How Peakon updates its benchmarks

As Peakon’s database grows, it is necessary to perform periodic updates to Peakon’s industry and True Benchmarks to maintain a high degree of accuracy. This ensures that you are always working with the most up-to-date benchmark comparisons. 

Updates to industry and True Benchmarks are deployed periodically throughout the year by Peakon’s engineering and data science teams. Any bug fixes or minor improvements take place on an ad-hoc basis as required. 

There is no action required on the customer’s part. Updates and bug fixes can be found in the Product Updates section of our Help Center.

General Updates to Benchmarks

Whenever we see substantial significant changes in benchmark trends, we review the data for our benchmarks to ensure that they are as accurate and current as possible. General Benchmark updates usually only impact scores that are externally benchmarked to an industry. This can impact the base external benchmark score that your company has chosen to be compared to as the Industry benchmark is updated.

Changes to industry benchmarks will only impact scores that are externally benchmarked. Since manager dashboards are usually benchmarked internally against the company engagement score, they will most likely not see any change at all unless they are manually assigned to the industry benchmark.

Adjustments to Industry Benchmarks

As an organization, it’s important to know how engaged your employees are compared to your industry counterparts. Our data set enables you to benchmark your company’s success with a direct comparison to your competitors. This is where Peakon’s industry benchmarks come into play.

When Peakon has enough data points in a new industry, a new industry benchmark will be made available to benchmark your overall organization’s engagement scores against.

Typically customers will select their industry benchmark when setting up their Peakon account. These settings can be reviewed and adjusted at any time by an administrator (Administration > Data settings > Benchmarks).

Peakon will never reveal the list of companies in each industry benchmark, but there will always be a minimum number of data points required.

Adjustments to True Benchmark

When enabled, True Benchmark will adjust the benchmark according to your team composition. These adjustments are based on data that Peakon collects regarding engagement trends attached to different attribute segments - age, department, gender, tenure, local office, and job level.

As Peakon collects more data points on these attribute segments, it becomes necessary to deploy periodic updates to ensure accuracy, which means you’ll always be working with the most updated benchmarks.

General updates to Peakon benchmarks do not necessarily always impact the True Benchmark functionality as these are considered for updates separately.

What will change on your dashboard?

When an update to True Benchmark adjustments has been deployed, you may notice changes to your True Benchmark scores on your dashboard. This is to be expected as the accuracy has improved. 

Similarly, if an update to industry benchmarks has been deployed, you may notice a change to your organization’s overall benchmark score. This is also to be expected.

In the majority of cases, minor improvements or bug fixes will not be noticed or have minimal impact on your dashboard’s benchmark scores. 

How does Peakon use industry and True Benchmark data?

In addition to providing as accurate as possible levels of benchmark comparisons, Peakon also leverages such data to uncover interesting trends in engagement to share with our customers.

If you are curious to see how our database is growing in real time and read our latest findings from research into the world of work, be sure to visit and subscribe to Heartbeat, our dedicated site using employee engagement data from Peakon.