Beyond the Score: How Benchmark Data Helps You Build a Healthier Workplace

When you decide to invest in a deeper understanding of workplace health and employee engagement, Best Christian Workplaces offers in-depth and robust data to guide improvement.

Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey is a research-based tool to accurately assess workplace health. An organization that scores 4.0 or higher on its composite results is deemed “healthy,” while a score of 4.25 and above is “flourishing.” However, the detailed report that a Ministry Partner receives provides more than just a raw score. You receive an in-depth map that will set your organization on the road to continuous improvement.

Taking an Employee Engagement Survey and reviewing the report is a first step in the Discover – Build – Grow process. As you dive deeper into discovery, your customized report offers benchmark data where you can see how your organization compares to your peers.

What is Benchmark Data?

Benchmark data allows you to compare your employee engagement results with those of similar organizations. It helps you answer the question, “What is a good score?”

Since Best Christian Workplaces has hundreds of participating organizations, you can see how your organization stacks up in aggregate and for each individual indicator. Our extensive data set has sectors for churches, parachurch and missions organizations, rescue missions, family services, Christian schools (K-12), Christian higher education, and Christian-led businesses.

For example, in the church sector, when employees are responding about satisfaction with pay and benefits, those responses are benchmarked against employees in other churches, not people in completely different sectors. The results provide an objective measurement that is statistically reliable.

By benchmarking data, Best Christian Workplaces comparisons are with like-minded organizations that face similar opportunities and challenges. If you participate in an employee engagement survey that covers the general marketplace, your results will be compared to those in unrelated industries and environments.

The Apostle Paul encourages Christians to assess themselves honestly: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment. (Romans 12:3) Using benchmark data helps you have sober judgment toward issues of workplace health.

Does Flourishing Mean We Don’t Need to Change Anything?

Recently, I worked with an organization that had flourishing scores overall, and for many of the specific questions. While they celebrated their results and were happy with their raw scores, I drew their attention to one area that was a potential problem. Their raw score in that area looked fine, but when compared to benchmark data, it was much lower than their peers. There was clearly room for them to do better in this particular area, and I was able to guide them to consider action plans for improvement.

By working with your Best Christian Workplaces consultant, you can gain insight into best practices that are working for your peers. If you score lower than peers in an area such as Sustainable Strategy or Healthy Communication, your consultant can help provide insight into specific actions that flourishing organizations use in those particular areas.

Of course, the scores for your organization are confidential and only available to designated members of your leadership team. But understanding how you rank compared to similar organizations can inform your action plans.

Looking at benchmark scores provides an opportunity to discover potentially hidden weaknesses and take steps to address them. This commitment to improvement helps healthy organizations continue to build and grow for future flourishing.

Do Overall Low Scores Mean We Are Stuck?

When a Ministry Partner is just starting on their journey toward workplace health, they might get discouraged by low scores for a number of the FLOURISH Factors. They might be below their peers on many of the benchmarks.

Is there hope for improvement in this situation? Yes, there is, and we see it happening every day. The benefit of working with Best Christian Workplaces is that, along with a detailed report that helps you discover the truth about your workplace health, you have a consultant who walks alongside you and can advise you as you develop an action plan.

In addition to benchmarked data, your consultant can point out particular areas that correlate most strongly with workplace health. This can help you discern a starting place to focus on as you commit to improving employee engagement. Rather than trying to address everything at once, your consultant will provide advice based on statistical research into measures that are most highly correlated with employee engagement. All of the FLOURISH Factors contribute to employee engagement, but some demonstrate a stronger correlation. This means that focused attention on these factors provides a meaningful lever for improvement. As you commit to improving employee engagement over time, action plans that emphasize the most highly correlated areas will help you build a healthier workplace environment.

Assessment is an Important First Step

In this age of quick answers generated by artificial intelligence tools, you can ask AI about how to improve employee engagement and achieve greater workplace health. AI will generate a list of areas to address. Of course, even before AI, you could read multiple management books with helpful ideas on how to engage your employees.

What is missing in this approach is a core understanding of the specific issues that impact the health of YOUR organization. Without taking time to specifically assess employee engagement, it isn’t clear where you should focus your efforts for improvement. And once you have implemented changes in your organization, unless you use an objective assessment, you won’t have clear data to even know if your efforts have brought positive results.

With more than 20 years of experience in guiding Christian organizations to flourishing, we see success stories every year through annual surveys. Ministry Partners who take the Discover – Build – Grow process seriously can take measurable steps to improve their workplace culture and move from non-engaged to healthy, to flourishing. The growth is demonstrated through reliable data that includes benchmarks to allow peer comparison.

An ongoing leadership commitment to workplace health, along with regular assessment, means that growth to flourishing is attainable.

Resources:

• Employee Engagement Survey: Discover the health of your workplace and access the largest Christian database in the world, giving you the most accurate and robust comparable data.
• State of the Christian Workplace Report: This one-of-a-kind, research-backed report offers unparalleled insights into workplace health, employee engagement, and leadership in Christian-led organizations.
• Case Studies of Healthy Workplaces
  • Listen First, Lead Second: How One CEO Revitalized a Struggling Organization.
  • How LeTourneau University Built a Thriving Culture Through Strategy, Prayer, and Mission.
  • Flatirons Church Was Growing—But Unhealthy. Here’s How They Changed That.