Many of our competitors use 'panel' based benchmarks made up of data collected (by market research providers) from people who've signed up to take surveys for money. These people 'indicate' that they work in a particular industry or for a particular company anonymously and there is often only one person from some companies. Thus, these benchmarks don't truly represent the overall industry but instead a self-selection biased mix of people who've signed up to take surveys for money.

Using our company level data we can match our results to other well known criteria such as Glassdoor reviews. Culture Amp measures can predict how well your company will be doing on Glassdoor reviews into the future. We also know Glassdoor data gets more accurate as they accrue more reviews and as long as they are not too dated.

A quick look at just some of our customers will tell you that you're in great company when you're using our benchmarks. Because we don't rely on panels you can be assured our benchmarks truly represent the companies that use our platform for achieving some of the same goals you have. Also, this allows us to create aspirational benchmarks that are based on the fastest growing and most engaging companies on the planet. In these aspirational benchmarks, we focus on the companies that are actively hiring people and growing fast, while engaging and retaining their talent. Other 'performance' oriented benchmarks rely on poorly defined organizational metrics such as stock prices, revenue, or profit growth. These metrics are influenced by external factors unrelated to how strong a company's people practices are and often do not predict longer-term sustainable success. Additionally, many of these metrics are not easily available for fast growing, tech companies and are often irrelevant as markers of success for companies in a high growth phase where profit is not the immediate aim.

We want to make it easy for customers to understand how they compare to organizations similar to them with our strong benchmarks. We also provide different scores beyond simple median scores so that customers are able to learn whether they sit in the top 25% or top 10% of customers within a certain benchmark. We use the same underlying grouping of customers to produce the data, we just use the 75th and 90th percentile respectively. We're only able to publish these upper limit benchmarks when the cuts meet our own minimum limits for response and company counts.

We limit our benchmark data to the data collected in the previous year. The traditional consultancy companies providing surveys and benchmarks are well known for exaggerating their benchmark numbers by using data from as far back as 3-5 years and also allowing the same company's data to be used multiple times. What you're getting is an old and potentially biased sample in your benchmarks. At Culture Amp we use each company only once and only if they surveyed in the current previous benchmark period.

Industry Benchmarks: Culture Amp industry benchmarks include a minimum of 20 companies and 20,000 people.

We've collected millions of survey responses and we conduct thousands of full company surveys every year. But we believe the most important thing you can get from benchmarks is an understanding of what the competitive landscape for people really looks like. Although some vendors argue they have hundreds of thousands of people in their benchmarks we frequently find they are from a small number of large companies who surveyed in the last 5 years, or even the same company repeating surveys. At Culture Amp we use up-to-date data and we make sure we have a good variety of companies in our industry benchmarks. People are looking for great cultures more afield these days and your benchmarks should reflect some of that search.

Geography Benchmarks: Culture Amp region/country benchmarks include a minimum of 20 companies and 20,000 people.

We've collected responses from employees around the world. Traditionally, geography-based benchmarks are calculated based on either HRIS location data which is notoriously inaccurate or company headquartered location which in an increasingly globally connected world can be misleading. Culture Amp takes a different approach. Our region/country benchmarks are calculated based on each respondent's location when the survey was completed. This approach means our geography based benchmarks accurately reflect the experience, opinions and work environment of employees working in the selected country/region. To ensure that country region data is not unduly weighted toward one company with many employees, scores are calculated at a company level (similar to the industry benchmarks). There also must be at least 10 employees from each company responding to be included in the country/region benchmark calculations.

To help customers understand the upper ranges of how organizations are scoring, we have generated benchmark cuts with scores from the Top 25% (75th percentile) and Top 10% (90th percentile) of item scores in each of our published benchmarks. Because of the statistical methodology we use, we're able to generate these extra percentiles for all our benchmarks - in fact, our emerging benchmarks using bootstrapping actually increases the accuracy of these percentiles.

An important thing to consider when selecting benchmarks is that an exact industry match may not be necessary, or the best thing. You'll want to consider a comparison benchmark that captures where your employees come from and where they might be going.

For normal benchmarks we use the average (median) favorability score. This score is where 50% of companies score above and 50% of companies score below. For the top 25% or top 10% benchmarks we use the 75th and 90th percentile respectively for each question. If you're wondering which companies and industries are included, they are the same as the normal benchmark.

Culture Amp's significant growth in customers has resulted in a number of new benchmarks. To meet customer needs, we have two classes of benchmarks, emerging benchmarks and standard benchmarks. Our standard benchmarks have strict requirements for publication. Our "emerging benchmarks" have slightly lower requirements for creation than our standard benchmarks to provide value to our customers earlier.

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