Global Benchmark Updates, Q1 2021

Benchmarking is an essential part of understanding how your organization is performing against the competition, but only when anchored in real-world expectations. Our data set enables you to benchmark your company’s success with a direct comparison to your competitors, on the same current events.

In our September 2020 Benchmark Report, we saw increases of more than .20 in mean scores (equivalent to 20% of respondents increasing their score by 1 point) for 12 of our 45 engagement questions. Between September and February 2021, the state of engagement has remained relatively stable, with substantial (more than 0.2) score increases for only two questions.

The following changes to the benchmark will be effective March 8, 2021:

• Updated Peakon global benchmark
• Updated existing industry benchmarks
• Addition of new industry benchmarks
• Updated associated percentiles tied to each benchmark
• Updated True Benchmarks

What are the benefits to this new update?

Workday Peakon Employee Voice is a continuous listening platform and we want to ensure that your benchmarks are as accurate and current as possible. We review the data regularly and this is the first time that we have seen such significant changes in engagement, before recent events these have remained stable over long periods of time up until the pandemic in 2020.

Value from new industry benchmarks

With our latest update, we have added 13 new industries that provide a much more granular breakdown of industry. Existing industries will remain the same, but the option to update the benchmarks you are using based on the new additions can be easily changed in your admin settings.

New Industry Benchmarks include:

1. Capital Goods
2. Commercial & Professional Services
3. Consumer Durables & Apparel
4. Consumer Services
5. Diversified Financials
6. Government
7. Health Care Equipment & Services
8. Independent Power and Renewable Electricity Producers
9. Media
10. Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology & Life Sciences
11. Retailing
12. Software & Services
13. Technology Hardware & Equipment

While all existing True Benchmark adjustments (tenure, age, gender, department, job level, and local office) are updated based on current data, the most significant increases we see in our latest update are within the office-location adjustments. Due to our database rise in companies worldwide, we can break regions and account for more countries to identify further adjustments.

To read more about the specific changes to benchmark, more information can be found in our latest report.

What will change on your dashboard?

These changes will impact the base external benchmark score that your company has chosen to be compared to. This can be seen in the expansion to the True Benchmark slide out panel on the front dashboard. It will also be noticed in the difference to benchmark calculations shown in the heat map and on driver and question score pages.

You may notice a change to your organization’s overall benchmark score and percentile placement. If true benchmark is enabled, you may also notice changes to your True Benchmark adjustments and this is to be expected.