Expanding the Value of Diagnostic Instruments

Expanding The Value Of Diagnostic Instruments

Internal Benchmarking

Survey tools have a built-in ability to help you identify the most effective employees in your workforce in utilizing a particular set of management, leadership, peer and/or team practices. In an effort to further determine how these practices are influencing the motivation, development and performance of other employees, you can provide an analysis of the survey results of those participants who received the most favorable responses overall. By conducting a quartile split of the data you will be able to study the results of participants whose overall scores are among the highest 25 percent (25%) and the lowest 25 percent (25%) of the total survey population. This comparative analysis of high and low quartile scores will help you identify the practices that most differentiate the performance of the most effective employees surveyed from those who were seen as least effective.

We believe that you can make a tremendous contribution to the performance of your organization by helping every employee surveyed understand what he or she needs to do to perform at the level of those whose results place them among the top 25% in your organization. With that goal in mind, we recommend that you establish internal benchmarks based on the practices of your high quartile employees. Their results are more readily acceptable yardsticks of performance than can often be found by looking at external benchmarks. We have found that a key element in getting people to change is for them to accept the data and believe that it applies to them. Often industry or other external benchmarks are resisted because employees believe that the conditions under which employees in other organizations operate are not equal to theirs. And as a result, they have a greater tendency to “fight” the data and resist assuming responsibility for their results or making the improvements called for by the survey feedback. This is not the case with the internal benchmarks that enable you to identify the practices employed by the highest scoring managers in your organization. The results achieved by your highest performers provide a realistic road map for those below the company mean and particularly for those in the bottom quartile to follow as they analyze their results and identify the actions they can take to increase their effectiveness on the job. Internal benchmarks help those surveyed realize that there are other peer-level employees within the company and within their department, function or business unit who are able to use particular management, leadership, peer or team practices successfully and who do so under common working conditions and organizational constraints.