About benchmarking and how it works

To understand engagement across your organization, it’s essential to have a measurement that is anchored in some real-world expectations, rather than an artificial scale. 

By having a complete, consistent approach to engagement, translated into over 50 different languages, Peakon can build up a view of very accurate global and industry benchmarks.

The Peakon benchmarks consist of data points from over 160 million unique surveys all using the same model of engagement with very closely aligned questions.

This article will contain:

• How it works
• Difference between benchmark and True Benchmark
• Viewing benchmarks in dashboard
• Segment specific benchmarks

How it works

Every single driver and segment is benchmarked on Peakon, whether it is externally to the industry or against your own company scores. This is possible on all question sets: Engagement, Health and Wellbeing, Diversity and Inclusion and COVID-19. As a result, when viewing a score on the dashboard, the benchmark score will also be visible, in order to anchor the data and provide some additional context.

Organizations can set their company level benchmark preference between Peakon benchmark (all companies) or a specific industry. It is also possible to set the benchmark percentile, if they only wish to measure against the top 25%, for example. To configure your benchmark, see Configuring the benchmark settings. 

The below table contains the 3 different benchmark options available to all companies:

How benchmark selection adapts to the context

Company level results are benchmarked to the industry, whereas segments of the company are benchmarked to the company score.

Furthermore, when viewing a segment within a segment, the sub-segment is benchmarked against the context segment. To learn more, see Understanding how benchmarks are applied on different views.

Additionally, clients can manually set a specific segment to be benchmarked externally, and propagate the benchmark preference to its child segments when using hierarchies (see Configuring the benchmark settings).

Difference between benchmark and True Benchmark 

Across the broad base of companies using the Peakon platform, we can see trends in how demographics and occupations affect engagement beyond the influence of individual managers or companies. 

To counter these trends, a True Benchmark is generated by first looking at the composition of an employee population, and then looking at how this differs from the norm for your industry or company (depending on whether you see industry or company benchmark on your dashboard). In groups of employees that differ greatly from the norm, Peakon takes this into account when calculating a benchmark.

The below table explains the key difference between the average benchmark and True Benchmark. To learn more about True Benchmark in general, see True Benchmark and how it works.

Viewing benchmarks in dashboard

Benchmark details are visible all throughout the Peakon dashboard. Whether a user sees an external or internal benchmark depends on their access and company configuration. To learn more, see Understanding how benchmarks are applied on different views.

The benchmark displays in the Score over time graph in quarterly increments, based on when Peakon updates its benchmarking data.

Main dashboard

The benchmark is visible on the main engagement score, as well as on each driver score. When using True Benchmark, it is also possible to click on the True Benchmark detail next to the main score in order to see any True Benchmark adjustments.

Benchmark percentiles

As with all Peakon scores, the main engagement score is rounded. Additionally, the percentile ranges are rounded. Below is an example of a percentile breakdown, as well as their rounded ranges.

For determining which benchmark percentile an engagement score sits in, the unrounded engagement score is compared to the unrounded percentile ranges.

For example, let's imagine that the engagement score is 8.96123864, rounded up to 9.0. Additionally, let's imagine that the top 5% range is 8.97363652, also rounded to 9.0. While the two figures might appear the same in their rounded form, this engagement score would be placed in the top 10% range, due to being just under the top 5% starting range of 8.97363652 and above.

Drivers and question scores pages

The driver and question score pages show benchmarks as well. Opening a driver's dashboard will also make it possible to expand the True Benchmark details.

Segment heatmap

The segment heatmap allows for multiple segments to be viewed in one view. Here it is possible to not only see the segment scores, but also compare scores to the benchmark. 

Segment-specific benchmarks

For organizations that operate in multiple industries or organizations made up of multiple companies, it is possible to choose a different industry benchmark for certain segments of the business.

For example, a financial services provider may wish for its fin-tech division to be benchmarked against technology businesses – given that it will need to operate more like a tech company than a bank to attract and retain talent.

A segment-specific benchmark can also be used for internal benchmarking (rather than external, against an industry). For example, a business with many manufacturing plants in different countries, may want to use the average of these as its internal global benchmark. 

When using hierarchical attributes (About attribute hierarchies and how they work), it is possible to automatically propagate the segment specific benchmark to child segments. For configuration, see Configuring the benchmark settings.

In relation to True Benchmark, should a segment-specific benchmark be applied, this will form the baseline benchmark that will then be corrected by True Benchmark – in the same process as a standard industry or company benchmark.