Benchmarks for Employee engagement survey results

[Anna Scherzer]

Our company conducts employee engagement surveys for large international companies. For one of our clients we are now looking for benchmarking data for several questions. Does anyone know who provides such benchmarking data, preferably with large databases and data of international/global companies our client could benchmark against?

 

Thanks.

 

[David Bowles]

Anna, its a good question but this area is a real minefield! First of all the biggest databases are in the hands of Gallup, Sirota, TowersWatson (which includes the former survey powerhouse ISR), etc. They are unlikely, I would say they will NEVER sell access to that data because it is so valuable to their business and their clients would never allow it. That leaves you with smaller databases.....but be careful....

I have done research on such databases (very large to smaller), some of which I used to maintain for my own consulting firm. If you read this you will see why I am wary. There are huge differences in databases between vendors, even on the same questions, for the same industry and the same country, in the same time frame. As far as I know this research has never been done before because getting hold of competing databases was a fluke which happened to me just once while working on constructing my own.

This is why Gallup and Towers cannot even agree on whether employee engagement has gone down or is flat in the last year, as you will see in my link. The differences are huge: Gallup saying flat and Towers saying a minus 9.0% move.

In the end I stopped using such "norms". If I were you I would have a discussion with your client about this, as I did with all mine. Internal benchmarking is far far better, in my opinion, than using norms which are of dubious value and validity.

best to you

David
www.moraleatwork.com

[Craig Althof]

Hi Anna--

What David said, for sure! The love of benchmarking against others' specific data is most definitely a salty area to mess with, my opinion too. It seems too many managers feel there is no longer a need for good old-fashioned leadership intuition (a dying art form?) as long as they have SOME kind of numbers to pull out of their pocket. Too often data does nothing but abdicate the responsibility for making sound, intelligent decisions based on gut, feel, instinct, experience...

Our friend Ollie recently quoted US bard Mark Twain's famous line about "three kinds of lies"....lies, damned lies, and statistics!

Sorry for the rant, couldn't resist!

It may help if you could narrow the search down, Anna...for what "several questions" are you looking to benchmark data?

[Mireille Jansma]

Hi Anna,

I do agree with David and Craig. Plus companies who do benchmarking often seem to go for mediocricy at best, especially if they combine their benchmarking with copying 'best practices' from the companies they benchmark.

A friend of mine once drew a lovely cartoon of some rabbits sitting on a highway, big car looming nearby, benchmarking each other. "They don't move: we're safe!" :)

Nothing wrong with using your own head (in a broad sense!).

Having said that: Yes, specifying what questions those companies want to 'benchmark' would help...

Best, Mireille

[Randi Sandlin]

Gallop, TowersWatson, big companies - may be big dollars for database visibility. Quantum Workplace may be able to help you with a survey and benchmarks.
Or you can go to the literature for some published results. There are multiple books and articles published on the topic.
At th end of the day, I agree with the comments below about benchmarking - your own organization benchmarks are the best starting place.
And, I would also add that it is important to remember that the power of the engagement survey is not in the data, but in the DIALOGUE about the data. The trend of your data from survey to survey will tell you if you are affecting the culture and how engaged your folks are over time.

[David Bowles]

Anna, this group is spot on with the right advice for you. External benchmarks are going to create problems for your client. Think about this: no one consultant has your client's competitors' data, all in one group, because the consulting industry is so fragmented. Best practices, OK maybe this is available, but for whom, a group of companies in your client's industry...with their unique culture? That's the beauty of internal benchmarking, you can find out who the champions are within your client's organization, within THEIR culture. Then have the less-than-stellar performers on the survey go and visit those people to see what they do differently. Internal rankings (we wrote our own special software for that...to assign a single "morale index" number to each group's performance then chart them in descending order) and as Randi says, trends over time, that's such incredibly powerful stuff. Having a client look at the screen and see their whole operation (one small hospital's departments or a multi-national's countries or operating units) ranked for morale or engagement from best to worst, well I never got tired of showing clients that and they never got tired of seeing it.

good luck to you

David
www.moraleatwork.com