External benchmarking = Unhealthy competition - your view?

[Vandy Massey]

Is external benchmarking on employee engagement helpful? Or does it just create an unhelpful culture of competition?

I recently wrote a critique on external benchmarking in employee surveys. My view is that its damaging and distracting.

This blog post on the topic generated some discussion on Twitter and LinkedIn.

I'd love to hear opinions from this forum.

[David Zinger]

Vancy,

Hopefully in employee engagement everyone gets off the bench and into work. Seriously, it is good to see how others might be doing as long as the conditions and surveys are the same. Yet the paradox of survey data is it usually is a bell curve with slight tweaks. At least what I have seen. So maybe the bench mark should be to the bell.

David

[Bob Gately]

Hello Vandy:

"I recently wrote a critique on external benchmarking in employee surveys. My view is that its damaging and distracting."

It is distracting and it may or may not be damaging but why risk either?

Are employee surveys effective at identifying engaged employees?

What other employers' employees think about their place of employment may well be irrelevant to another employers' workforce.

If an employer copies another employer's programs or approach, it may be doomed to fail unless the workforce and culture is very similar.

Employers try to improve employee productivity with training but training fails too frequently.

Employers try to improve employee productivity by training managers but that training fails too achieve its goals too frequently.

Employers try to teach employees to be leaders so they do not need to be managed, but that too fails too frequently as well.

Employers are now trying to make their employees engaged but that fails as well.

It is time for employers and their managers to stop trying shortcuts to employee engagement and start doing all their managerial tasks well.

If an employer does a good job of hiring the right people, then they'll have an engaged workforce once they have stopped mismanaging their employees and the business.

Bob

[Vandy Massey]

Hi Bob,

We completely agree that good management is critical. We're so committed to this principle that we've produce the Guideline to Employee Engagement for Managers which we provide as a free download on our site - You are most welcome to download a copy and share it with any managers you feel could do with some guidelines.

However, I don't agree that employers are using surveys as shortcuts. I think surveys, if well conducted and focused on the right things, are a powerful way of gathering feedback from staff - which enables the management team to make critical decisions about changes they could make in order to manage better. The point in conducting staff surveys, I believe, is that you provide a forum for people who might otherwise not feel able to give feedback for various reasons. Without an across-the-board feedback opportunity, those employees who have a loud voice, but may also have opinions that are not shared with everyone, are the ones who get heard. Not providing a means for everyone to give feedback of equal weight would, in my view, be exactly the bad management you are concerned about.

I do concur with your view that companies shouldn't try taking short cuts when it comes to their people. In fact, consciously, and constantly working on engaging your staff is exactly the sort of good management we should be encouraging. It isn't good enough to focus on recruiting the right people and then just stop short when it comes to developing them and the organisation.

And as far as training is concerned, we've seen time and again that its the companies that continue to develop and train their staff through the tough times who come out ahead of the pack when economic activity picks up. And there are ways of keeping the training going on a tight budget.

Vandy