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Viva People Science - Philosophy on appropriate use of benchmarks as comparisons

  • Article

At Viva Glint, we believe benchmarks provide useful, level-setting comparisons during an initial survey, but they are not nearly as useful to the organization as internal and trend (historical) comparisons in subsequent surveys.

  • With more than 10 years of experience with benchmarking, we serve over 1,300 global customers from across nearly every industry. Most of our customers use common survey questions, thus enabling us to offer global, high-performing, industry and country benchmark suites using cross-customer data* exclusively.

  • If our customers wish to use benchmarks, we strongly urge the use of our standards: The overall global and high-performance (top 10th & top 25th percentile) benchmarks, which are more robust and aspirational than a custom (for example, an industry-specific) norm.

Note

Viva Glint’s benchmark database contains benchmarks on more than 200 survey questions derived from survey responses representing 328 million data points over the last 12 months.

Robust benchmarks come from our 1,300+ customer database

With one of the largest customer databases in the world at 1,300+ companies, Viva Glint can produce the most robust benchmarks in the industry using a rolling 12-month database. We know our clients' data, so we can answer questions about composition of the data, like how many companies are represented, size of companies, for example.

Benchmarks are frequently refreshed

With our vast database, we are able to update our Global and Global High Performing benchmarks every six months. This review cycle ensures our most popular benchmarks keep up with rapid changes in the marketplace. Most other suites are updated annually. Additionally, we review item usage across our entire taxonomy twice a year to ensure we are benchmarking the largest possible set of items.

Viva Glint’s benchmark generation process ensures data validity

Graph of the Viva Glint benchmark generation process.

For industry and country benchmarks, Viva Glint takes extra steps to ensure suites have all core Engagement items, including:

  • Review of number of core items used by at least 15 clients:
  • If fewer than 15 of the 21 core items meet the threshold, the suite is tagged as “Developing,” as we expect greater volatility of scores.
  • Using a blended score for individual items slightly below the threshold:
  • This blended score is based on relationships found with the Global benchmark, combined with the client data for the suite itself.