Should You Benchmark Employee Engagement Levels?

Is it productive to try to benchmark engagement levels?

Many employee engagement training experts say that, yes, it is important to learn where your organization stands vis-à-vis similar organizations.

Why?

Because you can then begin the journey toward understanding what you need to do to increase employee satisfaction and, as a result, reduce turnover and increase productivity.

Use benchmarks from similar work forces so the comparisons make sense. And don’t just measure once. You need to assess engagement periodically so that you can evaluate progress. Where are you likely to fall in the distribution? If you are an organization that spends little effort to improve management effectiveness, you will likely fall into the lower distribution bracket.

However, if you are an organization that works at engaging employees because you are convinced that this is a critical strategic marker for success, you are apt to either find yourself in the high end of the norms or likely to be comparing yourself against companies with different strategies or cultures that do not provide any insightful or actionable benchmarks.

The bottom line:

1. Know why you are benchmarking
2. Make sure it provides actionable data
3. Compare yourself to similar industries, strategies and cultures.