Benchmarking with the Best in Class: NBRI Norms

Research psychologists, astute at creating psychological instruments to measure psychological constructs, such as the attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and behaviors of people, without biasing or skewing the data, have professionally designed your survey instrument. The customer or employee survey has been expertly deployed, and the results are in! Now, suppose for example that you have a mean score of 3.86 on a 6-point survey scale for a particular question. Is that a good score, or a bad score? It may seem relatively ‘good’ since it is above the mean of the scale. However, it may, in fact, represent the 27th percentile of the benchmarking database, or it may be at the 79th percentile of the benchmarking database. Without benchmarking data, clients must subjectively assess the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of each question’s mean score in relation to the scale. The scale does not represent the real world, and subjective opinions vary widely.

Benchmarking is the transformation of the means and variances of all data collected for each employee and/or customer survey question from millions of people into percentiles from the 1st to the 100th. Clients are provided with their own mean scores, as well as their benchmarking percentile scores for every question, topic, and the survey as a whole. Since you are using the identical customer and/or employee survey questions that millions of other people have used, when you use NBRI survey questions, you can compare your scores objectively to the real world! Knowing for certain, then, that your mean score represents either the 27th percentile or the 79th percentile, as in our example, immediately tells you whether the score is good or bad – as compared to other people who have responded to the identical question. You will never know this from comparing the mean score to the scale.

“Norms” or “normative data” or “benchmarking data” represents the normal or average scores for any survey question across various levels of performance. When we provide clients with benchmarking, we provide the mean scores for the 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, so clients have a range of scores against which they can compare. Clients are also provided with the corresponding percentile score for each of their means, so they immediately know their standing against the real world.

Approximately 125 million businesses exist in the world, about 50,000 are listed on stock exchanges around the world, and only about 18,500 “ultimate parent” organizations exist in the United States with 500 or more employees. Of these, NBRI has acquired data from over 30,000 organizations, resulting in NBRI Norms®. NBRI Norms® are the transformation of the means and variances of all data for each customer or employee survey question into percentiles, from the 1st to the 100th. Clients are able to compare their own mean score with “Best in Class” performers (90th percentile), “Stretch” performers (75th percentile), or national and international average performance (50th percentile). This provides clients with a range of performance for comparison.

The number of employee and/or customer survey questions from each organization ranges from 15 to over 125. The number of individual survey question scores in our databases is over eleven billion.

Benchmarking scores are updated continuously. Due to the size of the databases, we can utilize an outstanding .99 confidence interval, resulting in a margin of error of + or – .01 (1%), rather than the .03 (3%) or .05 (5%) or even .07 (7%) of many researchers. NBRI ClearPath Research®, NBRItems®, and NBRI Norms® have set the standard for excellence in benchmarking, and are the most widely used customer and employee survey tools in the world. This means you can have a higher level of confidence in the data you receive from NBRI than from any other source in the world.

Until a few years ago, clients often requested that we pull data from specific SIC or NAICS codes, as they wished to benchmark against their own industry. Today, however, we have seen a shift from benchmarking within one’s own industry or “the competition” toward benchmarking against best in class in the world. This is particularly true with regard to benchmarking variables that are universal to all companies.

We look forward to assisting you with your research study.