Our guide to employee survey benchmarking

A question we hear a lot when discussing employee surveys with potential clients is “Who do you work with in our sector?’

This is often motivated by two concerns:

• Do we understand the industry?
• Do we have employee survey sector benchmarks for comparison?

An employee survey partner with experience in your sector of course really helps when it comes to designing survey questions, and understanding the broader context and issues that affect colleagues.

However deciding who you compare your survey data to, and why, requires more consideration.

Sector benchmarks highlight strengths and challenges 

A common driver for sector benchmarks is the link between engagement and recruitment and retention of talent. Organisations are often keen to understand how likely they are to attract talented employees from or lose them to competitors. It is great PR to show strong employee engagement, and bad PR to show poor engagement, as our experiences with Glassdoor attest. Of course it’s not just engagement that make up the employer brand. Values, product, sustainability, company culture etc. all have their part to play.

Another valid reason for wanting to score higher than same-sector competitors is in order to demonstrate a resilient and stable workforce to shareholders. Organisations (particularly in financial services) use engagement scores as part of their strategic planning and reporting. We’ve also seen employee engagement scores requested by suppliers during due diligence.

Thirdly, bragging rights: high performing organisations want to know and show that they are market leaders in a variety of ways!

When sector benchmarks are misleading

Despite the many benefits, there are potential dangers when using a sector-specific benchmark.

There is no research defined sample size that constitutes a robust number for sector benchmarking. Fifty would be great, three would not, but what is enough?

In addition, all of the organisations would need to use the same questions to be comparable. Here’s a good time to note that People Insight’s PEARL model of employee engagement uses a set of 35 survey questions, which allow us to provide a robust benchmark across many sectors. Find out more about what makes PEARL the best way of measuring employee engagement.

So organisations that on paper are similar to yours may not actually be good comparators due to differences in structure, size, culture, operating principles, or maturity of engagement programmes.

Also, sector-specific comparisons are more likely to give rise to a false yardstick, i.e. an excuse for poor scores because ‘we’re better than the competition’ or an under appreciation of strengths due to very strong comparators. 

Which comparators should you use in an employee survey?

We do like the context that benchmarks provide, and there is a range of different comparators that you can use to achieve different goals.

For organisations who have established strong employee engagement, and want the stretch, a cross-sector ‘upper quartile’ benchmark is useful, and very popular with many of our clients. In fact, People Insight’s upper-quartile clients receive our Outstanding Workplace Award in recognition of their impressive scores.

A broad brush, cross-industry ‘general’ benchmark comparison might not have the perceived cachet of a sector-specific benchmark, but can provide a more accurate, robust view of what employees want from their employers, often from hundreds of thousands, if not millions of data points.

Additionally, you should focus on internal benchmarks – both historic and division/department comparisons. The highest performing organisations are often interested in internal comparisons first. After all, no organisation can find a better benchmark than itself.

A more subjective (and perhaps more valid) assessment is to look at scores around priority issues and consider ‘X% of our employees agree with question Y, is that good enough or not for the kind of organisation we want to be?’

“Don’t compare yourself to others, you have no idea what their journey is all about.” Dawn Abraham

There is a strong case to be made for benchmarking in helping to understand the organisation’s relative employee engagement strengths and weaknesses, but given the caveats above, a reliance on sector benchmarking shouldn’t be over emphasised.