Employee Engagement Survey Benchmarks: How Should You Compare Your Results?

Employee engagement survey results become far more useful when you have something meaningful to compare them against. A score of 4.1 out of 5 may look positive, but is it good for your organisation? Has it improved since last year? Are some parts of the organisation performing substantially better than others? And how do your results compare with other organisations?

Benchmarking can help answer these questions, but it needs to be used carefully. The wrong benchmark, or even the wrong way of calculating a survey score, can hide changes that HR teams and senior leaders need to know about.

In this guide, we look at the different ways organisations can benchmark employee engagement survey results, when external benchmarks are useful, and why the way your survey provider calculates and reports scores matters.

What is employee engagement survey benchmarking?

Employee engagement survey benchmarking means comparing your survey results against a meaningful reference point.

Depending on the organisation and the purpose of the survey, that might include:

• results from your previous employee survey;
• different departments, locations or business units;
• results from organisations in a similar sector;
• wider external benchmark data;
• an Employee Engagement Index (EEI);
• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).

The important point is that there is no single benchmark that tells you whether your organisation has “good” employee engagement.

The most useful picture usually comes from combining several forms of comparison.

Start by benchmarking against yourself

For many organisations, their own historical results are the most valuable benchmark available.

If you run an employee engagement survey annually, comparing this year’s results with last year’s can show whether employee perceptions are improving, deteriorating or remaining broadly unchanged.

This is particularly valuable after an organisation has taken action in response to a previous survey.

For example, suppose employees previously gave relatively low ratings to internal communication. The organisation subsequently introduced regular leadership briefings, improved manager communications and provided employees with more opportunities to ask questions. The next survey can help establish whether employees actually perceive an improvement.

This is often more actionable than knowing that your communication score happens to be slightly above or below an external average.

Be very careful about how survey scores are calculated

This is an area organisations should examine carefully when choosing an employee engagement survey provider.

Some survey systems report a percentage favourable score. Typically, this means the percentage of respondents who selected responses such as Agree or Strongly Agree.

That approach is easy to understand, but it can conceal potentially important changes in employee sentiment.

Consider a simple example.

Imagine 100 employees answer the statement:

“I would recommend this organisation as a good place to work.”

In Year 1:

100 employees select Strongly Agree.

The favourable score is therefore:

100%

Now imagine that in Year 2:

all 100 employees select Agree instead.

The favourable score is still:

100%

According to the percentage-favourable measure, nothing has changed.

But something clearly has changed. Every respondent has moved from the strongest possible positive response to a less positive one.

If the survey uses a five-point rating scale where Strongly Agree = 5 and Agree = 4, the average rating falls from 5.0 to 4.0.

That is a substantial movement which a simple percentage-favourable calculation can completely hide.

Why average ratings can provide greater sensitivity

As part of Protostar’s fully managed employee survey service, we report average ratings, which means changes within the response scale remain visible. This becomes particularly important when comparing results over time.

Percentage favourable scores can certainly be useful, particularly when communicating a simple headline result. The problem arises when they are used as the only measure of movement.

An organisation selecting a survey provider should therefore ask:

Exactly how are our results calculated, and will the reporting identify movement between Strongly Agree and Agree, or between Disagree and Strongly Disagree?

If the answer is no, potentially valuable information is being lost.

Should you compare your results with other organisations?

External employee engagement benchmarks can provide useful context. They can help senior leaders understand broadly how their organisation compares with others and can highlight areas where results appear unusually high or low.

However, external benchmarks should not become the sole definition of success.

Two organisations can have very different:

• workforces;
• organisational structures;
• geographic footprints;
• industries;
• cultures;
• employment models;
• histories;
• business challenges.

Even apparently similar organisations may be dealing with very different circumstances.

A benchmark should therefore be treated as context rather than a target.

Being above a benchmark does not automatically mean that no action is required. Equally, being below one does not necessarily indicate a serious problem.

Industry benchmarks can be useful — with caution

Comparing your results with organisations in the same industry can sometimes be more informative than comparing them with a broad database.

For example, employees working in professional services may have different expectations and experiences from employees working in manufacturing, retail or healthcare. However, industry benchmarking still needs careful interpretation.

You should understand:

Who is included in the benchmark?

How recent is the data?

How large is the comparison group?

Are the survey questions genuinely comparable?

Is the scoring methodology the same?

That final question is particularly important. Comparing your average rating with another provider’s percentage-favourable score is not a like-for-like comparison. At Protostar, we have access to a large database of employee engagement results from across Europe, meaning that in most cases we can compare by sector or comparable-sized company. In the UK, we also benchmark against organisations such as the local NHS trust as they are typically the area’s largest local employer. By having a range of benchmarks, you can get a much stronger feel for how good your employee survey results are.

Internal benchmarking can reveal more than an external benchmark

One of the most valuable uses of employee survey data is comparing different parts of your own organisation.

For example, an overall engagement result may look perfectly healthy while concealing substantial differences between departments.

Imagine an organisation with five divisions. Four produce consistently strong results, while one has significantly lower ratings for leadership, communication and recognition.

The organisation-wide average may disguise the problem.

Breaking the results down appropriately can identify where further investigation or action is needed.

Internal benchmarking can include comparisons between:

• departments;
• business units;
• locations;
• countries;
• functions;
• management levels;
• demographic groups, where appropriate and confidentiality can be protected.

This can also identify areas of unusually strong performance.

Rather than focusing exclusively on problems, organisations can ask:

What is this high-performing team doing differently, and can we learn from it elsewhere?

Benchmark trends, not just individual scores

It is tempting to focus on individual questions.

However, trends across related questions can often be more revealing.

Suppose several questions relating to senior leadership decline simultaneously. That pattern may deserve more attention than a small movement in one isolated question.

Similarly, an organisation might see improvements across communication, recognition and confidence in leadership following a major change programme.

Looking for patterns and movement helps turn a large survey dataset into meaningful organisational insight.

What about Employee Engagement Index scores?

An Employee Engagement Index (EEI) combines responses to selected engagement-related questions to provide an overall measure of engagement.

This can be useful for tracking engagement over time and providing senior leaders with an accessible headline measure.

However, an engagement index should not replace examination of the underlying results.

An organisation might have a stable overall EEI while individual aspects of the employee experience are changing significantly.

The headline number tells you what is happening overall.

The underlying questions help explain why.

Is eNPS a useful employee engagement benchmark?

Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, typically asks employees how likely they are to recommend their organisation as a place to work.

It can provide a simple headline measure and can be tracked over time.

However, eNPS should not be treated as a complete measure of employee engagement.

Employee engagement is influenced by multiple factors including leadership, management, communication, recognition, development, wellbeing and employees’ connection with the organisation.

A single recommendation question cannot explain all of that.

We therefore view measures such as eNPS as one useful indicator within a broader employee listening programme, rather than a substitute for detailed analysis.

Should you set targets based on benchmarks?

Sometimes — but with care.

A target such as “we must exceed the industry benchmark” may sound attractive, but it can encourage organisations to focus on the number rather than the underlying employee experience.

A better objective might be:

Improve employees’ experience of leadership communication and demonstrate measurable improvement in the next survey.

The survey score then becomes evidence of whether the intervention worked rather than the purpose of the intervention itself.

Ultimately, employee surveys should help organisations make better decisions, not simply produce higher numbers.

What should you ask an employee survey provider about benchmarking?

Before selecting a provider, it is worth asking how they approach benchmarking and reporting.

In particular:

1. How are individual question scores calculated?
2. Do you report average ratings or only percentage favourable?
3. Can we compare results accurately with previous surveys?
4. Can we benchmark departments, locations or other organisational groups?
5. What external benchmark data is available and how relevant is it to our organisation?
6. Can we see statistically and practically meaningful changes rather than simply headline percentages?
7. How will consultants help us interpret what the comparisons actually mean?

The quality of the analysis matters just as much as the amount of data provided.

Benchmarking should lead to better decisions

The purpose of benchmarking isn’t to produce a league table.

It is to help you understand where you are, what has changed and where attention is needed.

For many organisations, the strongest approach combines historical benchmarking, internal comparisons, relevant external context and detailed analysis of the underlying survey responses.

Most importantly, make sure your reporting methodology is sensitive enough to detect genuine movement.

If employees move from Strongly Agree to Agree, your organisation has learned something.

Your survey reporting should not tell you that nothing changed.

Learn more about our Employee Survey services  or contact Protostar for an informal, no-obligation conversation about your requirements.