Questionnaire Distribution Solutions at your Fingertips
I love a good questionnaire! One noteworthy feature of Workday questionnaires is the ability to receive insights into how your employees are feeling by measuring employee motivation, job performance, and the effectiveness of changes within the organization. Once the data is collected, it can be pulled into a custom report that can then be configured to meet your organization’s needs.
The appetite for data retrieval and audit may have led you to become stuck between a rock and a hard place, however, when it comes to distributing questionnaires and surveys. Do you love the functionality of questionnaires, but prefer the flexibility and native reporting capability of surveys? Do you have both questionnaires and surveys that have similar questions or are each collecting a portion of your required data? If so, you might be dealing with a reporting and user-experience nightmare.
That’s where this blog comes in!
While there is not currently one simple task to mass distribute a questionnaire (with its gratifying branching question capabilities) there is a unique workaround available.
It all stems from the Request Framework. Utilizing the Request Business Process, you can enable a different iteration for every questionnaire you plan to release, tailored specifically to the population you need to target. By leveraging rule based definitions and enabling your questionnaires for Requests, you will be able to utilize the full questionnaire functionality in an ad-hoc manner. This not only creates a single source of data to report from, it facilitates a more consistent user experience for those completing the questionnaires.
There are two Workday functionalities that can be utilized with the Request business process. The first is to configure the questionnaire on the business process using the ‘Complete Questionnaire’ step. This will allow for a request to be created on behalf of the worker or be configured so that the worker can create the request for themselves on an ad-hoc basis. This process can be a bit manual and the Create Request feature does have its limitations since it can only create a request for one worker at a time.
The second method is to configure the questionnaire on the request type that is linked to the rule based business process definition. This option allows for a Quicklink to be created using the Request Type. With the link either embedded in an announcement or distributed through an Alert, workers can be prompted to complete the questionnaire directly there.
Bonus points: by adding a condition rule to the announcement based on a questionnaire status of “complete”, the announcement will automatically disappear once the worker has completed it and the approver has closed the request.
This second method allows questionnaires to be completed by workers en masse and provides more ingrained rules to be added to ensure only the required employees are being prompted to complete the necessary questionnaire.
With there being two different approaches to having the questionnaire completed, one on the request type and the other on the request business process. There are also different business objects you will want to use when reporting on the questionnaire responses and ensuring the individuals needing to see and review the responses have been provided the required security.
| Configuration | Considerations |
| Create Questionnaire | – Ensure the questionnaire is allowed on the Request Business Processes when creating the questionnaire or use Maintain Questionnaires to enable |
| Create Request Type | – Link the Questionnaire here (only if using the feature to request on behalf of a worker)
– Dictate Security Groups – Update on Request BP Security Policy if additional groups are needed |
| Create Rule Based Business Process Configuration for the Request BP | – The rule will be based on the Request Type |
| (Optional) New Security Group | – If a new security group is added for the initiate or close request steps, they will require security for requests and need to be assigned on the business process security policy (Request) |
| Business Process Steps | – Add the Complete Questionnaire Here (only if you wish to use the Announcement/Alert feature)
– Add a Review Document step if employees will need to review and e-sign or DocuSign a document (BIRT can be utilized here) |
| Configure Announcement on Home Dashboard | – Create a Quicklink to add on the announcement that will initiate the questionnaire for the worker
– Create a condition rule that removes the announcement from the worker’s Home dashboard once it has been completed |
| Questionnaire Audit Report | – Data Source: Questionnaire Responses – Primary Business Object: Questionnaire Response – Data Source: Questionnaire Answers – Primary Business Object: Questionnaire Answer |
For any organization using questionnaires who also desires the ease and functionality of having workers complete them on a broad spectrum outside of a business process, these options are worth checking out! If you need support with this or any other questionnaire/survey or dashboard configuration, Kognitiv would love to hear from you.
