Employee Loyalty Benchmark from Walker Information
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Aug 12, 2009
Besides the
Employee NPS and the
Gallup Q12, another employee-satisfaction benchmark is Walker Loyalty. Walker Information fields its own benchmark consisting of 80 questions across eight sections:
- Attitudes toward the Organization
- Work-Related Behaviors
- Questions about the Organization and Your Work
- More Information about Work Factors
- Other General Opinions about the Organization
- Rating the Influence of Work Factors
- Opinions about the Integrity of the Organization
- Any Comments in Your Own Words?
The results of key questions are used to segment employees by attitude and behavior:
- Truly Loyal – positive attitude, positive behavior – These employees plan to remain employed and want to work for your organization.
- Accessible – positive attitude, negative behavior – Accessible employees want to remain employed but may not be able to, because of outside circumstances or better opportunities elsewhere.
- Trapped – negative attitude, positive behavior – Trapped employees plan to remain employed, but would prefer to work elsewhere.
- High Risk – negative attitude, negative behavior – High Risk employees do not plan to remain employed and no longer want to be employed by your organization.
In 2007, Walker reported that 34% of U.S. employees were Truly Loyal, 7% were Accessible, 23% were Trapped and 36% were High Risk.
Besides its segmentation of employees by attitude and behavior, Walker Loyalty also segments attributes into strengths and areas for improvement: Top Priorities (high performance gap, high influence on employee engagement), Lesser Priorities (high performance gap, low influence on engagement), Leverageable Strengths (low gap, high influence) and Other Strengths (low gap, low influence). This quadrant analysis makes it easy for organizations to determine what attributes they should focus on to improve employee engagement.
The following criticisms can be made about the Walker Information employee benchmark:
- While the attitudinal index used in the segmentation is derived from three questions, giving it greater accuracy and stability, the behavioral measure is based on the answer to one question.
- The survey is only used for benchmarking U.S. organizations.
- Little research has been done outside Walker to independently attest to the predictive validity of its loyalty segmentation.
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