Workplace Research Foundation

We work with the University of Michigan every year to collect information about the 22 million people who work in large US companies.  We study about 2000 people as a sample of the whole group.  The results gather information to add to understanding to the Wall Street Journal’s annual Shareholder Scorecard, or for comparing with a specific company.  The information we collect includes peoples’ thoughts on their company teamwork, leadership, communication, training, pay and benefits, ethics and fairness, and employee motivation.  Efficiency, quality, customer satisfaction can be looked at using this information to better understand the company and working conditions in the USA.

Four features distinguish our Benchmarks from similar measures compiled by other consulting companies. 1) NBS Benchmarks are drawn from a random sample of all large corporations in the US. Other so-called benchmarks are merely drawn from a consulting company’s client list, so results are not an accurate reflection of working conditions in the nation. 2) Our Benchmarks are recompiled annually. Other companies who try to portray their survey norms as benchmarks use data that are years, and sometimes decades old – an important limitation because survey results do change from year to year.  3) Our Benchmarks are based on identical questions taken from identical surveys administered to all our respondents. Our competitors claim to establish norms, but their scores are invariably drawn from surveys that vary in length, content, wording, and question selection – factors that can affect survey responses dramatically.  4) Our Benchmarks are designed to predict financial performance, and they do. We ask questions about Teamwork, Communication, Compensation, and a host of other topics, but our questions are based on published research examining the relation between employee motivation and corporate performance. Unlike our competitors, we are not merely using a mishmash of questions that may or may not have direct business utility. The Benchmarks from the National Benchmark Study are statistically linked to a number of important financial measures – Sales per employee, ROE, and return to stockholders, to name but a few.

During the 2005 cycle (our third year using an electronic version of our survey) we continued to expand the number of participants, as we have in recent years. In 2005 our norms came from 231 respondents (Response Rate within the participating organizations: 26%); the overall margin of error at the 95% confidence level, comparing our results to the population of 22 million employees in the US, is ± 2.6%

WRF publishes the national averages on its website without charge.  All survey results from individual companies remain confidential so that only participating companies see their results.