.

Peakon's recommendation

Once it becomes known that an employee will separate from your organization, add the separation date and separation reason into the employee record, regardless of the date being in the future or in the past. In doing so, the employee's survey responses will be segmented into the respective date range segments along with one of the separation reason segments.

Once the separation date is in the past, the employee is considered inactive and is no longer eligible to receive surveys or have access to a dashboard.

How to mark employee as leavers

Employee records can be updated as usual via file upload (Adding new employees with a data import (CSV or XLSX)), manually, or through an HRIS integration, such as BambooHR.

Any of the below methods can be used to populate the Separation date field:

Manual	In Administration > Employees, open the employee record or select the multiple employee records you wish to update. Update the Separation date field accordingly.
File upload	Ensure the file contains a column for Separation date field, and populate that column with the correct separation date on the row of the leaver.
HRIS integration	The separation date attribute field should be mapped automatically to the equivalent field in the HRIS system. Contact the Support team if needed.

Refer to the Reinstating an employee who has left article for reinstating leavers.

Viewing and managing leaver employee records

When viewing individual employee records, the Employment section will contain the Tenure, Separation reason, and Separation date attribute fields. 

The Tenure and Separation date attributes automatically put each employee into a group to describe their employment status. Find an explanation of each status below.

Hired	Employees who have a future date set in the Tenure field.
Employed	Employees who have a past date set in the Tenure field, and have not yet separated from the organisation. This can also include employees with a future separation date in the system.
Left	Employees who have a past date set in the Separation date field, due to having separated from the organisation

Employees with an upcoming separation date will automatically have a red Leaving: DD/MM/YYYY label on their profile. Once they have left, this will turn to a grey "Left" label.

Employees with an upcoming start date will have the grey Hired label on their profile. Once their start date has passed, this label will disappear and they will be considered employed.

By default, the employee list only contains employees that are considered "Employed" and "Hired". Employees who are classified as "Left" will not appear in the list unless filtered by Employment status = No longer employed. This will also enable you to search your leaver database for a specific employee.

When do leavers disappear from the results?

Leavers are no longer surveyed in subsequent surveys. When it comes to the current score (based on aggregated data), in order to protect the confidentiality of leavers, their results and participation do not fall out of the current score from one day to the next, but rather this is a gradual process, in accordance with the chosen data visibility settings (Data aggregation resources). The score aggregation process does not affect comments, so they will remain in the account in accordance with your data retention period (default 5 years).

This is what happens when an employee leaves:

1. Once an employee's separation date has passed, the system recognizes them as a leaver
2. They are no longer surveyed in future surveys
3. For their historic scores, the system refers to the visibility window for leavers (either 1, 3, or 6 months depending on the company settings)
4. At the start of each round, the system checks whether the aggregated score and participation contain any employees whose separation date is outside of the visibility window
5. If yes --> remove them from the aggregated score/participation. If no --> keep as it is, and check again in the next round

Example

Let's take a company with the below configuration for survey frequency and data visibility.

• Survey frequency: monthly
• Visibility window for current employees: 1 year
• Visibility window for leavers: 3 months

This configuration means that each month when a new survey begins, the system checks if the current list of surveyed employees contains anyone whose separation date is older than 3 months (12 weeks exactly). If there is no one with a separation date older than 3 months, it does not remove anyone in that round. It also does the same check for current employees, and 1 year, respectively.