Lifecycle Surveys

Lifecycle Surveys are survey-based check-ins tied to different points in an employee’s lifecycle. This includes:

All Lifecycle Surveys are built on the same Custom Surveys functionality. The same survey model supports four different scheduling methods, along with a reporting layer that allows survey owners and administrators to share specific results with other employees.

The Lifecycle surveys label appears under two different sections of the product, and these pages serve very different purposes.

Recipients can access a pending survey through:

Important distinction: Team › Lifecycle surveys is for reports shared with employees. Surveys & Performance is where employees can find surveys they personally received and review their own responses.

Lifecycle Surveys can be managed by:

A regular system admin who is not also an HRBP or qualifying manager cannot create or manage Lifecycle Surveys.

Being an HR Admin or manager does not automatically give someone access to every Lifecycle Survey.

A specific survey can be managed by:

Removing someone from a survey’s administrator list immediately removes their access to manage that survey and its reports.

Only people who already qualify to manage Custom Surveys can be added:

Someone who would not otherwise be able to access survey management cannot be added as an administrator.

Lifecycle Surveys support four scheduling methods.

The days to respond setting applies to all four survey types and determines how long each participant can submit or edit their answers after receiving the survey.

Lifecycle Surveys are created from the Create lifecycle survey flow. The fields displayed depend on the selected survey type.

Always available.

The “When do you want to send this survey?” field determines which scheduling method the survey uses:

One time

Requires:

Periodic

Requires:

After the survey becomes Live, the scheduler automatically manages subsequent sends.

Milestone

Requires:

The current configuration supports 0 or a positive number of days after the milestone.

Scheduled per recipient

There is no single survey-level send date.

Instead, people are added individually and each recipient receives their own:

Always available and determines the response window after the survey is sent.

Always available.

If left empty, the survey targets everyone eligible within the survey owner’s allowed scope.

“Everyone” does not necessarily mean the entire organization; the survey owner’s scope still acts as the maximum audience.

Lifecycle Surveys can move through the following statuses:

A survey must contain at least one question before it can be moved from Draft to Live or Archived. Until a question has been added, those status options are disabled.

Once a survey has gone Live, its main scheduling configuration becomes permanently locked.

This includes:

This prevents later changes from altering the configuration used for previous survey sends.

The following can remain editable while the survey is active:

Archived surveys are otherwise read-only: survey content cannot be modified once archived. The exception is the administrator list, which remains editable because it controls access rather than survey content.

Periodic, Milestone, and Scheduled per recipient surveys can be moved back to Live because they can still generate future sends.

A One-time survey that has already been sent cannot be moved from Archived back to Live, since its single send has already occurred.

For Periodic surveys, the scheduled date/time has two different purposes depending on the survey status.

While the survey is in Draft, it represents the first scheduled send. Once the survey goes Live, that value becomes the scheduler’s internal next run date/time. After each run, the scheduler automatically advances it according to the configured cadence.

At that point, the value is no longer user-editable.

Audience behavior is important because two restrictions work together.

When a survey is created, the system establishes a maximum audience based on the creator’s role and scope.

For an:

This becomes the survey’s maximum possible audience.

The survey creator can then use Target audience to narrow that population further.

For example, an HRBP whose scope contains 200 employees could configure a survey to target only employees in a particular department.

They cannot use Target audience to include someone outside their allowed scope.

In other words:

Owner’s scope + Target audience = Effective survey audience

The Target audience can narrow the owner’s scope, but never expand it.

The survey owner’s scope is captured when the survey is created. If the owner’s HR scope or organizational position changes later, the audience ceiling of an existing survey is not automatically recalculated.

When another survey administrator edits the survey, they also work within the survey owner’s original scope, rather than replacing it with their own.

There is an important distinction between:

These are always bounded by the survey owner’s scope. If another administrator edits the survey, their own personal scope does not replace the owner’s scope. Administrators can narrow the audience further, but they cannot expand it beyond the survey’s original audience ceiling.

The Add people picker applies an additional restriction.

A person must be:

This means two administrators working on the same survey can see different people in the picker.

For example, if Maricel belongs to the survey’s audience:

This is expected behavior.

Key distinction: The survey owner’s scope determines the audience ceiling for survey and question filters. For Scheduled per recipient surveys, the Add people picker applies the current administrator’s own scope as an additional restriction.

Supported question types include:

When a question already has answers, editing it creates a new version rather than changing historical responses. This preserves the question as it existed when previous participants answered it.

Each question added to a survey can have its own additional audience filter.

For example:

A question without an additional filter applies to the entire survey audience.

Question filters are also limited by the survey owner’s scope and the survey’s overall audience.

The same underlying question can be added to a survey multiple times if each copy has a different audience filter. This allows the same question to be presented to different sub-audiences.

An unfiltered question cannot be added more than once because an unfiltered copy already applies to everyone in the survey audience.

When a survey is saved, the system checks the survey audience together with each question’s audience filter. If a question’s filter would result in no eligible participants at all, the survey cannot be saved until the filter is corrected. This can also happen if the survey’s Target audience is narrowed after question filters have already been configured.

The system can detect that a filter no longer matches anyone, but it cannot determine whether a filter still matches the intended people. Because of this, question filters should be reviewed whenever the overall survey audience changes.

Every time a survey is sent, the send is represented through an instance.

Survey owners and administrators can select an instance from the Responses page to review the participants and questions associated with that send.

A One-time survey has a single send, so it normally has one instance.

Each scheduled run creates an instance.

For example, a monthly survey accumulates instances as it runs over time.

Scheduled milestone runs create instances as eligible employees reach the configured milestone.

Scheduled per recipient surveys also use instances for reporting. However, the exact grouping behavior for Exit/Scheduled per recipient sends is currently worth validating. During testing, scheduler runs have been observed creating separate instances rather than consistently grouping recipients by their local send date.

Behavior under investigation: Before communicating date-based grouping as expected behavior to customers, the current scheduler behavior should be confirmed with Product/Engineering.

The Participants and Questions tabs are scoped to the selected instance.

The Reports tab is different: reports aggregate across the survey rather than being tied to a single selected instance.

Survey responses can be exported for:

The all-instances option is available once the survey contains more than one instance.

Survey owners and administrators can access responses from:

Admin › Lifecycle surveys › [Survey] › Responses

Only the survey owner and administrators added to that survey can access this area.

The Participants tab shows everyone included in the selected instance.

For each participant, it shows:

Once a participant has responded, the View action allows the administrator to review their answers question by question. If nobody belongs to the selected instance, the page displays: “No participants in this instance.”

The Questions tab shows the questions included in the selected instance.

For each question, administrators can see:

Opening a question displays the participants and their response status.

Two values are particularly important:

Shown = No

The participant was excluded by the question’s audience filter. They were never shown the question, so this is not considered a skipped response.

Shown = Yes, Responded = No

The participant was shown the question but did not answer it.

Administrators can also filter the response list using participant attributes such as department or manager.

Authorized survey administrators can leave threaded comments on individual responses. Comments belong to the individual answer and can be accessed from the question response view or participant response view.

The Reports tab is available only when Survey Reports are enabled.

A Report belongs to a survey and defines a shared layout of charts.

Reports can then be divided into audience-specific Report Items.

Examples include:

Each Report Item uses the same report structure but displays data for its own audience.

For an employee who is not one of the report managers to see a Report Item, two conditions must be met:

Survey owners and administrators can access the report items they manage even if those items have not yet been published.

The Team page acts as a “shared with me” area for survey reports.

It lists published Report Items that have been explicitly shared with the logged-in employee.

The page includes information such as:

If no report items have been shared with the employee, they see:

“No reports shared with you.”

This is expected behavior and does not indicate a problem.

If the reporting feature is unavailable or the request fails, the page displays:

“Could not load your reports.”

Selecting View report opens the report already scoped to the audience represented by that Report Item. When the report is opened from Team › Lifecycle surveys, the page includes navigation back to Lifecycle Surveys.

When a survey instance is sent, each recipient receives an individual survey participation.

Recipients can be notified through:

Each notification channel respects the employee’s own notification preferences independently. This means someone may receive an email but not a Slack/Teams notification, or vice versa. Notification links take the employee directly to the survey response page.

A pending survey also appears as a task in three places:

The employee can also access the survey through Surveys & Performance on their profile. All of these entry points ultimately open the same survey participation.

After submitting the survey, the employee is redirected to their own Surveys & Performance profile tab, with the survey selected.

Surveys & Performance is where previous surveys remain available, but it is not the only place where an active survey can be completed or edited. While the survey’s response window is still open, employees can access and edit their answers through any available entry point.

The main limitation is the survey’s expiration. Once the configured days to respond period has passed:

If the employee responded, they can see their submitted answers. If they never responded, the record indicates that no response was submitted.

Lifecycle Survey responses are associated with identifiable respondents.

Authorized survey owners and administrators can review individual responses.

Each survey send preserves the survey configuration and questions used for that send. Editing a survey later does not retroactively change:

Once a Scheduled per recipient survey has been sent to someone, that entry is kept for reference and can no longer be rescheduled or removed.

For Scheduled per recipient surveys, two administrators may see different people in Add people because the picker also considers each administrator’s personal scope.

This does not mean the survey itself has a different Target audience for each administrator.

Are Lifecycle Survey responses anonymous?

No. Responses are associated with the person who submitted them, and authorized survey owners and administrators can review individual answers.

Who can create a Lifecycle Survey?

Superusers, HRBPs, and managers with at least one active direct report.

A regular system admin without one of those roles cannot create or manage Lifecycle Surveys.

Can customers enable Lifecycle Surveys themselves?

No. The relevant feature flags are controlled internally.

Where does an employee go to complete a survey?

They can access it through Home, Tasks, the header tasks/notifications indicator, Surveys & Performance, or a direct notification link from email or Slack/Teams.

What is Team › Lifecycle surveys for?

It contains survey reports that have been shared with the employee.

It is not primarily the place where employees go to complete surveys assigned to them.

Where can employees find surveys they personally received?

Under Surveys & Performance on their profile. Pending surveys may also appear in Home, Tasks, and the header indicator.

Can employees edit their responses after submitting?

Yes, while the survey’s configured response window remains open. Once the days to respond period expires, the survey becomes read-only.

Can different employees receive different questions in the same survey?

Yes. Individual questions can have additional audience filters.

Can the same question be used for different audiences?

Yes. The same question can be added more than once when each copy has a different audience filter.

Why can't an administrator find a specific employee in the Add people picker?

For Scheduled per recipient surveys, the employee must be both:

If either condition is not met, the employee will not appear.

Why do two administrators see different people in Add people?

Because the picker considers each administrator’s individual scope in addition to the survey audience. This is expected behavior.

Does changing the survey owner’s scope change existing surveys?

No. The survey’s audience ceiling is based on the owner’s scope when the survey is created and is not automatically recalculated later.