FAQ: Benchmarking

The benchmark simply shows the average industry score when displaying scores at company level and the average company score at segment level for benchmark comparisons.

True Benchmark takes this a step further by making small adjustments to the benchmark (the industry or company score) to account for any demographic outliers that may affect your company or segment scores. This way the benchmarks against which you compare your company or segments are more personalized.

Example: If a department contains a lot of new starters, the engagement score may have a sudden positive spike after their onboarding, while the company score (the benchmark) might not follow this trend. True Benchmark compares the demographic make up of the department to the overall company (the benchmark). It then makes a small benchmark adjustment to better align with the department's demographics.

It's not possible to select specific companies or countries to benchmark against. Each industry benchmark contains companies of that industry, from various countries. We always recommend using True Benchmark to ensure that your benchmark adjusts for the demographic differences.

True Benchmark is about removing differences between groups based on their individual characteristics, which could otherwise cause them to respond differently. However, the objective of Diversity & Inclusion and Health & Wellbeing question sets is to uncover potential differences or unfairness between different groups or needs. For this reason, we don't apply True Benchmark adjustments to these question sets.

Example: Employees from one gender or age group experience diversity issues or feel that the wellbeing is treated differently. True Benchmark could potentially downplay the very issues you're trying to detect and action.

Example: All 4 engagement questions individually have Middle as the benchmark classification, but the overall engagement score has Bottom 25% as the benchmark classification.

This is because the overall score is not the average of the 4 engagement questions at team or company level, but the average of each employee's overall score (whether they've answered all 4 questions or not).

Example: The

Top 5%

is from 9.0, but my 9.0 engagement score is only in the

Top 10%

.

Peakon uses rounding when presenting scores in the user interface, because the benchmark percentiles and all driver scores have multiple decimal places. However, all calculations use the unrounded data for accuracy.

Using the provided example, imagine that your unrounded engagement score is 8.96123864, while the unrounded

Top 5%

range is 8.97363652. Both numbers round up to 9.0 in the dashboard, however your score is actually 0.01239788 below the threshold for the

Top 5%

percentile.

It's currently not possible to surface the unrounded scores in the user interface.

To ensure a stable version of benchmarks, we simply aggregate employees' scores from the different companies, then split them into drivers and industries.

Twice a year, Peakon updates its industry benchmarks based on the last 12 months. The internal benchmark uses the scores of the company, which aligns to the visibility window you're using (1 year, 6 months, or 3 months).

We don't provide customer names due to contractual agreements.