Peakon

Peakon is an employee success and continuous listening platform that collects staff feedback through frequent surveys and converts it into analytics and recommended actions for managers and HR leaders. The product covers employee engagement, retention and turnover forecasting, leadership development, diversity, equity and inclusion, employee health and well-being, and organizational change and transformation. It emphasizes ongoing feedback cycles rather than a single annual survey, with benchmarking against a large standardized dataset of employee feedback, dashboards for stakeholders across the organization, and AI-generated themes and summaries drawn from free-text comments.

Since the 2021 acquisition by Workday, the offering is sold as Workday Peakon Employee Voice. Delivery includes a survey experience, dashboards, Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, mobile push notifications, and a public developer API with SCIM 2.0 user provisioning for custom integrations and identity management.

The company describes an attrition-prediction capability that flags employees likely to leave up to 250 days in advance, based on patterns observed in its feedback dataset, and stresses respondent anonymity, including for engagements with heavily unionized employers.

Founding story

Peakon was founded in Denmark; co-founder and CEO Phil Chambers dated the founding to December 2014 in one interview, while a separate interview with co-founder Dan Rogers gives September 2014, and Chambers stated at the time of the Workday acquisition that the company had been founded six years earlier. The initial idea came from co-founder Dan Rogers, who observed that roughly 70% of a company's operating expenses are people costs and that no tool existed for a real-time, data-driven approach to retaining and developing staff. Rogers had previously worked in consumer analytics and growth roles, including VP of Marketing and Growth at Songkick (2010-2014), growth at Qype (2009-2010) and finance and technology roles including a senior associate position at JP Morgan (2005-2007); he holds an MBA from London Business School and a BEng in software engineering from Aberystwyth University. Chambers studied computer science and worked at Accenture, Gumtree, Qype and the B2B SaaS company Podio before co-founding Peakon.

Business model

B2B software-as-a-service sold to organizations, with recurring subscription revenue; since the Workday acquisition it is offered as part of the Workday enterprise application portfolio and sold through Workday's sales organization.

Recurring subscription revenue from enterprise customers for the employee listening platform.

Traction

As of a 2019 interview the company reported more than 600 customers, over 35 million feedback observations across 125 countries, headcount growth from 80 to 230 in two years and $68M raised. Workday's 2021 acquisition release lists Capgemini, The Adecco Group, Delivery Hero, Staples and easyJet among organizations served. Marketing materials cite customer outcomes including a 57-point eNPS increase over 12 months, a 10% reduction in voluntary turnover, an 11% rise in Glassdoor rating and 10x ROI from lower attrition and reduced hiring spend.

Latest developments

The offering is marketed as Workday Peakon Employee Voice with generative-AI themes, summaries and concrete action suggestions, alongside published resources such as the Workday 2024 Employee Experience Trends report. The Peakon developer API and status page remain operational, with the status page reporting all systems operational and scheduled maintenance in August 2026.