Explanation Of Scoring Procedures
Best Companies calculate scores out of 7 for each of our 8 Factors. but these are then weighted before being averaged to produce an overall engagement score.
The first step in scoring is to translate the responses into numbers from 1 to 7. For questions which use a statement where agreement is favourable to the organisation ‘Strongly Agree’ converts to 7, ‘Agree’ converts to 6 and so on with ‘Strongly Disagree’ converting to 1. Questions which use a statement where disagreement is favourable to the organisation are ‘reverse scored’. That is to say that for these questions ‘Strongly Disagree’ translates to 7 and ‘Strongly Agree’ translates to 1. In this way high numbers are always favourable to the company and low numbers are always unfavourable.
The next step is to get a factor score for every respondent for each of the 8 factors. This is done by averaging that person’s responses to each of the questions measuring that factor. The factor scores of each respondent in the organisation are averaged to give the organisation’s score on that factor. This is repeated for each of the 8 factors.
Factor scores can either be expressed on the 1-to-7 scale – on which questions are originally scored – or they can be translated to a 0-to-100 scale which can be thought of as a percentage of the maximum possible score. This conversion is carried out by first subtracting one from the score (giving an answer between 0 and 6) and then expressing the answer as a percentage of 6. In this way, the maximum of 7 on the 1-to-7 scale converts to 100%, the minimum of 1 converts to 0% and 4 – which is the mid-point of the 1-to-7 scale – converts to 50%. The same conversion can also be carried out for question averages and for overall engagement scores.
An organisation’s 8 factor scores are combined to give the overall engagement score for that organisation. Again, this is done by averaging the 8 factor scores, but this time the factors are weighted – although differences in the weights between factors are quite small. The weights are used because there are small variations between factors in the spread of scores across companies. Without the weights, the factors with a bigger spread of scores would have more influence on overall engagement than factors with a smaller spread of scores.
The final stage in scoring is to rescale the overall engagement score into the BCI metric. We have consistently found that engagement scores decrease as organisation size increases. Because of this, and in order for us to be able to make a fairer comparison between organisations of different sizes, the rescaling incorporates an adjustment for organisation size: small, mid or big.
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