Workplace Performance Indicators according to 4,174 UK employees

Today Perkbox, Europe’s fastest growing employee experience platform, is announcing the average yearly ratings for what it considers to be the ten key workplace drivers: Quality of Life, Meaningful Work, Managers, Strategy & Leadership, Learning & Development, Reward & Recognition, Career Opportunities, Teamwork, Culture & Diversity and Communication; from a sample of 4,174 UK employees currently using Perkbox Insights through their employers.

Perkbox Insights is an agile pulse survey tool for gathering and actioning employee feedback. It works by creating automated pulse surveys based on organisation psychology-backed questions on the above mentioned drivers. These help get a meaningful understanding of the health of an organisation and its overall employee experience. Its real-time dashboard also enables HR teams to translate information into stories and benchmark individual teams, alongside company-wide performance.

In an attempt to get a better understanding of where employee experience stands as a whole in the UK, Perkbox has undertaken an analysis of the Insights survey results for 4,174 of its users. The results indicate that Manager Performance for companies using Insights, has improved significantly over the last year. It ranked highest at 4.08 out of 5 in July 2019, showcasing progression which could perhaps be linked to the introduction of Perkbox Insights into the organisation.

On the other hand, Reward & Recognition results worsened, ranking last out of all 10 Insights drivers in July. The majority of open-ended feedback received for this driver was “negative” (27%) or “very negative” (21%). Communication also ranked pretty poorly, either last or second to last all year around. It’s the driver which received the most open-ended feedback by users. What’s hopeful is that the majority of this feedback was “neutral” (32%) although only 9.21% of it was “very positive”.

Quality of Life was yet another driver which showcased slightly concerning results, particularly given recent talks around burnout turning into a real workplace issue. It ranked highest in Q2 2018 (4.33) and then decreased gradually throughout the year. Last month’s average was 3.71, meaning it has indeed decreased quite significantly. The majority of the open-ended feedback for this driver has been negative too (24%). However, there is hope in that it’s amongst the drivers that received the most open-ended feedback, supporting the case that data-informed initiatives can help direct spending more effectively in areas like this one, where understanding is lacking.

Christopher Manning, Director of Product Management at Perkbox says: “To accomplish workplace goals, it’s important to listen and take action on meaningful feedback. Burnout for example, is a direct result of not listening properly to warning signs from our employees. However, without tools like Insights, it’s impossible to even attempt this “listening” – there is too much going on in everyone’s everyday working lives to proactively attempt to investigate everyone’s cases individually.

It’s for this reason that every one of the results above is really useful, no matter how negative the scores may look at first glance. They give us some direction as to where we should be looking to up our standards and what changes we should be considering. In this way they turn us into better managers – which would perhaps explain why “Manager Performance” has progressed so much amongst our user community over the last year”.