Themes group individual questions into a higher, more abstract topic. They help you to organize, understand, and interpret the data collected from the survey.

Here are a few examples of themes:

• Employee satisfaction
• Company values
• Performance & Growth
• Leadership & Management
• Rewards & Benefits

Personio offers a number of preset themes that you can assign to your survey questions to group them. You can also create custom themes and manage them on a company level.

Themes and the People Matter Framework

The People Matter Framework (PMF) is Personio’s conceptual framework to measure engagement.

Personio collects engagement data via five science-based questions organized into three preset themes: Engagement, Retention, and Referral.

You can’t add these themes to any other question. This makes sure your scores are always based on the same questions, ensures comparability of results, and detect trends.

Main benefits

Survey themes are a powerful tool when it comes to analysing survey results. They empower you to:

• Glean insights from survey results more quickly, especially for surveys with many questions.
• Easily identify trends in clearly defined areas.
• Reduce manual work when analysing results (considering groups of questions instead of every single question).

Permissions for themes

To create, edit, and add custom themes to survey questions, you need specific permissions:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Organization section, click Roles & permissions.
3. Click the relevant role. 
4. Click Permissions.
5. Under Configuration, expand the Surveys segment.
6. Next to Themes and under Edit, tick the All checkbox.

Note:
You cannot create, edit or delete preset themes.

Create, edit and delete themes

You can manage custom themes when drafting a new survey, or when editing an open one. To do so, follow these steps:

1. On the sidebar, click Surveys. Click a draft survey.
2. The survey editing window opens. Under Question, click Add theme.
3. In the drop-down menu, click Manage themes.
4. The Manage themes window opens:
   ▶︎ To add a new theme, click Add theme.
   ▶︎ To edit an existing theme, click the pencil icon next to the theme's name.
   ▶︎ To delete a theme, click the trash icon next to the theme's name. Note that deleting a theme removes it from all surveys, including closed ones.

Note:
If you create a custom theme and give it the same name as an existing preset theme, Personio still treats them as separate themes.

Add a theme to a survey question

You can add a theme (preset or custom) to a survey question when drafting a new survey, or when editing an open one. To do so, follow these steps:

1. On the sidebar, click Surveys. Click a draft survey.
2. The survey editing window opens. Under Question, click Add theme.
3. In the drop-down menu, click the preferred theme.

Notes
You cannot add Themes to a closed survey as adding themes could affect the aggregated favorability per theme.