Employee surveys can offer great business value if the right actions are taken. But it's imperative you understand your data, know the key drivers of employee engagement, and gain context on scores through benchmarking.
Employee engagement survey benchmark data is fundamental to the employee survey process – whether that's with other organisations’ results or your own historical data. Otherwise, how would you know what a ‘good’ employee engagement score looks like, or whether your employees are truly happy at work?
In the following article, our experts discuss employee survey benchmarks in more detail. Let’s jump right in!
What Is an Employee Engagement Benchmark?
An employee engagement benchmark is a point of reference utilised by companies to measureand compare their employee engagement levels against the norms and best practices within the industry. The aim of these benchmarks is to help businesses monitor their performance and detect areas in which they can improve.
There are various benchmarks out there to help you do this, including:
· Geographic benchmarks – measurements that consider regional differences
· Industry benchmarks – comparisons between similar organisations
· Demographic benchmarks – measurements that analyse engagement levels across factors likegender and age
· Historical benchmarks – comparisons to previous engagement scores in the same organisation, used to track progress
· High-performance benchmarks – allowing comparisons with ‘best in class’ organisations as a more stretching target
Benefits of Employee Engagement Score Benchmark Data
Why is obtaining employee engagement survey benchmark data so advantageous for your organisation? When utilised correctly, here are some of the main benefits you could see:
1. Make useful internal comparisons to replicate success
Using historical trend data allows you to compare with previous years’ results within your organisation. This will show you whether scores have improved or declined following actions taken.
Internal benchmarking can also be really useful for making comparisons across the organisation to assess specific business units or job roles in relation to overall scores. This can highlight high- and low-performing pockets, which you can look at more closely to see what those higher-performing areas are doing differently and seek to replicate their success elsewhere.
2. Gain context from external survey benchmarks
Getting an external comparison with many employees’ views collated from various organisations provides a great context for your own organisation’s results. It can help you decipher what a really good score looks like in relation to a moderate one.
You may find it particularly valuable to compare your employee engagement survey results with those of other organisations of a similar size or from the same industry, as you’ll likely share a number of similar characteristics so as to provide a more relevant comparison.
For example, if you obtain a favourable score of, say, 70% for job role clarity, you might consider this in isolation to be a strong score. But it’s only when you look at how other organisations fare in the same area that you can be sure that it is indeed a good score. In this case, our ETS benchmark score for job role clarity is actually 92% favourable, so you’d conclude that a score of 70% isn’t a particularly good score in comparison with other organisations and there’s plenty of room for improvement.
You can also use quartile splits by grouping all benchmark scores into quartile bands (i.e.25th, 50th, 75th) rather than using mean scores. This can show you how your results compare with ‘best in class’ organisations, allowing you to replicate successful best practices and generate targeted enhancements where required.
3. Learn more about and improve manager performance
Line managers and senior leaders play a significant part in engaging employees. The relationship between line manager and direct report is, arguably, the most important one in any workplace.
We recommend devising a manager index to look at areas where management can directly impact an employee, such as performance management, communication and encouraging development. Below are examples of the statements you might use:
- My immediate manager actively supports my development
- I believe that the company is well-led
- Senior management leads by example (i.e. walk the talk, live by the values)
- My immediate manager shows appreciation for the work I do
- I feel that I am well-managed
Being able to benchmark scores relating to management can reveal areas of strengths and development needs. You can then apply these findings to support managers to improve in order to develop their leadership skills and better engage with their team.
4. Enjoy reliability
Broad samples of data collected from many different organisations can certainly offer you a reliable point of comparison. Having said that, you should consider any possible external influences that could impact employee attitudes expressed in surveys.
For this reason, fluctuations in benchmark scores often benefit from interpretation to better understand what is behind the trends.
5. Guide your strategies with standardised metrics
Because employee engagement survey benchmarking provides standardised metrics to measure engagement against industry norms and best practices, you can utilise these valuable insights to help you navigate your strategies and make informed decisions.
This may involve introducing training sessions or methods of better communication. At ETS, we have experience in improving employee engagement through meaningful conversations.
From this, you will have the power to create achievable objectives that can help you and your employees boost productivity, drive growth, and gain that competitive advantage you’ve been looking for.
Interpreting and Applying Employee Satisfaction Survey Benchmark Data
1. Benchmark your employee engagement on the right things
A key starting point is to make sure you select benchmarks that align with your company’s values, size, industry, and location to ensure that comparisons are relevant and accurate. Moreover, it’s critical to consider what kind of talent you want to hire in the future. Don’t just benchmark the talent you already have – consider benchmarking the company against evolving company needs.
Moreover, questions relating to intention to stay, pride in the organisation, advocacy, and putting in discretionary effort are most commonly taken as key measures of employee engagement.
We group statements relating to these areas into an ‘engagement index’ to monitor the impact of business initiatives on the way employees feel and behave. Here are some statements that would typically make up an engagement index:
- Overall, I am satisfied working for the company
- I intend to still be working for the company in a year’s time
- Morale in the company is high at present
- I am proud to work for the company
- I would recommend the company as a great place to work
Read more about the best employee engagement survey questions for additional information.
2. Collect and analyse the data comprehensively
The best employee engagement survey benchmarking demands detailed data collection. This means you should use employee surveys, performance metrics, and feedback mechanisms to get the details you need to conduct a thorough data analysis.
Once you have this, you must analyse it against the benchmarks to pick up on any patterns, gaps, or other insights that say something about your current engagement strategy.
3. Choose the right-sized benchmark
When thinking about how big your employee engagement benchmark should be, you should always value quality over quality. It’s a misconception that bigger is always better. Instead, you need to focus on what’s relevant.
For example, consider what other possible workplaces your employees may leave you for. Look at various companies within your benchmark instead of focusing on a specific number of people. After all, obtaining a sample of people from similar businesses will fail to give you a representative sample of different organisational cultures.
4. Don’t take broad averages as the final answer
Some people settle for global industry averages, but the truth is that the available datais actually much more comprehensive. If you’re after measurable improvements you can make to employee engagement at your own company, you should look at engagement levels across factors like roles, locations, and more.
5. Keep adapting
Don’t forget that employee engagement is an ongoing process. Remember to keep tracking any changes, monitoring your organisation’s progress, and swapping out your strategies when required. Engagement survey action planning will help you stay one step ahead when creating and maintaining engaged employees.
The Future of Employee Survey Benchmarks
Looking ahead to technological innovations and evolving work dynamics, we can expect employee survey benchmarks to modify further in the future.
Trends that could affect how employee survey benchmark data is obtained and utilise dinclude the adoption of artificial intelligence support and more personalised engagement strategies. Predictive analytics tools may also have a hand inchanging how companies collect and use their data by making the process more and more streamlined.
Get Started with ETS Today
Would you like to compare your organisation’s engagement survey results with our extensive benchmark comprising over one million employees’ responses from many top companies?
There’s no cost involved for eligible organisations, and we’ll send you a free benchmark report – just get in touch, and we’ll help you find out more about how your employee engagement measures up. Our team will also be happy to answer any questions you may have about employee surveys and making marginal gains on employee experience.
We can also help you with planning, launching, and reporting an employee survey.
FAQs
What are benchmark employee engagement scores?
Benchmark employee engagement scores can vary broadly depending on the industry, location, and more factors. Generally, average industry scores fall at around 70%, whereas high-performing scores sit above 80%. Good engagement survey scores indicate that employees feel satisfied, engaged, and committed to their company. This being said, a ‘good’ score can differ from industry to industry and can also depend on a specific organisation’s goals.
Companies can use these benchmark scores to monitor their own success, detect weaknesses, and create targeted strategies to improve their performance over time.
Will your questions be comparable to those in other benchmarks?
In our experience, there are typically a number of ‘common’ questions that are frequently used in employee surveys. While some of these may have subtle differences in the wording, the actual meaning or intention of the question is the same.
Such questions’ scores can be benchmarked and will provide a reliable comparison.
Do employee engagement levels differ much between industries?
There are numerous variances and trends in employee engagement between different industries.
For example, manufacturing companies often have lower overall engagement levels when compared with other industries. This is likely to be a result of common and unique challenges in this industry– such as employees tending to have less autonomy over how they do their work.
How important is it to benchmark against other similar companies of a similar size or industry?
This really depends on the circumstances and, in particular, whether your engagement programme is quite new or established over a number of years. It may be useful to start with an industry-specific benchmark, but with time, you may want to branch out to benchmark yourself against a broader sample giving you a more stretching comparison.
An overall benchmark comparison, made up of many organisations across different sectors, is likely to be more stretching. If your organisation is consistently attaining high engagement scores, you should consider a ‘high-performance’ comparison, which may include a number of different companies across industries, but only scores within the top quartile.
What impact can different cultures have on benchmark scores?
You should certainly take into account possible cultural variances when comparing engagement survey results from across different geographical regions. Different feedback cultures and hierarchies, for example, can significantly influence employee behaviour and survey scores.
For example, countries in the Middle East tend to have exceptionally high levels of employee engagement, which could be partly due to a high power distance. This means that employees are not accustomed to providing feedback to their line manager or senior executives, so scores tend to be higher.
