Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(Data sources: company websites, see links below)
If you use external benchmarks for your employee engagement/morale survey results, and if you place anything more that a tiny amount of value in them, this chart above should make you very afraid. Let me explain:
Some time ago I wrote a piece on how external employee engagement benchmarks, the data from other organizations against which consultants compare a client’s performance on surveys of their people, differ greatly from each other. This is one of the darker secrets of the consulting world, but one which I have covered for years, as someone who used to collect and manage such databases for my own consulting purposes. Then I found out that my data and that of other consultants did not even closely resemble each other, even on the same questions, for the same industry, in the same time period and geographic location. How could this be? You can read all the reasons in the original post. Mainly, this is a gap…no, a gaping wide cravasse…between how consultants define engagement.
I thought it might be time to update this: maybe the consultants have found a way to agree on what engagement “is” so that their questionnaires more closely resemble each other and the data are more uniform? Dream on…..
I took two consultants which operate worldwide and collect a great deal of information. 2013 was a year when I had data from both of them, but I suggest to you this is not going to change in one or two years. Gallup tells us that in that year, some 13% of people were engaged at work. AonHewitt says that nunber is 61%. Both sets of data are “global”, not for any one country.
The original blog will tell you more as to why this is: its about definition, questionnaires and the participants on the database. Its embarrassing that we have this situation. A few points different…OK. An almost 5X difference? Now you know why I gave up offering this type of information to my clients many many years ago. I could have no confidence that my data reflected what was “out there”. I switched to internal benchmarking, we wrote software which would give us the best internal benchmarks possible, and clients loved it. They never wanted to go back.
So every now and then I will visit this subject and see if it changes. I am not optimistic, and for that reason I repeat here my strongly held view (can you tell?) that all external employee engagement and morale benchmarks should carry a warning label. Here it is:
This benchmark is based on how we define engagement, which might be different from how others define it; it is based on our proprietary questionnaire, which is based on our definition of engagement; it is also based on a sample of our client data, and others might have different types of organizations in their databases which will affect their data and cause it to be different than ours. As a result we cannot guarantee that our engagement benchmark will match any other, even for the same geographic location, the same worker demographics and the same time period.
Want to make a valid comparison to data which reflects your own unique culture, industry (or if non profit, mission) and location (yes national culture does affect local work cultures…)?? Then use internal benchmarks of your own data over time. Its supremely powerful stuff, done right.
Filed under: @psych4biz, data mining, data mining with employee surveys, David Bowles Ph.D., employee engagement, employee engagement surveys, employee morale, employee morale surveys, employee survey myths, employee surveys, enagagement benchmark, engagement myths, engagement surveys, external benchmark engagement, external benchmark morale, Gallup, Gallup Q12, happiness at work, happiness at work and worker engagement, High Engagement, human resources, internal benchmarking engagement data, internal communications, internal ranking on engagement, internal vs external benchmarking of employee data, mining employee survey data, mining engagement data, morale, morale benchmark, morale myths, morale surveys, myths of morale, TowersWatson, Trends in Employee Engagement, Trends in Employee Morale, UK worker engagement, Uncategorized, US worker engagement levels, World at Work Tagged: #employeeengagement, @psych4biz, AonHewitt, corporate culture, data mining and engagement, David Bowles Ph.D., employee engagement, employee morale, engagement, external benchmark engagement, external benchmark morale, Gallup, Gallup Q12, global engagement, global morale, Hewitt, high workforce morale, HR, human resources, internal ranking and engagement, internal vs external benchmarking of employee data, management, management and employee engagement, management and high employee morale, morale, morale and engagement, Trends in Employee Engagement, Trends in Employee Morale, workforce morale Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
