Concept: True Benchmark
Trends in demographics and occupations can affect engagement beyond the influence of individual managers or companies. Standardized data across demographic attributes makes it possible to calculate typical variances on driver scores.
True Benchmark adjusts the benchmark based on 2 criteria.
- The strength of the attribute effect. Different tenure levels have a large difference in average scores for most drivers, while gender doesn’t tend to have a big effect. Tenure will often drive greater True Benchmark adjustments compared to gender.
- The demographic distribution of the company or segment, compared to that of the benchmark. If your company has far fewer low tenure employees than the industry benchmark, the True Benchmark adjustments are higher. If the tenure distribution in your company is somewhat representative of the average, the adjustments are smaller or have no impact.
True Benchmark starts with the average engagement score in the industry, and applies the deciding criteria to add any necessary adjustments. In practice, most benchmarks don't tend to move by more than 0.2 in either direction.
To view adjustments, click
True Benchmark
on the main dashboard. In the slide-out tab, you can expand the benchmark composition, and the adjustment breakdowns.True Benchmark is only applicable to questions from the Engagement question set.
True Benchmark Attributes
True Benchmark provides adjustments on 6 standard attributes. If you're using custom attributes, a Workday consultant must map the attributes to the standard mapping options.
Standard Attribute | Observations |
|---|---|
Tenure | Tenure can produce substantial variances in score. Scores in the first 6 months of tenure trend almost 2 points higher than scores of employees with 3-5 year tenure. |
Age | Different factors affect employees at different stages of their life and career. Example: Factors affecting a 20-year old employee working in retail might differ to a 40-year old senior manager in the headquarters. |
Job Level | This category differentiates between employee, manager, senior manager, executive, and director. Leadership teams often outperform the Strategy driver benchmark, because they build the strategy in the company. However, the benchmark mostly contains scores from the operational workers. |
Gender | In most cases gender provides little variance in the score, but it can provide insight into areas like career growth and reward. |
Department | Different departments might be generally more or less engaged than others due to the varying skill sets and experiences. |
Local Office | This adjustment accounts for differences in score across different regions based on the way employees within different countries respond to Peakon surveys. Example: Cultural differences, such as varying openness in providing feedback, can lead to score variations across regions. |
Limitations
Consider these restrictions when configuring attributes for True Benchmark:
- Restricted Attributes: Attributes with restricted data access cannot be part of True Benchmark adjustments.
- Custom Attributes: A custom attribute cannot be part of True Benchmark. Only standard attributes or custom attributes mapped to standard options by a Workday consultant are supported.