Employee Survey Tips: Who Should I Benchmark Against?

I spent seven years leading methodology and data science for employee engagement surveys at Peakon and Workday. Over that time, I’ve worked with everyone from tiny tech startups to massive retail brands, mining operations, football clubs, and even government entities. Now that I’m no longer directly involved in survey creation, I can share my honest thoughts on the most effective ways to run employee surveys.

See the complete set of tips & tricks for running employee engagement surveys.

Benchmarking can be helpful, but it shouldn’t overshadow your overall engagement strategy. Here are three points to keep in mind when deciding who you stack up against:

1. Don’t Overdo the Search for a Perfect Benchmark
   Good question coverage usually trumps a perfectly tailored industry benchmark. While a narrow industry comparison might be required for board reports, it may not be the best benchmark for everyday decision-making. Ensure you have enough companies included to have faith in the average scores the benchmark provides - typically you'd want 30 or more to really trust the scores.
2. Look at Your Talent Competition
   Consider which organizations you’re actually competing with for skilled people. These are the benchmarks that matter. If you’re a utilities company losing IT employees to tech startups, for example, a broader tech benchmark might be more insightful than a narrowly defined one.
   
   Most of the time your survey provider won't let you manually select the companies in your benchmark for confidentiality reasons. However you might be able to persuade them to build a custom benchmark to your specification without revealing the idenitites of the companies involved.
3. Accept That Some Questions Won’t Be Benchmarkable
   Topics like return-to-office policies can vary wildly among organizations, so sometimes you might have to abandon the benchmark entirely - and that's OK! For example, comparing yourself to fully remote companies when you’re 100% on-site may not yield useful insights, and it's silly to hold yourself to impossible standards. Focus on what’s relevant to your reality.

Sunbeam

Sunbeam is a feedback analytics platform designed to make working with open-ended, text-based feedback as straightforward as working with scores. Too many organizations overlook the rich insights hidden in qualitative responses, and Sunbeam aims to fix that. By combining deep industry expertise with cutting-edge AI, Sunbeam makes it simple to analyze and act on text feedback, ultimately helping HR teams unlock the full potential of employee engagement data.