How highlighted segments are calculated

Highlighted segments are Peakon’s way of bringing attention to the areas of your organization with significantly different levels of engagement, in comparison to the company as a whole. These highlighted segments are split into priorities and strengths.

This article will contain:

• Background
• How Peakon identifies a highlighted segment
• Viewing highlighted segments

Background

The groups of employees or demographics that you’ll see are dependent on your position in the organization. Only employees who report upwards to you are included in the calculation of your highlighted segments.

Peakon also considers the size of each segment, in proportion to the number of people reporting upwards to you, when choosing what to highlight. For example, if you were a CTO with some 1000 or so technical staff reporting upwards to you, then your top priority would not be to focus on five disengaged quality assurance engineers – you’d leave that to the head of QA. This kind of business logic is reflected in Peakon.

• Strengths are your highly-engaged groups of employees. They often represent a team where the culture and strategy are perfectly in sync, and cases of best-practice management.
• Priorities reflect the groups of employees who are significantly less engaged than the organization as a whole. By flagging a segment as a priority, Peakon is recommending that you take a closer look, and understand from the driver scores and comments as to why engagement differs significantly here.

How Peakon identifies a highlighted segment

Highlighted segments are segments where the engagement score is significantly above or below the company benchmark.

In more detail:

• Only segments where results are significantly different (in a statistical sense) from the benchmarks are considered. Segments with low score accuracy are much less likely to be significantly different.
• The difference to benchmark is weighted by the size of the segment, to find segments of a size that is actionable given the size of the context, but not so big that they are essentially the majority of the context.
• Very similar segments are removed, as described further below.
• A number of priorities and strengths are selected based on the size of the context. For very large contexts, there can be up to 10 priorities and strengths, for small contexts it can be 3 (or less if none that match the other criteria).
• Based on the above, the top and bottom segments are selected and set as priorities and strengths, based on the combination of the difference to benchmark and the weight based on the segment size.

What happens when there are two very similar segments?

When two segments are very similar in their employee makeup, Peakon calculates how much the employees overlap by dividing the intersection (number of employees the segments have in common) by the union (number of employees the segments have in total) of the two segments. If this metric is 80% or above, they're considered very similar.

In such cases, Peakon only highlights the segment that has the biggest difference between its score and the benchmark, relative to its segment size.

Viewing highlighted segments

From the Engagement overview

Highlighted segments can be viewed from the Engagement overview of your dashboard, beneath the section of highlighted drivers of engagement:

From the Heat map

From the view under your dashboard overview, it is possible to click on View heat map to see these highlighted segments there. To access segment comparison, click on Heat map in the Analysis section. If any segments are highlighted, they appear selected as default in the Heat map view as Highlights.