Workday Peakon vs. Diversio

More and more companies are realizing that diversity and inclusion are critical to the success of their business. Inclusion is an excellent predictor of employee success and attrition rates, business performance and competitiveness, and public perception and financial risk. However, it can be incredibly difficult for organizations to understand and assess their own biases, and get honest, objective feedback from employees.

For these reasons, HR and DEI managers need third-party solutions that gather timely, accurate data about diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and offer proven, actionable solutions. Workday Peakon and Diversio are two of the most well-known services for measuring and promoting inclusive workplaces. But can Peakon, an employee engagement survey tool, really promote diversity and inclusion as well as Diversio? And does Peakon offer effective training and interventions to make real improvements? Let’s compare Peakon vs. Diversio.

Workday Peakon vs Diversio Overview

Here is a brief summary of the main features and functionality of Diversio vs. Peakon:

Schedule a demo to see the differences between Diversio and Peakon for yourself.

What is Workday Peakon?

Workday is a cloud-based HCM platform founded in 2005. Over time, Workday added capabilities that merge HR with a wide range of products that include financial management, human capital management, spend management, adaptive planning, talent management, payroll and workforce management, analytics and reporting, professional services automation, student services, and platform and product apps, and extensions. In 2021, Workday announced the acquisition of Danish company Peakon. Peakon is an employee engagement tool that tracks sentiment, productivity, and tenure, along with benchmarking, attrition predictions, and other data.

The merger was completed in March 2021, leading to the new name Workday Peakon, and adding Peakon employee engagement capabilities to the Workday product line as “Peakon Employee Voice”. Companies can choose to use Peakon Employee Voice independently, without Workday HCM.

How Does Workday Peakon Work?

Peakon is an employee engagement tool that helps company leadership measure employee motivation and morale. Peakon was one of the first companies to use their dataset to begin to measure and predict employee attrition, and much of their tool remains optimized toward engagement metrics that affect staff turnover. While tracking employee engagement is essential to creating a thriving workplace, tracking diversity and inclusion are equally important.

Peakon employs “continuous listening,” where employers can choose from a variety of employee survey templates or create their own surveys, and then surveys are automatically generated to employees at the desired frequency. For example, if an employer wants to generate surveys related to engagement, diversity, values, or health, they can then automatically distribute relevant questions at different frequencies, including weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.

Survey responses are presented in a dashboard, and Peakon’s machine-learning algorithm analyzes responses, using natural language processing to identify problems, predict attrition, create benchmarks, and suggest corrective actions.

Peakon then offers suggestions through their “Improve” page, which helps company leaders create action plans that influence specific drivers of employee engagement, such as workload, recognition, and career path. The Improve page offers micro-lessons with personalized training and advice for managers, but only for companies using the more expensive (Business and Premier) subscription packages. Currently, micro-courses and suggestive actions are only available for employee engagement datasets, not for diversity, or any other Peakon benchmarks. Because Diversio integrates with other HR tools, Peakon could use Diversio’s trainings and toolkits to improve DEI.

Are Workday Peakon Surveys Anonymous?

One of the questions that comes up most often about Peakon is whether their surveys are anonymous. Various online networks and forums claim that responses are not truly anonymous, making employees distrust the platform.

The truth is, Peakon surveys are anonymous. Company leadership only sees survey results within the Peakon dashboard, stripped of all personally-identifying information. However, managers and supervisors can reply to employee comments within the Peakon system, which then forwards the manager’s response to the employee by email.

Receiving an email with a supervisor’s direct response to an anonymous survey response often makes employees feel personally identified, as though their feedback and responses were not anonymous after all. Many then go online to “warn” others that responses are not private and anonymous, creating distrust of the Peakon platform.

What is Diversio?

Diversio is a woman-owned company committed to building more diverse, inclusive workplaces. Diversio is the world’s first DEI platform that uses proprietary artificial intelligence to analyze diversity and inclusion data and create powerful, customized recommendations that drive meaningful change.

How Does Diversio Work?

Diversio uses short, 4-minute surveys to collect anonymous employee data and analyze it within a proprietary 6-part Inclusion Framework. Results are analyzed using Natural Language Processing, pinpointing the most important areas for improvement. Diversio’s benchmarks are tailored for each company, using a proprietary dataset of more than 21,000 companies.

Finally, Diversio’s AI-powered recommendation engine identifies the programs and policies that are proven to work, along with expert support, training, and interventions that really make a difference. Diversio also has unique capabilities not offered by Peakon, including:

• Bias Corrector. Diversio’s Bias Corrector plugs into your messaging platform to analyze team dynamics and identify challenges.
• Certifications. Diversio’s globally recognized certifications indicate a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Critical Differences Between Workday Peakon and Diversio

The most important differences between Diversio and Peakon are:

• Anonymity. While Peakon responses are anonymous, the communication system can foster distrust if misused. While survey responses are intended to open a dialogue and solve problems, many employees do not perceive it that way. Diversio protects employee anonymity in a way that builds trust and confidence over time.
• Diversity data. Peakon surveys allow employers to include diversity and demographic questions within their surveys, and take steps to assure employees that this data is gathered with their consent and protected. However, because true diversity is intersectional and complex, Peakon’s manual diversity and demographic survey questions may not always capture the full spectrum of diversity in a workforce. Diversio accounts for multiple and overlapping diversity factors, including gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and Indigenous identity.
• Interventions and outcomes. Peakon is a powerful tool for measuring, tracking, and predicting employee sentiment. Peakon’s interventions are focused on factors that drive employee turnover, like recognition, workload, career opportunities, and leadership strategy. Their micro-lessons system helps train specific managers and leaders, but only for engagement metrics, and only when the customer purchases the subscription. Peakon does not offer robust tools for improvement or organizational change, especially for complex challenges like diversity and inclusion. Diversio offers a robust catalog of specific, proven, effective interventions customized to the specific challenges of your organization. The solutions being presented will adapt over time based on your latest employee data and most effective methods available to address pressing DEI issues within your organization at any given time.

Although Peakon is a powerful platform for measuring employee sentiment, and Workday offers a huge suite of tools for managing a business, true inclusion goes beyond measurement to actually making organizational change. Diversio’s AI-driven Recommendation Engine provides proven interventions that make a workplace truly inclusive, and we also offer a wide range of diversity training, workshops, and certifications to transform company culture.

If you want to go beyond measurement and make a real difference, book a Diversio demo today.