My clients tend to question one particular part of the survey my organization uses when getting feedback from employees on an annual basis.  It’s the “competitive assessment” section, where I ask the company’s employees to compare their “deal” to employees with similar jobs at other organizations.  When I designed the original Workforce Engagement Assessment, I wanted to bring something different to my survey approach, something we used to do in the customer satisfaction measurement business I used to be involved with in an earlier life.

There are two types of ways to measure your performance;  “absolute” and “competitive”.  Absolute performance questions ask the respondent (customers, employees, prospects, competitors) to rate your company on a scale, sometimes “numeric” (one a scale of one to ten, where one is the worst and 10 is the best…..), sometimes using a four or five point lichert scale (how would you rate the company using the scale… excellent, very good, good, fair, poor).

In this example, Competitive performance asks the employee to compare their company against another.  And based on our third biennial study, companies still don’t understand how to win, or even compete in the war for talent.

First the good news:

• 63% of employees in the national study said their relationship with co-workers was better than other employees with similar jobs at other companies, while only 5% said the relationship was worse.
• 62% of employees said their relationship with their supervisor was better, while just 10% said it was worse.

That was the good news.  All of it.

Now the not-so-good:

• 44% of employees in the national study said their work-life balance was better than other employees with similar jobs at other companies, while 18% said it was worse.
• 43% of employees said their training and development was better, while 20% said it was worse.

And the really-not-so-good:

• 39% of employees in the national study said their benefits package was better than other employees with similar jobs at other companies, while 24% said it was worse.
• 38% of employees said their stress level was better, while 25% said it was worse.
• 37% of employees said their compensation/pay was better, while 27% said it was worse.

And the really-really-really-not-so good:

•  27% of employees in the national study said their advancement opportunities were better than other employees with similar jobs at other companies, while 29% said they were worse.

Nasty nasty stuff…  And do you know what’s worse?

The numbers haven’t really improved since 2004.  Bad news for today’s employees.  Even worse for tomorrow’s customers.