Who Should You Benchmark Employee Surveys Against?
Benchmarking can be helpful, but it shouldn’t overshadow your overall engagement strategy. Here are three points to keep in mind when deciding who you stack up against.
I spent seven years leading methodology and data science for employee engagement surveys at Peakon and Workday. Over that time, I’ve worked with everyone from tiny tech startups to massive retail brands, mining operations, football clubs, and even government entities. Now that I’m no longer directly involved in survey creation, I can share my honest thoughts on the most effective ways to run employee surveys.
See the complete set of tips & tricks for running employee engagement surveys.
Benchmarking is useful. It gives you context, a yardstick, a sense of whether you're doing well or drifting behind. But like most things, it’s easy to misuse.
Your engagement strategy should not revolve around a spreadsheet of comparison scores.
- Don’t Overdo the Search for a Perfect Benchmark
Everyone loves the idea of a finely tuned, industry-specific benchmark. But the truth is, solid question coverage often does more for you than a hyper-narrow comparison group. Sure, your board might demand a utilities-only benchmark or whatever box ticks compliance. But for everyday decisions? Broader is usually better. You also need a big enough sample size to trust the numbers. Anything under thirty companies and you’re effectively gambling. - Look at Your Talent Competition
This part gets missed. Your real competition isn’t always the company next door doing the same thing. It’s whoever is hiring away your best people. If you're a bank but keep losing software engineers to tech firms, you want to benchmark against the tech sector. That’s the battlefield.
Most survey providers won’t let you hand-pick companies for benchmarks, because confidentiality gets tricky fast. But push them. Often, you can get a custom benchmark tailored to the kind of competition you care about, without breaching anyone’s privacy. - Accept That Some Questions Won’t Be Benchmarkable
Not everything needs a comparison point. Some topics are just too variable. Return-to-office policies, for example, are all over the place. Comparing your results to a fully remote startup when you’ve mandated on-site attendance isn’t just unhelpful, it’s nonsensical. Sometimes you need to abandon the benchmark and focus on what's relevant to your own situation.
Sunbeam
Sunbeam is a feedback analytics platform designed to make working with open-ended, text-based feedback as straightforward as working with scores. Too many organizations overlook the rich insights hidden in qualitative responses, and Sunbeam aims to fix that. By combining deep industry expertise with cutting-edge AI, Sunbeam makes it simple to analyze and act on text feedback, ultimately helping HR teams unlock the full potential of employee engagement data.