Internal benchmarking

Internal benchmarking is the process by which we look for data comparisons within your organization. Internal benchmarking is widely used to determine employee experiential baselines within the organization and track the progress over time.

To draw an allegory, imagine you are a swimmer or a runner. You initiated your training program, and you would want to track how you are progressing over time. With that in mind, you use your stopwatch to capture how much time it takes you to swim or run one lap. The time you recorded on your stopwatch is your baseline and your internal benchmark. As you continue training and developing, you will continue competing with yourself and improve your initial score until you improve your performance by a certain percentage, when you will likely set the new benchmark and compete against it.

We use internal benchmarks for all of our diagnostic surveys. Employee experiences are quite varied, and organizations tend to have different thresholds when answering experiential questions. For that reason, an excellent way to start evaluating your results is by comparing them against your internal standards.

We approach representing data for each construct, dimension, and item studied by using percent favorable scores.

Percent favorable responses represent the percentage of favorable or positive answer choices to the question or a group of questions that define a construct. The reason we use percent favorable scores instead of mean is the ease of interpretability. It merely states the percentage of employees who have a positive experience with a tested dimension, and it is easier to understand that 95% of your employees have a positive sentiment about a particular topic as opposed to knowing that your employee score 4.23 on the same studied dimension.

At Orgnostic, we use your percent favorable scores for the whole population (employee base) as the benchmarking baseline and then compare specific employee segments (business units, demographics, etc.) against those numbers. We then visually and numerically compare the distances between the studied employee segment and the whole employee population.

External benchmarking

Let's go back to our swimmer/runner. When you first start practicing, you might not be interested in the world record for completing your intended lap, but you'd want to compare to people similar to you. World record (or average time needed for an average person to complete a lap) is an external benchmark.

External benchmarking is the process by which you take your score and compare it against the external record of data; that record of data looks into a broad sample of data points on a given topic.

For data representation of external benchmarking at Orgnostic, we use percentile scores. Percentile scores as a function of the numerical model of external benchmarks tell you how you stack against the market. If your score is 95 on our external benchmarking scale, that means that your employees score higher than the 95% of all the other companies in our sample.

We mainly use external benchmarks for your organizational culture diagnostics and data interpretation. Our data sample contains more than 10M employee survey records and over 2000 companies. Denison's culture survey studies have shown the predictive value between universal benchmark scores and financial outputs such as revenue, EBITDA, and return on sales. Using the external benchmark, in this case, helps us establish the links between your internal scores and potential business outputs. Based on such scores and your business priorities, we can suggest what types of actions you should prioritize to align organizational and business goals.

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