Benchmarking

What are the benefits of benchmarking?

There are numerous advantages that a commercial organisation will reap from carrying out a comparative exercise like this. The foremost of these is to gain valuable insights into how well – or otherwise – a business is working when it is compared to other commercial entities operating in the same sector. Benchmarking means taking an honest view of business so that truly useful data can be gathered that will be of benefit to those who have to make strategic planning decisions.

In addition, benchmarking benefits organisations because it doesn’t just offer an overall picture of performance but will help to identify specific areas that could be improved by comparison. These could be operational problems or structural in their nature. The point is to use benchmarking to discover them in relation to other businesses’ best practices. Another advantage of carrying out a benchmarking in this manner is that it will mean coming up with an agreed standard of measurement of performance. In turn, this can lead to better ongoing assessment methods for a business, improving its performance not just now but in the future, as well.

Why is benchmarking important to employers?

Employers who want to make a sound judgement about the state of their business need independent information that they can rely on. This is, at heart, what benchmarking exercises offer them. Without them, they are often floundering in the dark, trying to make the best organisational and investment decisions but without the data to back up their thought processes. Equally, benchmarking helps employers to understand the outcomes of their decisions better, not merely to help them make them.

This means that benchmarking will assist employers who would like to know what their return on investment was for changing something. Benchmarking before and after such a decision has been made will determine how successful – or otherwise – it might have been. Typically, this might be seen in one firm’s recruitment and retention statistics with employees compared to the industry average, for example. Those businesses that have invested in their workforce sufficiently should see an improvement in levels of staff turnover, for instance. Note that it is the benchmarking exercise itself that will highlight such issues in the first place.

Benchmarking also helps in terms of motivation. By benchmarking your business against the performance of competitors, it can draw your employee’s attention to how well they are doing compared to rivals. On its own, this can lead to improved performances without even making any organisational changes. This is because many employees are naturally competitive and like the thought of catching up – or even pulling away – from their competitors as a sign of their own success in the workplace. In short, the motivational aspects of benchmarking your business should not be undervalued as they can be felt right throughout an organisation from top to bottom.

How can WorkBuzz help employers benchmark employee engagement?

WorkBuzz’s employee engagement platform will allow your organisation to benchmark itself in an incredible amount of detail with the most up-to-date information possible. Our platform is proven as a benchmarking tool that allows senior managers to listen, to understand and to act. By gathering the sort of quantifiable data that is needed for true decision making, employers will be much better placed to make the right business calls for both the short and longer term. By making use of the latest artificial intelligence techniques and offering intuitive dashboards, our platform provides even very large businesses with easily understandable information that allows them to act in the best ways possible for the success of their enterprises.