Employee Surveys

Corporate Spirit’s Normative PeoplePower^TM Benchmarks

The normative benchmarks of Corporate Spirit are based on one of the most extensive international databases of employee engagement surveys available. It forms a reliable frame of reference when evaluating the results of such surveys from different countries. National norms are a necessity when one wants to understand and interpret global employee survey results.

Corporate Spirit has experience from thousands of employee surveys since 1986 in almost fifty different countries. Having analyzed hundreds of thousands of responses we have found some amazing differences in styles of responding in different countries as well as some quite different meanings and values attached to the individual questions.

Knowing this variety of cultural difference, it is difficult to imagine that reliable information could be gained simply by comparing the proportion of favourable responses between different countries. If for example in Spain half of the respondents tend to respond favourably towards a single question, it may be a very good result in Spanish terms, but it might be that the same result in Denmark is quite poor by comparison with similar companies in Denmark.

Significance of normative benchmarks in employee surveys
More generally an employee survey conducted without any proper normative benchmark could be regarded as quite questionable. A standard “finding” of such a survey would generally be that weaknesses in the employee survey are connected with unsatisfactory remuneration, poor information flow and too little feedback. This is because these types of questions are normally judged and valued in a more critical way in almost every culture than other types of questions. Only when you have reliable benchmarks are you able to give meaningful answers to question e.g.: “65 % of staff are dissatisfied with information flow, is this a good result or something we should be worried about?”

Global benchmarks
Several international and scientific research projects have proved that demographic variables, such as age or gender do not explain much of the variation in employee survey results and the same goes with the field of business or the industry of the company concerned. The most powerful predicting variables to explain the variation in the results are found to be the working culture of the country together with the nature of the job. That’s why we have classified our benchmarks based on the geographical areas and the type of job: blue-collar, white-collar, golden collar (experts). These are based on the classifications of the respondents and their respective organisations in the surveys conducted by us. For all these combinations we offer annually (in January) updated norms for the following 20 countries:

We also have tentative norms for the following countries that will be published shortly.

Brazil
Lithuania
Czech Republic

We don’t publish new country specific norms, until we have at least 3.000 respondents from at least 6 different organisations in our database from the last five years. For big countries (i.e. USA, China, Russia), the minimum is 5.000 respondents. For those countries for which we haven’t yet created a country norm, we have developed regional norms:

• Scandinavian norm (based on the averages of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark)
• European norm (based on the average of 10 European countries)
• North American norm (based on the averages of the USA and Canada)
• Baltic norm (average of the Baltic countries)
• Eastern European norm (based on the average of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia)
• Global norm (based on the average of 10 countries from Europe, America and the Far-East)
• South-East Asian norm( based on the average of the countries in the region)

The normative benchmarks provided by us are based on our extensive base research in Europe, the global database developed through the surveys conducted by us, and the Ph.D. studies of the company founder Mr. Jukka Pohjola. Besides the country averages, we also deliver Global Top Performance norm to recognize top performance.

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