A number of different benchmarks are available, and these can be either internal or external:
Internal – These are benchmarks comparing a single organisations data to itself, for example through year-on-year comparisons (i.e. current survey results vs previous survey results) or filtering by employment group and comparing the scores for one employment group to the organisation overall or each other.
These benchmarks can also be applied to demographic data (i.e. you can look at scores for different job grades or for different salary bands in the same way).
External – This is where an organisation’s scores are compared to other organisations; for example, to other organisations in the same sector or to those with a specific Star Rating (i.e. a stretch benchmark showing how far away or ahead of the next level of engagement award you are).
External benchmarks can also be applied to demographic data, for example, job grades. As job grades (and other demographics) are consistent across organisations at a basic level (names may change of course), this allows us to compare the scores for, say, managers in your organisation to the scores of managers in other organisations. We can do this as we ask every client with custom job grade names to map them back to a consistent level, i.e. Team Member or Manager.
How are benchmarks calculated?
The scores that make up the benchmarks are simply the average scores for the particular group you are comparing to. If you are looking at average factor scores for your organisation for your current surveys results vs your previous survey results, you are comparing the average score for this survey vs the average score from your last survey.
For external benchmarks, the scores are the average scores for all the organisations in the group you are looking at. As these benchmarks include multiple companies, scores are calculated at company level first (i.e. factor scores for each organisation in the benchmark are calculated, then averaged across all the organisations that make up the benchmark). This is so that no company is over-weighted in the benchmark.
When using benchmarks for demographics, the scores in the benchmark will be the average scores for that specific group from the companies within that benchmark. If you are looking at the overall score split by job grade compared to 2 Star organisations, you can see the average score for Team Members, Managers etc. within your organisation compared to the average score for Team Members, Managers etc. for all 2 star organisations. As with the stretch and sector benchmarks overall, the average scores in the benchmarks are calculated at company level first (i.e. all the scores for Team Members, Managers etc. are averaged for each company within the benchmark) and then these scores are averaged across all the companies in the benchmark to create the benchmark scores.
Employment groups are unique to an organisation and cannot, therefore, be compared directly to an external benchmark (i.e. you cannot compare scores for employees within a particular employment group to employees in the same group in other organisations, as the groups do not exist in other organisations). However, it is possible to benchmark employment groups against stretch benchmarks…
In the above table, the scores for each employment group are shown. The scores in the coloured cells on the table are the percentage difference between the score for that employment group and the average score for all the companies in that benchmark. So, looking at the score within the black bold box, this is the difference between the average Leadership score for the employment group ‘Research and Development’ and the average Leadership score for all the organisations within the 2 Star Companies stretch benchmark.
If we switch to the ‘Job Grade’ tab now, the scores are the difference between the average scores for each job grade within the organisation (or an employment group if filtered by this) compared to the average scores for each job grade in the organisations within that stretch benchmark. So, looking at the score below in the black bold box, this is the difference between the average score for all the team members within the job grade ‘Team Member’ and the average score for all the team members in the organisations within the 2 Star companies stretch benchmark …
When looking at any of these comparison style tables in WIT, you can click on any employment group or percentage number that has a line underneath it for further insight. If it’s an employment group you will be able to view any smaller ‘child’ groups that fall within that structure and if it’s a factor you will be able to drop down into the statements within that factor.
For additional support please email support@b.co.uk, call us on 01978 856222, or click the 'Get in Touch' button at the top of this page.